Icelike crystals encrusting a 100-ton steel-and-concrete box meant to contain oil gushing from a broken well deep in the Gulf of Mexico forced crews Saturday to back off the long-shot plan, while more than 100 miles away, blobs of tar washed up at an Alabama beach full of swimmers.

The failure in the first attempt to use the specially constructed containment box over the leak 50 miles off the Louisiana coast, coupled with the ominous arrival of the sticky substance at Dauphin Island, Ala., crushed hopes of a short-term solution to what could yet grow into the worst oil spill in the nation’s history.

More than 3 million gallons of crude have spewed into the Gulf since a rig exploded April 20, killing 11, and officials said it would be at least Monday before a different solution is found.

Authorities in protective gear descended on the public beach on Dauphin Island, three miles off the Alabama mainland at the mouth of Mobile Bay and much farther east than oil had been reported.

Kimberly Creel, 41, was hanging out and swimming with hundreds of other beachgoers when crews arrived to investigate. She said she found quarter- to pea-size balls sporadically along the beach.

“It almost looks like bark, but when you pick it up it definitely has a liquid consistency and it’s definitely oil,” she said. “… I can only imagine what might be coming this way that might be larger.”

Even after discovering the oil and being warned not to touch it, Creel said beachgoers continued swimming.

Creel said it was sad to the see the oil come ashore.

“It almost brings tears to me eyes,” she said.

About a half dozen tar balls had been collected by Saturday afternoon at Dauphin Island, Coast Guard chief warrant officer Adam Wine said in Mobile. Authorities planned to test the substance but strongly suspected it came from the oil spill.

The containment box, a method never before attempted at such depths, had been considered the best hope of stanching the flow in the near term.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

Wednesday 05 May 2010

 by: Greg Palast, t r u t h o u t | News Analysis

I’ve seen this movie before. In 1989, I was a fraud investigator hired to dig into the cause of the Exxon Valdez disaster. Despite Exxon’s name on that boat, I found the party most to blame for the destruction was … British Petroleum (BP).

That’s important to know, because the way BP caused devastation in Alaska is exactly the way BP is now sliming the entire Gulf Coast.

Tankers run aground, wells blow out, pipes burst. It shouldn’t happen, but it does. And when it does, the name of the game is containment. Both in Alaska, when the Exxon Valdez grounded, and in the Gulf last week, when the Deepwater Horizon platform blew, it was British Petroleum that was charged with carrying out the Oil Spill Response Plans (OSRP), which the company itself drafted and filed with the government.

What’s so insane, when I look over that sickening slick moving toward the Delta, is that containing spilled oil is really quite simple and easy. And from my investigation, BP has figured out a very low-cost way to prepare for this task: BP lies. BP prevaricates, BP fabricates and BP obfuscates.

That’s because responding to a spill may be easy and simple, but not at all cheap. And BP is cheap. Deadly cheap.

To contain a spill, the main thing you need is a lot of rubber, long skirts of it called a “boom.” Quickly surround a spill, leak or burst, then pump it out into skimmers, or disperse it, sink it or burn it. Simple.

But there’s one thing about the rubber skirts: you’ve got to have lots of them at the ready, with crews on standby in helicopters and on containment barges ready to roll. They have to be in place round the clock, all the time, just like a fire department, even when all is operating A-O.K. Because rapid response is the key. In Alaska, that was BP’s job, as principal owner of the pipeline consortium Alyeska. It is, as well, BP’s job in the Gulf, as principal lessee of the deepwater oil concession.

Before the Exxon Valdez grounding, BP’s Alyeska group claimed it had these full-time, oil spill response crews. Alyeska had hired Alaskan natives, trained them to drop from helicopters into the freezing water and set booms in case of emergency. Alyeska also certified in writing that a containment barge with equipment was within five hours sailing of any point in the Prince William Sound. Alyeska also told the state and federal government it had plenty of boom and equipment cached on Bligh Island.

