7 ms·

BP oil slick

49 points by motters 16y ago

jsulak 16y ago
I still have trouble comprehending how truly very, very bad this all is. I think it's been hard to feel the scale of it because it's such a slow-motion event, so it frequently falls out of the news cycle, even here in relatively nearby Houston. It makes me even more pessimistic about the prospect of humans getting it together to deal with truly slow-motion problems, like global warming.
- grandalf 16y ago
  Not too long ago there was a fuel oil spill in the SF Bay. Some of the oil washed up at Ocean Beach where I frequently run (barefoot). A few times (long after the spill and several beach cleanups) I'd get home and notice a blob of tar stuck to my foot. It is nearly impossible to remove and extremely disgusting. One can only imagine how much of this tar will be left by the BP spill and for how long it will remain.
- Tamerlin 16y ago
  What makes me most pessimistic about it is that even in the face of empirical, observational evidence of global warming, there are still people out there who deny it. The real gravity of this situation in the Gulf is being drastically underplayed -- because no one has accounted for the combination of its enormity plus the fact that hurricane season is nigh. And NOAA is predicting a higher than average hurricane season. Even if NOAA ends up being wrong about that, one or two hurricanes of even moderate strength anywhere near that enormous oil spill, which I suspect is FAR larger than anyone at BP has admitted (several researchers indicated that based on analyzing BP's video, BP's estimate of 5000 barrels per day is short by close two orders of magnitude), will whip the entire coastline into a toxic nightmare.
  - jsulak 16y ago
    Exactly. I am truly dreading hurricane season. Cleanup after a major storm is bad enough without having to deal with sticky, toxic oil.
    - Tamerlin 16y ago
      I'm surprised that it hasn't gotten more attention, but the thought of a 120 MPH wind whipping all of those miles-long plumes of toxic glop into a froth and splattering all over the Gulf coast definitely concerns me -- especially with the beginning of hurricane season so close, couple with the National Weather Service forecast... http://www.mahalo.com/2010-hurricane-season-forecast http://www.mahalo.com/2010-hurricane-season-forecast
joubert 16y ago
I'm speechless.
rauljara 16y ago
I never really had a strong stance on offshore drilling until this.
DanHulton 16y ago
Weirdly enough, it was a YouTube comment that really hit home with me on this issue: How long ago was it that there was a substantial part of the North American population chanting "Drill baby, drill"?
- gcv 16y ago
  That same segment of the population still supports off-shore drilling. Environmental concerns don't matter to vocal members of the conservative movement until they actually start coughing up smog. On the other hand, liberal President Obama's drilling plan might actually collapse now. At least, one might hope that the oil industry can't successfully bribe Congress anymore — er, excuse me, make sufficiently large campaign contributions. (Blatant politics and off-topic for HN, I know. Sorry.)
  - kmfrk 16y ago
    If Robert Reich is correct, the degree of dereliction of duty is horrendous: http://robertreich.org/post/604861772/bp-stands-for-bad-petroleum http://robertreich.org/post/604861772/bp-stands-for-bad-petr....
  - orangecat 16y ago
    Well, perhaps if we had opened up ANWR there would be less need for offshore drilling. Or if liberals hadn't spent the last several decades demonizing nuclear power, apparently under the delusion the alternative is Living in Harmony with Gaia rather than coal and oil.
    - MichaelSalib 16y ago
      ANWR would need decades to begin production and even then would produce only modest amounts of oil. Nuclear power has proven to be extremely expensive; I am not aware of any country that generates a significant fraction of its power using nuclear power plants without massive investment and control by the state. Since the people generally opposed to government funding and control of industry on a massive scale are not usually liberal, your comment is of questionable veracity.
flatline 16y ago
Sadly, I'm afraid that the only real hope for cleanup is to rely on natural processes. From the reading I've been doing about past oil spills and the efforts they've taken so far with this one, the dispersants and other chemical measures used to stop the spread of the oil may be more toxic than the oil itself. Although millions of gallons of oil leak into the gulf each year naturally, they are certainly not all at once and in so contained an area. We will feel the impact of this for a long time into the future.
- chaosmachine 16y ago
  This might be the event that finally drives home the long-term consequences of our actions as a species. The problems we're creating today have no immediate solutions. We are fucking things up in ways that will take hundreds or thousands of years to fix. Of course, that only seems like a long time because we measure things in terms of human lifespans. 500 years is nothing to a 4 billion year old planet. And earth's seen much worse. A single supervolcanic eruption would do more damage than all the man-made disasters of the last 500 years combined.
  - dhimes 16y ago
    Unfortunately I am cynical about this. We thought the Exxon Valdez disaster might be a turning point as well, but it wasn't. Some incremental change may come of this, but probably nothing revolutionary. No doubt, you'll soon hear folks trying to put the public at ease about the long-term consequences of this spill. Something about how it's not too important in the big scheme of things, nature will have the place perfectly restored in about a decade, and so on. That's what they said about the Valdez. At the time I thought it was a reasonable argument. Then I pretty much forgot about it and went on my merry way. It wasn't until this spill that it came to my attention that the Puget sound still hasn't recovered ecologically from the spill.
