BP
stoat | July 12, 2010And for BP's share price. Though in fact I came to this the other way round: the rise in BP's share price reflects a gradual re-pricing of the risk and damage extent, as well as the more recent news that the new cap-fitting seems to have gone well.
[Update: speaking of political risk - this is the kind of thing I mean -W]
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-10654584]
vlicata | July 11, 2010BP has released the first slug of oil-spill hush money to LSU: $2 million for research on the Effects of the Oil Spill and it's Cleanup. Sounds like a lot of research money, until you realize that LSU does about $200 million dollars of research a year. So, it's kind of like if your next door neighbor (the one who knocked down his house and opened a strip mine) came over to your house and crapped in your refrigerator on $200 worth of groceries you just bought, then gave you two dollars so you could look into what effect his actions had on your food (and so you would feel good about him again…
egrossman | July 8, 2010By Elizabeth Grossman
"I've never seen anything like it," says David Willman, who has nearly 15 years' experience captaining supply boats that support oil rigs and drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. "We're seeing pods of whales and dolphins out in the oil and lots of dead things," he tells me. "Things I've never seen before coming up from the deep that look like sea cucumbers floating dead. Man o' wars floating dead with shriveled tentacles." Willman is captain of the Noonie G., an 111-foot supply boat owned by Guilbeau Marine, a company based in Cut Off, LA. He's been working out of…
grrlscientist | July 6, 2010tags: Close Encounter with a Whale Shark in the Gulf of Mexico, marine biology, field research, research, technology, whale shark, Rhincodon typus, satellite tags, Gulf of Mexico, BP, Gulf Coast Research Laboratory, University of Southern Mississippi, streaming video
Whale Shark, Rhincodon typus, feeding in the Gulf of Mexico.
Image: Gulf Coast Research Laboratory Whale Shark Research.
Despite being the largest fish species in the world, measuring over 40 feet in length and 35 tons in weight, whale sharks are quite mysterious. We know they are plankton filter feeders, and we recently…
dblum | July 5, 2010A couple days ago I received this note:
"There was an article in the Huffington Post not long ago about an extreme worst case scenario with the oil spill - that a giant methane bubble bursts through the sea floor, ignites, causes a huge supersonic tsunami that would wipe out all of Florida, followed by a vaporization tsunami.
I've heard this described as "disaster porn", and certainly, the scenario smacks of it. But, there have been extreme natural disasters in the past, and not being a geologist, I can't help but feel some alarm at this, as I'm currently a resident of Tampa. I have…
grrlscientist | July 3, 2010tags: Federal Officials Suspend First Amendment Rights for Coverage of Gulf of Mexico Disaster, First Amendment Rights, Gulf of Mexico, BP, oil spill, oil spill clean-up efforts, relief efforts, disaster relief, US Coast Guard, Admiral Thad Allen, mainstream media, streaming video
What. The. FUCK. As BP makes its latest attempt to plug its gushing oil well, mainstream news photographers are complaining that their efforts to document the slow-motion disaster in the Gulf of Mexico are being thwarted by local and federal officials -- working with BP -- who are blocking access to the sites where…
lborkowski | June 29, 2010by Eula Bingham & Anthony Robbins
On April 20th, when the Deepwater Horizon offshore oil rig exploded, eleven workers died. Since then thousands of Gulf Coast citizens have responded to the disaster. Few are professional clean-up workers, but these responders stepped forward rapidly to protect their communities from the consequences of the man-made catastrophe. Health damage to these "workers" may persist long after the booms, berms, and dispersants are gone. They are beginning to report acute symptoms. Obviously they must be protected now, and the protection must also prevent long-…
egrossman | June 28, 2010By Elizabeth Grossman
"This is my place. This is my peace. This is where I come to pray. Now it's damaged for years to come," Dauphin Islander Angela Bonner tells me as we stand on the pier that stretches out over the beach. This fine white sand beach on Alabama's Gulf Coast is nearly empty save for clean-up crews finishing the day's work and several pairs of beach goers. The beach is open but there's a double red-flag advisory warning against going in the water. Regardless, a father and son with boogey-boards leave their bicycles at the end of the pier and head for the water.
