Eideard

Containers on the stern deck of the 47,230 ton Liberian-flagged Rena hang precariously, about 12 nautical miles from Tauranga, on the east coast of New Zealand’s North Island October 20, 2011. The recovery of fuel oil from a stricken container ship grounded off New Zealand resumed on Thursday as salvage teams worked to minimize the damage in the country’s worst environmental disaster in decades. Two days of strong winds and high seas had prevented the pumping of oil from the Rena, which has been stuck for more than two weeks on the Astrolabe Reef.

Before 9/11, we may have allowed ourselves to be cynical about Western governments and their leaders, but we took it for granted that, faced with rising terrorist threats, they were not just hoping for the best but planning for the worst.

It turned out that nobody was.

The intelligence community saw warning lights flashing, but nobody took preventive action. Then airport security failed. Then the jets failed to scramble. Institutions that were supposed to protect us were asleep. In an instant, we discovered that no one was looking out for us.

The fire crews, the police and the emergency medical service teams who were called to the scene that September morning tried to make up for the failure of institutions with raw courage. The men and women in uniform who climbed upward into the fire displayed that virtue beyond measure or praise. But courage is no substitute for sovereigns that fail.

A sovereign is a state with a monopoly on the means of force. It is the object of ultimate allegiance and the source of law. It is there to protect, to defend and to secure. It is there to think the unthinkable and plan for it.

A sovereign failed that morning…

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Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

Exxon Mobil said on Friday that a pipeline that failed two weeks ago, leaking oil into the Yellowstone River, routinely transported a heavier and more toxic form of crude than the company and federal regulators initially acknowledged.

The Silvertip pipeline carries so-called tar sands crude from Alberta, Canada, as do the U.S. pipelines of most major oil companies, Exxon spokeswoman Karen Matusic told Reuters.

Matusic said the tar sands crude was present along various segments of the pipeline but not at the spill site in Montana.

“Oil from Canada was in the line, but not that area that was affected by the breach. The oil that spilled out, that oil came from Wyoming,” she told Reuters, referring to sweet crude produced in oil fields at the Montana-Wyoming border.

Tar sands oil or bitumen, derived from tar sands or oil sands, contains more toxic components than the sweet, or low sulfur, crude that Exxon and government regulators initially said flowed in the Silvertip…

The news comes amid an intensifying debate over TransCanada Corp.’s proposed $7 billion pipeline to carry more than half a million barrels a day of tar sands crude from Alberta to U.S. refineries in the Midwest and the Texas Gulf Coast…

Citing a University of Nebraska study released this week, activists say spills from pipes weakened by the corrosive and abrasive agents in tar sands crude would contaminate water supplies for hundreds of thousands of Americans and destroy bottomlands in the nation’s midsection vital for endangered birds like the whooping crane…

Environmental groups on Friday pointed to the July 1 rupture of the 69-mile Silvertip, which spilled what Exxon estimates at 42,000 gallons of oil, or 1,000 barrels, into the Yellowstone River west of Billings.

Officials with the U.S. Transportation Department’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration said on Wednesday they had just learned that the Silvertip carried oil from Canada.

Federal inspectors were trying to determine if transport of the synthetic petroleum product could have triggered internal corrosion that may have played a role in the rupture.

Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer has faulted Exxon for failing to tell the state exactly what kinds of crude ran in the pipeline or spell out what hazardous chemicals were in the mix now contaminating riverside properties and sickening at least five residents.

How old were the licenses for the pipeline? Anyone checking up on the reality of what’s transported? Frankly, the “new and improved” regulators seem to be a trusting and gullible as their predecessors.

An undetermined amount of crude oil spilled from an ExxonMobil pipeline into the Yellowstone River in Montana, prompting evacuations of nearby residents on Saturday, authorities said.

The spill that was detected early Saturday came from a crude oil pipeline that runs from Silver Tip to Billings, Montana, the ExxonMobil Pipeline Company said in a statement. The pipe was subsequently shut down and state and federal authorities were alerted, the company said.

Nearby residents in Laurel, Montana, were evacuated in the wee hours of the morning but were able to return to their homes by 6 a.m., said a spokesman for Laurel City Fire and Ambulance…

Exxon said the cause of the rupture was not yet known and it was unclear how much oil had been released.

“We recognize the seriousness of this incident and are working hard to address it,” the company said in a statement. “Our principal focus is on protecting the safety and health of the public and our employees.”

Here – let me get my Wellies on before the crap gets any deeper.