But it was all a lie. On that March night in 1989 when the Exxon Valdez hit Bligh Reef in the Prince William Sound, the BP group had, in fact, not a lick of boom there. And Alyeska had fired the natives who had manned the full-time response teams, replacing them with phantom crews, lists of untrained employees with no idea how to control a spill. And that containment barge at the ready was, in fact, laid up in a drydock in Cordova, locked under ice, 12 hours away.

As a result, the oil from the Exxon Valdez, which could have and should have been contained around the ship, spread out in a sludge tide that wrecked 1,200 miles of shoreline.

And here we go again. Valdez goes Cajun.

BP’s CEO Tony Hayward reportedly asked, “What the hell did we do to deserve this?”

It’s what you didn’t do, Mr. Hayward. Where was BP’s containment barge and response crew? Why was the containment boom laid so damn late, too late and too little? Why is it that the US Navy is hauling in 12 miles of rubber boom and fielding seven skimmers, instead of BP?

Last year, CEO Hayward boasted that, despite increased oil production in exotic deep waters, he had cut BP’s costs by an extra one billion dollars a year. Now we know how he did it.
As chance would have it, I was meeting last week with Louisiana lawyer Daniel Becnel Jr. when word came in of the platform explosion. Daniel represents oil workers on those platforms; now, he’ll represent their bereaved families. The Coast Guard called him. They had found the emergency evacuation capsule floating in the sea and were afraid to open it and disturb the cooked bodies.

I wonder if BP painted the capsule green, like they paint their gas stations.

Becnel, yesterday by phone from his office from the town of Reserve, Louisiana, said the spill response crews were told they weren’t needed because the company had already sealed the well. Like everything else from BP mouthpieces, it was a lie.

In the end, this is bigger than BP and its policy of cheaping out and skiving the rules. This is about the anti-regulatory mania, which has infected the American body politic. While the tea baggers are simply its extreme expression, US politicians of all stripes love to attack “the little bureaucrat with the fat rule book.” It began with Ronald Reagan and was promoted, most vociferously, by Bill Clinton and the head of Clinton’s deregulation committee, one Al Gore.

Americans want government off our backs … that is, until a folding crib crushes the skull of our baby, Toyota accelerators speed us to our death, banks blow our savings on gambling sprees and crude oil smothers the Mississippi.

Then, suddenly, it’s, “Where was hell was the government? Why didn’t the government do something to stop it?”

The answer is because government took you at your word they should get out of the way of business, that business could be trusted to police itself. It was only last month that BP, lobbying for new deepwater drilling, testified to Congress that additional equipment and inspection wasn’t needed.

You should meet some of these little bureaucrats with the fat rule books. Like Dan Lawn, the inspector from the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, who warned and warned and warned, before the Exxon Valdez grounding, that BP and Alyeska were courting disaster in their arrogant disregard of the rule book. In 2006, I printed his latest warnings about BP’s culture of negligence. When the choice is between Lawn’s rule book and a bag of tea, Lawn’s my man.

This just in: Becnel tells me that one of the platform workers has informed him that the BP well was apparently deeper than the 18,000 feet depth reported. BP failed to communicate that additional depth to Halliburton crews, who, therefore, poured in too small a cement cap for the additional pressure caused by the extra depth. So, it blew.

Why didn’t Halliburton check? “Gross negligence on everyone’s part,” said Becnel. Negligence driven by penny-pinching, bottom-line squeezing. BP says its worker is lying. Someone’s lying here, man on the platform or the company that has practiced prevarication from Alaska to Louisiana.

This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

http://www.ajc.com/business/giant-box-could-be-519768.html

By VICKI SMITH

The Associated Press

NEW ORLEANS — The best short-term solution to bottling up a disastrous oil spill threatening sealife and livelihoods along the Gulf Coast should be headed out to sea Wednesday in the form of a specially built giant concrete-and-steel box designed to siphon the oil away.

At about midday, a barge will haul the 100-ton contraption 50 miles offshore to a spot where a mile-deep gusher from a blown-out undersea well has been spewing at least 210,000 gallons of crude a day into the Gulf for two weeks. BP spokesman John Curry said it would be deployed on the seabed by Thursday.