"When the oil…
grrlscientist | June 22, 2010tags: Oil From BP Leak Threatens Life on a Nearby Seamount, animals, marine life, fishes, invertebrates, Salt Dome Seamount, oil drilling, oil spill, oil wells, petroleum, BP, British Petroleum, TransOcean, environment, streaming video
In 2002, ocean explorer Gale Mead was the first person to see and film the profusion of life 200 feet down on Salt Dome Seamount -- just 16 miles from where the BP oil well is now gushing out of control. Mead (daughter of oceanographer Sylvia Earle) describes the corals and fish she saw and the devastation that the oil is likely causing in a place that no other…
lborkowski | June 19, 2010by Eileen Senn, MS
It seems obvious to many that respirators are needed to protect cleanup workers in the Gulf from inhaling air contaminants that are making some sick now and may make many more chronically ill in the future. I will describe a combination of political and scientific issues conspiring to prevent the needed respirators from being provided. They include:
*Lack of focus on the adverse health effects of airborne contaminants
*Limited air sampling
*Outdated exposure limits
*Oil company protocols for limiting respirator use
*Concerns that respirators will worsen heat stress to…
egrossman | June 18, 2010By Elizabeth Grossman
"This is the one thing that could destroy our culture and I don't want to see it happen," says Grand Isle, Louisiana resident Karen Hopkins, wiping at tears she's clearly fighting. Hopkins, a Louisiana native and long-time resident of Grand Isle, runs the office at Dean Blanchard Seafood. Blanchard typically buys 13 to 15 million pounds of Gulf Coast shrimp annually. Hopkins' house sits across from what should be a busy loading area for Dean Blanchard Seafood and no more than ten yards from a pier where boats that should be gearing up for a night out shrimping are coming…
lborkowski | June 17, 2010It's appropriate for BP to dedicate $20 billion to an escrow fund for oil-spill claims, and I hope the fund's independent administration will allow for quick payment of claims. Nicholas Beaudrot points out that the fund's structure means BP has an incentive to resolve claims quickly - in contrast to the 20 years that it took ExxonMobil to pay claims related to the Valdez oil spill.
Though the process of compensating financial losses will be complicated, it's far easier to quantify lost income than to tally the costs to Gulf residents' mental health. The New York Times' Mireya Navarro focuses…
hrynyshyn | June 17, 2010What happened at Three Mile Island in 1979 led to a new regulatory environment that increased the costs of building and running nuclear power reactors in the U.S. The environment was so hostile to the industry that no new reactors have been ordered since then. There are several in the planning stages, but none have been approved. The question now being debated among energy analysts is whether or not what's going on in the Gulf of Mexico at the moment will lead to similar challenges for the oil industry.
Of particular interest is the precedent set this week when BP agreed to pony up $20…
dblum | June 15, 2010Recently, I wrote a cranky little post about NOAA's behavior regarding the Gulf of Mexico. The agency's approach seemed to me to be timid and deferential at a time when I wanted a strong voice and and steady sense of purpose.
What had set me off was the agency's reluctance to use the word "plume" in describing the underwater mists of oil drifting away from the BP disaster site. Why not, I asked, call a plume a plume?
To my surprise, I almost immediately got a call from NOAA. For some reason, people at the agency didn't agree with my analyses. I thought they were being wusses. They thought…
lborkowski | June 14, 2010It's been good to see OSHA adding more Gulf sampling data to its website, but the presentation of the information there isn't quite as detailed as we were expecting to see. We asked an industrial hygienist colleague for a reaction to the web pages, and got an in-depth response. Here are one industrial hygienist's recommendations for how OSHA can make its online sampling data more useful:
After reviewing OSHA's "Keeping Workers Safe During Oil Spill Response and Cleanup Operations" series of websites, I recommend that OSHA improve the information technology capacity of the sites and add…
egrossman | June 13, 2010by Elizabeth Grossman
"The biggest thing we're going to see in the next month or so is heat. The hottest months are ahead. There's no shade on the water, on the beach or in the marshes. We're going to see an increased amount of heat exhaustion and heatstroke," Dr. James Callaghan, emergency room physician and vice president of hospital staff at the West Jefferson Medical Center (WJMC) in Marrero, Louisiana told me on Saturday morning June 12.
The hospital has admitted eight spill response workers thus far but, said Callaghan, "There are triage centers before they get here, so very few…
grrlscientist | June 12, 2010tags: The BP Oil Spill Meets Cats, Oil Spill, BP, entertainment, humor, weird, strange, wow, streaming video
This amusing little video should catch you up on everything that's happened with the BP oil spill so far.
If teh kittehs don't give you enough information, let's listen to what Obama has to say:
stoat | June 11, 2010I haven't been paying a great deal of attention to the actual *cause* of the oil leak, in the sense of whose *fault* it is (I mean, in the physical sense rather than any stupid legal sense). [[Deepwater Horizon oil spill#Investigations]] has some stuff. In fact I'll quote it, so we have a sort of agreed position to start from, if only to disagree with:
Attention has focused on the cementing procedure and the blowout preventer, which failed to fully engage.[216] A number of significant problems have been identified with the blowout preventer: There was a leak in the hydraulic system that…
grrlscientist | June 11, 2010tags: BP Spills Coffee, Upright Citizen's Brigade Comedy Team, BP, British Petroleum, oil spill, disaster, environment, social commentary, Gulf of Mexico, comedy, humor, satire, funny, fucking hilarious, streaming video
What would happen if BP spilled a bunch of coffee on their conference room table? Pretty much the same thing if they spilled a whole bunch of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. This Upright Citizen's Brigade theater sketch spoof explores the delicate mapping between the two scenarios, and the delightful comedy that ensues. Kevin Costner's voice, or a reasonable facsimile, guest stars…