This is the model company the Republican Party has in mind when they say we should have someone “friendly to business” running the country. I can see Mister Montana, Dick Cheney’s smiling face right now telling us “not to worry”.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Britain said on Wednesday it would review its regulations covering offshore oil and gas drilling in the North Sea following the publication of a U.S. investigation into BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill. The review will start within a month and will report later this year, Energy Minister Charles Hendry said in a statement…

A White House panel probing BP’s massive oil spill called on Tuesday for an overhaul of America’s offshore drilling regulatory system, damning it as “entirely unprepared” for disaster..

Last week a parliamentary report warned Britain was not ready to tackle a spill of the kind suffered by BP and that if one did occur, taxpayers could end up paying the clean-up costs.

Hendry said his officials would study the White House oil commission’s report to identify its implications for British deepwater drilling. He said some of the report’s recommendations were already existing practice in the North Sea but that Britain was committed to learning what it could from the findings.

“We have already acted, in the light of the emerging information from the many investigations into the disaster, to strengthen where we can what is already one of the most robust environmental and safety regimes in the world,” he said.

In particular, devices called acoustic switches required by Norwegian regulators and accepted by the Brits could have been, should have been, used on the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico. They had been in place for previous drilling ventures in the North Sea.

The dead have no voice in our politics
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

BP and its partners made a series of cost-cutting decisions that ultimately contributed to the oil spill that ravaged the Gulf of Mexico coast over the summer, the White House oil spill commission said on Wednesday. In its final report on causes of the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history, the commission said BP and its collaborators on the doomed Macondo well had lacked a system to ensure their actions were safe.

“Whether purposeful or not, many of the decisions that BP, Halliburton, and Transocean made that increased the risk of the Macondo blowout clearly saved those companies significant time (and money),” the report said.

Created by President Barack Obama in the midst of the BP spill, the panel is the first government-sanctioned group to wrap up its probe of the causes of the drilling disaster…

Although the commission lacks authority to establish policy or punish companies, its conclusions could have a bearing on future criminal and civil cases relating to the spill…

The commission’s report ultimately blamed management failures for the April 20 explosion that ruptured the Macondo well and unleased millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf.

The commission also concluded the Gulf spill was not an isolated incident caused by “rogue industry or government officials”.

“The root causes are systemic and, absent significant reform in both industry practices and government policies, might well recur,” the report said.

The report offers no surprises. Neither will the responses, I fear.

We wil get to watch Congress in action as both sides work at avoiding doing anything of importance.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

The Justice Department on Wednesday sued BP and eight other companies in the Gulf oil spill disaster in an effort to recover billions of dollars from the largest offshore spill in U.S. history.

The Obama administration’s lawsuit asks that the companies be held liable without limitation under the Oil Pollution Act for all removal costs and damages caused by the oil spill, including damages to natural resources. The lawsuit also seeks civil penalties under the Clean Water Act…

The federal lawsuit says inadequate cementing of the well contributed to the disaster. Similar charges were made by BP in its internal investigation, and by the independent presidential oil spill commission. But Halliburton Co., the contractor in charge of mixing and pumping the cement, is not named in the suit…

An explosion that killed 11 workers at BP’s Macondo well last April led to oil spewing from the company’s undersea well — more than 200 million gallons in all by the government’s estimate. BP disputes the figure…

The lawsuit alleges that safety and operating regulations were violated in the period leading up to April 20.

It says that the defendants failed to keep the Macondo well under control during that period and failed to use the best available and safest drilling technology to monitor the well’s conditions. They also failed to maintain continuous surveillance and failed to maintain equipment and material that were available and necessary to ensure the safety and protection of personnel, equipment, natural resources and the environment, the suit charges.

Democratic Rep. Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., a member of the House energy panel that is investigating the spill, acknowledged the government will have a tough fight on its hands since BP has already taken an aggressive stance regarding its liability.

“It may have taken these companies months to cap their well, but they will spend years trying to cap their financial obligations to the people of the Gulf,” Markey said. “That is why it is vital for the Obama administration to swiftly advance this legal action.”

And so it begins. I wonder if the suit will be resolved in my lifetime. Between judicial processes, laws written for lawyers, decisions promulgated to protect corporate wealth, it will be years if not decades for anything approaching justice. It’s the American way.

The Department of Justice has filed fraud charges against eight people over claims of damages related to the BP oil spill.

The indictments were announced on Friday against people in Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, Michigan and North Carolina who the government said fraudulently sought money from the $20 billion pool financed by BP.

