The Great Gulf of Mexico Oil Spewage Thread

Here is some info on British Petroleum that they would rather not have most people know.

BP Oil Spill: 7 Secrets BP Doesn't Want You To Know (PHOTOS)

I dont want to even watch the news, its too disturbing. O how I wish we were not so dependant on the damned stuff. BP need to be punished.

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.

Hopefully this latest incident will finally convince them that it is too risky, from a financial standpoint, for their operations to continue in this haphazard manner. We can also partly thank Dick Cheney for shutting down legislation on making an automatic shut-off switch mandatory in oil rigs...you'd think the companies would want this switch for their own benefit, but I guess it's more expensive than just losing 50k gallons into the ocean.

What makes you think that they operated in a haphazard manner? Because something went wrong? How about the many more times that things went right? Were they operating haphazardly then too?

I dont want to even watch the news, its too disturbing. O how I wish we were not so dependant on the damned stuff. BP need to be punished.

What makes you think that they operated in a haphazard manner? Because something went wrong? How about the many more times that things went right? Were they operating haphazardly then too?

What makes you think that they operated in a haphazard manner? Because something went wrong? How about the many more times that things went right? Were they operating haphazardly then too?

If you actually care, and I sincerely doubt that you do, you can look up BP's long list of environmental and safety violations, and the fines paid as a result. Then make up your own mind.

1. The federal government needs to take charge and put BP under temporary receivership as recommended by former Labor Secretary Robert Reich. BP was dishonest about the quantities of oil flowing into the Gulf, and their initial repair efforts have failed. The federal government is accountable to the American people, and it needs to decide what to do to protect our nation's water, wildlife, and shorelines of the Gulf (and wherever else the oil travels). As Reich argues, receivership would allow the government to act with full authority and accountability, and to call on all the expertise available (not just BP's) to help make the difficult calls.

2. The cleaning and protection of coastlines needs to be ramped up. Whether that means hiring more local fishers, bringing in National Guard troops, or deploying citizen brigades on the beaches, the response needs to be aggressive and sustained. Even if the oil stopped flowing today, the contamination would continue washing up in sensitive coastal regions for months or longer. All workers should have training, equipment, and protective gear to keep them from being sickened by the oil and the toxic dispersants.

3. There should be generous pay for the armies of bird-rescuers and beach cleaners, and those out protecting shorelines with boats and booms. Families who are the immediate victims of the disaster should get first crack at the jobs, and their wages will help sustain the region through this economic storm. Charge BP (and any other companies responsible for the disaster) the full costs for as long as it takes to get this region clean, whether it's months or years.

4. Use the least toxic chemical dispersants and insist on full disclosure of the makeup of all the dispersants being dumped into the Gulf. The U.S. EPA should determine which dispersants, if any, are used based on the long-term health of the Gulf and its shorelines and estuaries, not based on which companies have ties with BP or which chemicals will be most likely to hide the effects and protect BP from embarrassing images of oil slicks. Use emergency powers, if necessary, to get a full disclosure of the makeup of the dispersants from BP or whoever is refusing to release it. Without this information, there's no way to keep the emergency responders safe, to properly treat stricken birds and sea life, and to assess the long-term damage.

5. Boycott BP, but also other oil companies. They are all spilling oil (see what Shell is doing in Nigeria, for example), and causing direct environmental damage. But using oil, no matter what company pumps it, is putting our entire planet at risk through disruption of the climate. Melting ice caps, changing rainfall patterns, mega-storms and failing crops are already happening, but that is only the beginning if we start hitting climate tipping points. We must kick our fossil fuel addiction. This is our part of the solution.

6. Begin a massive conversion to energy efficiency and renewable energy. There is a lot of blame to go around for this disaster, from the practice of putting cronies in charge of regulation to the corporate culture of putting profits above all else. But this disaster is above all happening because the oil that is easy to get to is already taken. Now oil companies are trying to get the oil that's hard to reach, from deep under the oceans, from hostile regions of the world, and from dirty and destructive sources like tar sands. We've entered a time that analyst and author Michael Klare calls "The Age of Tough Oil," and the costs-human, environmental, economic, and strategic-are rising with each new barrel. Making our economy more energy efficient and building a renewable energy infrastructure offer immediate benefits in terms of jobs and economic stimulus and will sustain generations to come.

In any case, the Chinese...

"Journalists struggling to document the impact of the oil rig explosion have repeatedly found themselves turned away from public areas affected by the spill, and not only by BP and its contractors, but by local law enforcement, the Coast Guard and government officials," wrote Jeremy W. Peters for the New York Times. "To some critics of the response effort by BP and the government, instances of news media being kept at bay are just another example of a broader problem of officials' filtering what images of the spill the public sees. Scientists, too, have complained about the trickle of information that has emerged from BP and government sources. Three weeks passed, for instance, from the time the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on April 20 and the first images of oil gushing from an underwater pipe were released by BP."

Really? China is going to be drilling off our shores? I hope not! Perhaps you meant that they would be drilling off their own shores? If that's what you meant and if China wants to drill off their own shores and pollute their coastline then they are welcome to it.