It’s the latest idea engineers from oil giant BP PLC are trying after an oil rig the company was operating exploded April 20, killing 11 workers. It sank two days later.

BP is in charge of the cleanup and President Barack Obama and many others have said the company also is responsible for the costs.

BP capped one of three leaks at the well Tuesday night, a step that will not cut the flow of oil but that BP has said will make it easier to help with the gusher.

Meanwhile, the effort to protect Louisiana coastal wetlands was expected to pick up.

In Plaquemines Parish, near the southern tip of Louisiana, officials loaded absorbent boom shortly after dawn to take out to the mouth of the Mississippi River. The barge will be used as a distribution point for local fishermen to lay the boom around sensitive marshes.

At a nearby marina, local shrimpers planned to use their boats to put down boom as part of a program BP is running.

Lionel Bryant, a U.S. Coast Guard spokesman, said officials planned to send out about 80 vessels from Biloxi and Pascagoula, Miss., and Orange Beach, Ala., primarily to handle booming. Bryant said two Coast Guard cutters would also conduct offshore skimming operations. Crews in Mississippi are picking up debris from beaches to make cleanup easier if oil comes ashore.

In all, about 7,900 people are working to protect the shoreline and wildlife, and some 170 boats are also helping with the cleanup.

A rainbow sheen of oil has reached land in parts of Louisiana, but forecasts showed the oil wasn’t expected to come ashore for at least a couple more days.

“It’s a gift of a little bit of time. I’m not resting,” U.S. Coast Guard Rear Adm. Mary Landry said.

In their worst-case scenario, BP executives told members of a congressional committee that up to 2.5 million gallons a day could spill if the leaks worsened, though it would be more like 1.7 million gallons. In an exploration plan filed with the government in February 2009, BP said it could handle a “worst-case scenario” it described as a leak of 6.8 million gallons per day from an uncontrolled blowout.

Containment boxes have never been tried at this depth — about 5,000 feet — because of the extreme water pressure. If all goes well, the contraption could be fired up early next week to start funneling the oil into a tanker.

“We don’t know for sure” whether the equipment will work, BP spokesman Bill Salvin said. “What we do know is that we have done extensive engineering and modeling and we believe this gives us the best chance to contain the oil, and that’s very important to us.”

The seas calmed Tuesday, allowing more conventional methods to contain the spill to get back on track as businesses and residents kept an eye on the ocean currents, wondering when the sheen washing ashore in places might turn into a heavier coating of oil. Crews put out more containment equipment and repaired some booms damaged in rough weather over the weekend. They also hoped to again try to burn some of the oil on the water’s surface, possibly Wednesday.

Chemical dispersants piped 5,000 feet to the main leak have significantly reduced the amount of oil coming to the surface, BP said.

From the air Tuesday, the site of the Deepwater Horizon explosion looked similar to a week ago except for the appearance of a massive rig brought in to drill a relief well to shut off the spewing oil. That will take months.

People along the Gulf Coast have spent weeks living with uncertainty, wondering where and when the huge slick might come ashore, ruining their beaches — and their livelihoods.

The anxiety is so acute that some are seeing and smelling oil where there is none. And even though the dead turtles and jellyfish washing ashore along the Gulf of Mexico are clean, and scientists have yet to determine what killed them, many are just sure the flow of crude unleashed by the explosion at BP’s Deepwater Horizon is the culprit.

The rig was owned by Transocean Ltd. Some of the 115 surviving workers who were aboard when it exploded are suing that company and BP PLC. In lawsuits filed Tuesday, three workers say they were kept floating at sea for more than 10 hours while the rig burned uncontrollably. They are seeking damages.

Guy Cantwell, a spokesman for rig owner Transocean Ltd., defended the company’s response, saying 115 workers did get off alive. Two wrongful death suits also have been filed.

While officials worked on cleanup, the long wait took its toll on nerves and incomes.