Among those charged were Cam T. Hang of Louisiana, who, according to the Justice Department, demanded $42,000 for business losses related to a restaurant that does not exist. A Michigan man, Kevin Hall, claimed he lost $9,000 at an ice cream stand in Pensacola, Fla., that, according to his indictment, is similarly mythical.

Charlette Dufray Johnson, a North Carolina woman, was accused of filing claims in the name of her sister, saying that she worked for a company in New Orleans that suffered losses because of the spill. The sister is deceased. Ms. Johnson is also alleged to have also filed a dozen other claims totaling nearly $80,000 related to Hurricane Katrina, a California wildfire and storms in Georgia and Tennessee.

“The charges announced today send a strong message that we will not tolerate any fraudulent activity designed to profit from this tragic oil spill,” said Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer.

This is the little end of the “American Way” of fraud. Understand these are hustlers who aren’t capable of a real con. They’re just fraudsters accustomed to shucking and jiving past run-of-the-mill bureaucrats. Hopefully, the tidying up that the Obama Administration has been injecting into the DC way of doing things will continue to root out government-job hacks.

Some of the layabouts have been bounced. Let’s see if any of the “important” campaign contributors end up facing serious penalties.

Arranging blue crabs for sale in New Orleans
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

The US government reopened nearly 30 percent of federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico that were closed to fishing following the BP oil spill after tests showed that seafood there is safe to eat.

The area covers 6,879 square miles off the coasts of Florida and Alabama, and is the ninth reopening of waters since the spill, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said in a statement on Friday.

At its closest point, the area is about 110 miles southeast of the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon rig that exploded in April and sank to the sea floor, hemorrhaging crude for more than 100 days.

“Each reopening is a reassuring sign that areas once impacted by oil can again support sustainable fishing activities,” said NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco.

“Tourists and consumers should know most Gulf waters are open for fishing and seafood from these waters is safe to eat…”

About seven percent of federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico, or 16,481 square miles (42,685 kilometers), remain closed to fishing, it added.

Of course, if you think you need more to worry about in terms of food safety — you can always warm yourself with no confidence in any testing whatsoever.

One of the benefits of being a lifetime news junkie.

Collecting deepwater samples from the oil plume

In the aftermath of the explosion of BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico, a dispersed oil plume was formed at a depth between 3,600 and 4,000 feet and extending some 10 miles out from the wellhead. An intensive study by scientists with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) found that microbial activity, spearheaded by a new and unclassified species, degrades oil much faster than anticipated. This degradation appears to take place without a significant level of oxygen depletion.

“Our findings show that the influx of oil profoundly altered the microbial community by significantly stimulating deep-sea psychrophilic (cold temperature) gamma-proteobacteria that are closely related to known petroleum-degrading microbes,” says Terry Hazen, a microbial ecologist with Berkeley Lab’s Earth Sciences Division and principal investigator with the Energy Biosciences Institute, who led this study. “This enrichment of psychrophilic petroleum degraders with their rapid oil biodegradation rates appears to be one of the major mechanisms behind the rapid decline of the deepwater dispersed oil plume that has been observed…”

Analysis by Hazen and his colleagues of microbial genes in the dispersed oil plume revealed a variety of hydrocarbon-degraders, some of which were strongly correlated with the concentration changes of various oil contaminants. Analysis of changes in the oil composition as the plume extended from the wellhead pointed to faster than expected biodegradation rates with the half-life of alkanes ranging from 1.2 to 6.1 days…

“We deployed on two ships to determine the physical, chemical and microbiological properties of the deepwater oil plume,” Hazen says. “The oil escaping from the damaged wellhead represented an enormous carbon input to the water column ecosystem and while we suspected that hydrocarbon components in the oil could potentially serve as a carbon substrate for deep-sea microbes, scientific data was needed for informed decisions…”

Hazen and his colleagues attribute the faster than expected rates of oil biodegradation at the 5 degrees Celsius temperature in part to the nature of Gulf light crude, which contains a large volatile component that is more biodegradable. The use of the COREXIT dispersant may have also accelerated biodegradation because of the small size of the oil particles and the low overall concentrations of oil in the plume. In addition, frequent episodic oil leaks from natural seeps in the Gulf seabed may have led to adaptations over long periods of time by the deep-sea microbial community that speed up hydrocarbon degradation rates.

The scientists whose analysis and discussion will determine the real state of affairs following the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico may not prompt the sort of thrills required by ideologues and pundits. But, there is a chance that useful information will be discovered – helpful both towards preventing and alleviating future accidents.

Not that it means much for the Fall election spectacle. Not that much attention will be paid by science-challenged skeptics.