    - khafra 16y ago
      I fuzzily remember a quote about either the hot-air balloon or the gatling gun; something to the effect that it would make war so terrible that it would no longer be waged. It doesn't matter how terrible the consequences of something are to everybody else; if it profits someone who's powerful enough to get it done, it'll get done.
yellowbkpk 16y ago
On a mostly-related slant, Grassroots Mapping is working with local groups to take home-made high-resolution aerial photographs of the oil slick (from balloons and kites): http://grassrootsmapping.org/ http://grassrootsmapping.org/
Recontemplation 16y ago
I'm not an environmentalist but the negligence displayed by the handling of this oil spill enrages and saddens me profoundly. I hope companies go bankrupt and people go to prison over this.
doron 16y ago
Having visited New Orleans after Katrina, you could not escape the feeling that neglect, and dereliction of duty of our elected officials displayed before, during, and after the event. Strong words came to mind at the time, something akin to treason, but time has passed, and we move on to other issues. And here we are again, where an entire way of life might be destroyed and the already battered economy of the region (and more so,its unique wild life habitats) will be gone due to neglect, cutting corners and protecting profit margins at the detriment of society and our natural environment. The golf states are being destroyed by neglect, and i cant shake the feeling that to some degree however small it is my fault as well.
- Tamerlin 16y ago
  "Having visited New Orleans after Katrina, you could not escape the feeling that neglect, and dereliction of duty of our elected officials displayed before, during, and after the event. Strong words came to mind at the time, something akin to treason, but time has passed, and we move on to other issues." That's the understatement of the decade. New Orleans was a deathtrap, and a large part of the damage was self-inflicted. The city sank itself by drawing water out of the aquifer below (which gradually leeched out the dissolved limestone, a bit like the sinkholes in Florida, but not as dramatic). The barrier islands that the locals have been callously destroying, mostly by ripping out the vegetation ("weeds") that held them together used to protect the coastline from the massive storm surges that come along with the bigger hurricanes pretty much every summer. To top things off, the levies weren't built to spec -- the Army Corps of Engineers cut corners, as usual, not driving the supports in deep enough to anchor them into solid ground. So they drifted under hydraulic pressure from the canals, and eventually started to leak, since they were anchored in soggy earth. In spite of complaints about flooding from the leaking levies, no one bothered to examine and/or repair them. On top of that, the way that they've screwed up the Mississippi's outflow gives it only one place to go when it floods: New Orleans. Which, being below Lake Ponchartrain, the Mississippi, AND the Gulf, leaves the water with no way out. So the only thing that kept the 3 major bodies of water out of the city were the levies that were poorly built and unmaintained. That's not just neglect, it's bordering on suicide.
parka 16y ago
It is very sad to see the extent of the problem. However, as much as I hate to say, it doesn't really affect us directly, probably not those that are reading this comment on HN anyway. Yes, we're angry, disappointed, disillusioned - throw in other emotions - but that's about all. Those who are directly affected are merely inconvenienced or at worst having to pay the price of cleaning up. The wildlife there are paying with their lives, because of us. I hope people with the power to effect change can learn something from this disaster, especially the CEO of BP who's going to get his million dollar paycheck anyway at the end of the year.
RyanMcGreal 16y ago
For all those holdouts still insisting that peak oil is just a silly theory, I ask you: if the easy-to-reach reserves weren't already in production, why would we be trying to pump oil out of risky, technically-difficult places like this?
- tumult 16y ago
  What if 99% of the world's oil was in more difficult places like this, but we had already extracted the 1% that was easy to get? I'm not sure what the point of your question was.
  - jbooth 16y ago
    Then we wouldn't have gotten so addicted to begin with. The point is that current oil consumption rate and projected growth are completely unsustainable, as we're just going to have to keep doing crazier and crazier stuff like an addict on the street who needs the next fix.
davi 16y ago
On the need for a second try at inserting a 4 inch tube to capture some of the oil coming out of the 21 inch riser pipe: '“This is all part of reinventing technology,” Tom Mueller, a BP spokesman, said on Saturday. “It’s not what I’d call a problem — it’s what I’d call learning, reconfiguring, doing it again.”' http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/18/us/18spill.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/18/us/18spill.html
thefool 16y ago
the sad part it, it seems as though this spill is getting comparatively little attention compared to other disasters. Hell, this will probably much more damaging than Katrina in the long term, but the difference in the levels of conversation are staggering.
- Tamerlin 16y ago
  Agreed. Worse still is the fact that since the oil companies run america, this will get swept under the rug. The ecological and economical damage will last for more than half a century. And there are hundreds of these things scattered along the now-trashed Gulf coast.

