Marisacat

DIY 11 June 2010

A roseate spoonbill passes below a tern over an island in the Barataria Bay on the Gulf coast of Louisiana. The island is home to thousands of brown pelicans, egrets and roseate spoonbills, many of which are now affected by oil after the Deepwater spill. Officials now say that it may be impossible to clean the hundreds of miles of coastal wetlands and islands      [John Moore/Getty Images – Guardian Wildlife series]

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Madman linked to this Rolling Stone article on the Gulf Oil [spill mess gusher volcano] in the last thread… and I am just getting there.. It is long, several pages…

I had noticed that lambert at corrente also linked to the article, pulling out parts and pieces in the article that fulfil how this matches up against so many other disasters… in the details. From Katrina to Krakatoa.  Even the Titanic!

The Titanic: Full speed ahead into the ice bergs? What could go wrong?

Most troubling of all, the government has allowed BP to continue deep-sea production at its Atlantis rig – one of the world’s largest oil platforms. Capable of drawing 200,000 barrels a day from the seafloor, Atlantis is located only 150 miles off the coast of Louisiana, in waters nearly 2,000 feet deeper than BP drilled at Deepwater Horizon. According to congressional documents, the platform lacks required engineering certification for as much as 90 percent of its subsea components – a flaw that internal BP documents reveal could lead to “catastrophic” errors. In a May 19th letter to Salazar, 26 congressmen called for the rig to be shut down immediately. “We are very concerned,” they wrote, “that the tragedy at Deepwater Horizon could foreshadow an accident at BP Atlantis.”

The administration’s response to the looming threat? According to an e-mail to a congressional aide from a staff member at MMS, the agency has had “zero contact” with Atlantis about its safety risks since the Deepwater rig went down.

And fucking depressing the whole thing is, too. 

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However, little Magnolia Springs in Alabama is not. Depressing, that is.. I just happened on a report on MS, AL on CBS and how they decided some weeks ago, not to wait. It helped that they looked at the plan that was made for them (I would guess a stinking mess devised by BP and Unified Command – don’t make me laugh too hard!) and they did not like it. Plus they were watching Louisiana, and not liking what they saw.

The CBS report I saw, in fact, cheered me up, in all ways… At that point they were laying down multiple lines of boom and just starting with the barges, at that stage they had two. Renting boom, renting barges, so far it was running 6k a day, with a 200k chunk tossed in from the state, part of the BP cash allotment to Alabama.

Everybody was involved, even little pleasure craft that went by helping to lay boom, their rainbow colored sun umbrellas with flirty trim rippling in the breeze:

[F]rom the start, the townspeople were unsatisfied with the unified command’s plan for Weeks Bay — a strand of floating surface barriers known as boom stretched across the bay’s mouth. Because of tidal currents, any oil on top of the water could splash over the boom, then into the bay and up the Fish and Magnolia Rivers into nurseries for area wildlife. A plan to string boom across Mobile Bay failed when water shredded the barrier.

Mr. Hinton’s solution was simple: run a wall of barges across the mouth of Weeks Bay to block the current, then run five layers of boom behind it — two to block the oil, and three strands of absorbent boom to soak up any oil that got through the containment layers.

The town bought the boom right away, before an increase in demand nearly quadrupled the price. Money for the project came from the state, which received $25 million from BP for emergency response efforts.

“We’re not biologists or engineers or scientists,” Mr. Hinton said. “We took common sense and what we knew about the water from living here. I’m pretty proud of our little plan.”

Between rain showers on Sunday, two dozen volunteer firefighters and teenage explorers laid out the layers of boom, while a tugboat and a crane moved nine barges into place, anchored by 40-foot spikes, with a closeable 100-foot gap for boats to pass through.

To seal the bay entirely they would need approval from unified command. But they are resolved to close it at the first sight of nearby oil, with or without approval, said Charles S. Houser, the mayor of Magnolia Springs, who earns a monthly salary of $100.

“We’re not going to wait for BP,” Mr. Houser said. “If we saw oil right there we’d close the bay right now. The lesson we learned from Louisiana is to act, not wait. We’ll ask for forgiveness later.”

The biggest challenge, Mr. Hinton said, has been dealing with BP and the unified command bureaucracy. The 36 fire chiefs in Baldwin County here passed a resolution to censure BP for poor communications with fire crews.

Mr. Hinton said that so far no other communities had contacted him about copying his plan. “A fire chief told me, ‘Jamie, you can slow down in your preparations, the federal government is going to take care of it.’ I said,

‘Meaning the way they took care of Katrina, Ivan and the Valdez spill?’   …snip…

So much shame to go around.  WHAT was more important than at least trying very hard to block the oil?

What?

A report that Louisiana is now turning to barges to block the oil.

[“W]e’ll have pumps on top of the barges that can actually have hoses attached them to suck oil off as they come against the barges, and the barges will also steer oil towards those openings and have skimmers sitting there to skim off the oil as it tries to go through the opening,” said Deano Bonano, Jefferson Parish’s emergency preparedness director. “It won’t completely stop the oil. It will minimize the oil getting in there.”

16 barges have already arrived with at least 100 more expected by next week. Area leaders hope to sink them along side one another at major passes where Gulf waters flow into coastal Louisiana.

A more permanent plan calls for an interior barrier of rocks to line the barges, sealing entry for the oil. But the permits have yet to be signed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the feasibility of it all remains an issue.

“We’re going to make sure that in those passes there’s nothing that’s going to obstruct it like a gas line that we don’t hit that. So they’re doing the tests, the field tests now, to determine where those are,” said Steve Theriot, interim Jefferson Parish president.   …snip…

The oil is going to roll to land for god knows how long, but with some luck (and a lot of boom), back at Magnolia Springs:

James Hinton looked over a barge jutting into the mouth of a 6,000-acre estuary last weekend and said, “If we can make this work, if the oil don’t get in here, 1,275 miles of bay and river coastline will be protected.”

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