In Gulf Shores, Ala., the real estate firm Brett/Robinson Vacations sent a note to those renting vacation properties that they would not be penalized for any spill-related cancellations, but urged them not to jump the gun.

“There are many questions and many ‘what ifs’ regarding this event,” the message read. “Because changes come about hourly and 30 days is a long way away, we are asking you to wait before canceling your vacation, especially those of you who are scheduled to arrive more than 30 days from today.”

There are legitimate concerns, experts say. A second bird found in the slick, a brown pelican, is recovering at a bird rescue center in Louisiana. National Wildlife Federation president and CEO Larry Schweiger says there’s no way to know how many birds have been oiled because the slick is so big and so far offshore.

Perdido Key, a barrier island between Pensacola and the Alabama state line with sugar-white sand studded with condominiums, likely would be the first place in Florida affect by the oil spill. Perdido — Spanish for “Lost” — got a sniff Tuesday morning of what may be in store.

“You could smell the smell of it, real heavy petroleum base,” said Steve Owensby, 54, a maintenance man at the Flora-Bama Lounge abutting the state line on the Florida side.

The air cleared later, but Owensby’s 28-year-old daughter, Stephanie, who tends bar at the lounge, said some visitors have complained of feeling ill from the fumes.

“It’s very sad because I grew up out here,” she said. “I remember growing up seeing the white beaches my whole life. Every day I’ve been going to the beach … a lot of people are out watching and crying.”

___

Associated Press writers Harry R. Weber, Kevin McGill in New Orleans, Ray Henry in Robert, La., Sarah Larimer in Mobile, Ala., Jennifer N. Kay in Fort Walton Beach, Fla., Bill Kaczor in Perdido Key, Fla., Holbrook Mohr in Venice, La., and Cain Burdeau who flew over the site contributed to this report.

Jim Hendee to coral-list
show details 9:32 AM (28 minutes ago)

“The Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has been
designated the lead state agency for responding to potential impacts of
the Deepwater Horizon oil spill along Florida’s shoreline. This website
will serve as the primary location for updates and information on
response actions and impacts to the state of Florida.”

Here is the site:

   http://www.dep.state.fl.us/deepwaterhorizon/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/03/AR2010050302781.html?hpid=topnews

Washington Post; special thanks to Richard Charter

By Steven Mufson
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
In 1969, when people still used manual typewriters and rotary telephones, a Union Oil well blew out five miles off the coast of Santa Barbara, Calif. People attacked the oil washing ashore by skimming it off the surface, dispersing it with chemicals, and soaking it up with straw and other materials.

Forty-one years and many generations of technology later, BP is attacking the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico with techniques similar to those used in Santa Barbara. And just as in those days, choppy water and strong winds can make it impossible to use those tools to bottle up oil once it has leaked into open seas.

“Taking proper care of the oil and then the pollution is damn near the same as what we see today,” said Robert G. Bea, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California at Berkeley who spent 16 years working for Shell Oil. “We’re still chasing it around with Scott towels.”

Unlike the 1969 Santa Barbara and 1989 Exxon Valdez spills, which were close to shore and coated coastlines, the well that blew up April 20 while being drilled by Transocean’s Deepwater Horizon rig is much farther out and has given BP and federal authorities an extra week or more to respond to the oil leaking into the gulf.
Yet the more than 100 boats and dozens of aircraft deployed by BP and the U.S. Coast Guard have been unable to prevent it from creeping up to land and threatening the environment. “The absolute objective is to contain it in the offshore environment,” BP chief executive Tony Hayward said optimistically Wednesday. By Friday, it had started to touch Louisiana’s shores.

“From the mid-’80s, it is the same thing,” said Lois Epstein, an Alaska-based engineering and policy consultant to nonprofit conservation organizations. “At the time of the Valdez spill, we were utilizing booming and dispersants and controlled burns — the same three major techniques as now.”

The reason little has changed, said Byron W. King, an energy analyst at Agora Financial, is a “failure of imagination.”