49 points by motters 16y ago

I still have trouble comprehending how truly very, very bad this all is. I think it's been hard to feel the scale of it because it's such a slow-motion event, so it frequently falls out of the news cycle, even here in relatively nearby Houston. It makes me even more pessimistic about the prospect of humans getting it together to deal with truly slow-motion problems, like global warming.

grandalf 16y ago
Not too long ago there was a fuel oil spill in the SF Bay. Some of the oil washed up at Ocean Beach where I frequently run (barefoot). A few times (long after the spill and several beach cleanups) I'd get home and notice a blob of tar stuck to my foot. It is nearly impossible to remove and extremely disgusting. One can only imagine how much of this tar will be left by the BP spill and for how long it will remain.
Tamerlin 16y ago
What makes me most pessimistic about it is that even in the face of empirical, observational evidence of global warming, there are still people out there who deny it. The real gravity of this situation in the Gulf is being drastically underplayed -- because no one has accounted for the combination of its enormity plus the fact that hurricane season is nigh. And NOAA is predicting a higher than average hurricane season. Even if NOAA ends up being wrong about that, one or two hurricanes of even moderate strength anywhere near that enormous oil spill, which I suspect is FAR larger than anyone at BP has admitted (several researchers indicated that based on analyzing BP's video, BP's estimate of 5000 barrels per day is short by close two orders of magnitude), will whip the entire coastline into a toxic nightmare.
- jsulak 16y ago
  Exactly. I am truly dreading hurricane season. Cleanup after a major storm is bad enough without having to deal with sticky, toxic oil.
  - Tamerlin 16y ago
    I'm surprised that it hasn't gotten more attention, but the thought of a 120 MPH wind whipping all of those miles-long plumes of toxic glop into a froth and splattering all over the Gulf coast definitely concerns me -- especially with the beginning of hurricane season so close, couple with the National Weather Service forecast... http://www.mahalo.com/2010-hurricane-season-forecast http://www.mahalo.com/2010-hurricane-season-forecast

joubert 16y ago

I'm speechless.

rauljara 16y ago

I never really had a strong stance on offshore drilling until this.

DanHulton 16y ago

Weirdly enough, it was a YouTube comment that really hit home with me on this issue: How long ago was it that there was a substantial part of the North American population chanting "Drill baby, drill"?

gcv 16y ago
That same segment of the population still supports off-shore drilling. Environmental concerns don't matter to vocal members of the conservative movement until they actually start coughing up smog. On the other hand, liberal President Obama's drilling plan might actually collapse now. At least, one might hope that the oil industry can't successfully bribe Congress anymore — er, excuse me, make sufficiently large campaign contributions. (Blatant politics and off-topic for HN, I know. Sorry.)
- kmfrk 16y ago
  If Robert Reich is correct, the degree of dereliction of duty is horrendous: http://robertreich.org/post/604861772/bp-stands-for-bad-petroleum http://robertreich.org/post/604861772/bp-stands-for-bad-petr....
- orangecat 16y ago
  Well, perhaps if we had opened up ANWR there would be less need for offshore drilling. Or if liberals hadn't spent the last several decades demonizing nuclear power, apparently under the delusion the alternative is Living in Harmony with Gaia rather than coal and oil.
  - MichaelSalib 16y ago
    ANWR would need decades to begin production and even then would produce only modest amounts of oil. Nuclear power has proven to be extremely expensive; I am not aware of any country that generates a significant fraction of its power using nuclear power plants without massive investment and control by the state. Since the people generally opposed to government funding and control of industry on a massive scale are not usually liberal, your comment is of questionable veracity.