“The industry says it never had a blowout,” he said, and as a result the oil “industry is not going to spend good money on problems that it says aren’t there.” But King said that “you need new technology to deal with the problems that your other new technology got you.” And he said that the federal government, instead of just collecting its royalties, should have made sure that research took place.

The most visible tool for containing the oil slick is the long string of floating plastic booms. Half a million feet of booms are on hand and about half of them have been set out so far, but they work best in calm seas.

“They presume oil is floating on the surface and the sea is still,” said Hammond Eve, a former specialist in the environmental impact of offshore drilling at the Minerals Management Service who lives just east of New Orleans. “The sea is certainly not still now. They don’t stick up very high. The waves are going right over them, the oil’s going right over them. They don’t work very well.”

Burning oil on the water surface is dramatic but of limited use. It also requires calm seas to corral oil where it’s thickest and drag it to a spot where it can be ignited with flares. Last week BP and the Coast Guard did that in what they described as a test; they burned 100 barrels of oil, a tiny fraction of what’s pouring from the well. They said later burns could consume as much as 1,000 barrels of oil, still less than the 5,000 barrels a day that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates is leaking into the gulf.

Bad weather has made it impossible to do a second burn. And the technique sends thick, black clouds of smoke into the atmosphere — also bad for the environment and possibly the lungs.

BP and the Coast Guard have also used ships to skim oil from the surface of the water. This also works best in calm seas; good weather during the first week after the spill helped. By Monday morning, the oil spill response teams had recovered more than a million gallons of an oil and water mixture, but much of it is seawater. The layer of oil on the surface is thin, measured in microns in most places and as thick as 0.1 millimeters in others, so skimming is a slow process. BP’s Hayward said it has the appearance of iced tea.
BP and federal agencies have also sprayed more than 156,000 gallons of chemicals to help disperse the oil at the surface and, with the help of a robotic submarine, near the source of the leak.

“It’s a good thing,” said Eve, the retired minerals-management expert. “If you get oil on your hands, and wash in dish detergent, the nature of the oil changes. It’s not clinging to you. It’s become something with different properties so it doesn’t have the harmful impacts.”

Some of the oil breaks down in the water, and research has gone into biologically friendly agents that would speed up the work nature does in breaking down oil. But the effects of such agents are not well understood, and it isn’t clear what kind of chemicals BP is using.
Environmental groups caution that the chemicals can be harmful and disperse the oil under the surface of the water, where it causes different kinds of problems.

“Dispersants . . . are toxic to marine life and so there are trade-offs to consider,” said David Pettit of the Natural Resources Defense Council. “And just because humans can’t see oil on the surface doesn’t mean it’s not still in the water column, affecting marine life from plankton to whales.”

“The objective of dispersant use is to enhance the amount of oil that physically mixes into the water column, reducing the potential that a surface slick will contaminate shoreline habitats or come into contact with birds, marine mammals, or other organisms that exist on the water surface or shoreline,” said a report by the National Academy of Sciences. “Dispersant application thus represents a conscious decision to increase the hydrocarbon load (resulting from a spill) on one component of the ecosystem (e.g., the water column) while reducing the load on another (e.g., coastal wetland).”

Now BP, with the approval of the Coast Guard, is trying to magnify that effect by applying dispersants underwater. They said that method seemed promising.

Once the oil spill hits shore, new complications will arise. The Louisiana wetlands could act as sponges, soaking up the oil and damaging the plant life there.

Many environmentalists fear damage to the wetlands, which also help protect New Orleans from hurricanes.

The Alaskan shore where the Valdez spill took place was rocky, and cleanup crews hosed down the rocks, killing organisms that lived there and driving some of the oil into soils out of sight. Some critics said leaving the rocks alone might have been better.

The Coast Guard’s Web site says: “Natural recovery is often misunderstood; in sensitive environments active cleanup activity may cause more harm than allowing the oil to slowly degrade naturally, as disturbance by activity can drive oil below the surface causing significant damage.”