flatline 16y ago

Sadly, I'm afraid that the only real hope for cleanup is to rely on natural processes. From the reading I've been doing about past oil spills and the efforts they've taken so far with this one, the dispersants and other chemical measures used to stop the spread of the oil may be more toxic than the oil itself. Although millions of gallons of oil leak into the gulf each year naturally, they are certainly not all at once and in so contained an area. We will feel the impact of this for a long time into the future.

chaosmachine 16y ago
This might be the event that finally drives home the long-term consequences of our actions as a species. The problems we're creating today have no immediate solutions. We are fucking things up in ways that will take hundreds or thousands of years to fix. Of course, that only seems like a long time because we measure things in terms of human lifespans. 500 years is nothing to a 4 billion year old planet. And earth's seen much worse. A single supervolcanic eruption would do more damage than all the man-made disasters of the last 500 years combined.
- dhimes 16y ago
  Unfortunately I am cynical about this. We thought the Exxon Valdez disaster might be a turning point as well, but it wasn't. Some incremental change may come of this, but probably nothing revolutionary. No doubt, you'll soon hear folks trying to put the public at ease about the long-term consequences of this spill. Something about how it's not too important in the big scheme of things, nature will have the place perfectly restored in about a decade, and so on. That's what they said about the Valdez. At the time I thought it was a reasonable argument. Then I pretty much forgot about it and went on my merry way. It wasn't until this spill that it came to my attention that the Puget sound still hasn't recovered ecologically from the spill.
  - khafra 16y ago
    I fuzzily remember a quote about either the hot-air balloon or the gatling gun; something to the effect that it would make war so terrible that it would no longer be waged. It doesn't matter how terrible the consequences of something are to everybody else; if it profits someone who's powerful enough to get it done, it'll get done.

yellowbkpk 16y ago

On a mostly-related slant, Grassroots Mapping is working with local groups to take home-made high-resolution aerial photographs of the oil slick (from balloons and kites): http://grassrootsmapping.org/ http://grassrootsmapping.org/

Recontemplation 16y ago

I'm not an environmentalist but the negligence displayed by the handling of this oil spill enrages and saddens me profoundly. I hope companies go bankrupt and people go to prison over this.

doron 16y ago

Having visited New Orleans after Katrina, you could not escape the feeling that neglect, and dereliction of duty of our elected officials displayed before, during, and after the event. Strong words came to mind at the time, something akin to treason, but time has passed, and we move on to other issues. And here we are again, where an entire way of life might be destroyed and the already battered economy of the region (and more so,its unique wild life habitats) will be gone due to neglect, cutting corners and protecting profit margins at the detriment of society and our natural environment. The golf states are being destroyed by neglect, and i cant shake the feeling that to some degree however small it is my fault as well.

Tamerlin 16y ago
"Having visited New Orleans after Katrina, you could not escape the feeling that neglect, and dereliction of duty of our elected officials displayed before, during, and after the event. Strong words came to mind at the time, something akin to treason, but time has passed, and we move on to other issues." That's the understatement of the decade. New Orleans was a deathtrap, and a large part of the damage was self-inflicted. The city sank itself by drawing water out of the aquifer below (which gradually leeched out the dissolved limestone, a bit like the sinkholes in Florida, but not as dramatic). The barrier islands that the locals have been callously destroying, mostly by ripping out the vegetation ("weeds") that held them together used to protect the coastline from the massive storm surges that come along with the bigger hurricanes pretty much every summer. To top things off, the levies weren't built to spec -- the Army Corps of Engineers cut corners, as usual, not driving the supports in deep enough to anchor them into solid ground. So they drifted under hydraulic pressure from the canals, and eventually started to leak, since they were anchored in soggy earth. In spite of complaints about flooding from the leaking levies, no one bothered to examine and/or repair them. On top of that, the way that they've screwed up the Mississippi's outflow gives it only one place to go when it floods: New Orleans. Which, being below Lake Ponchartrain, the Mississippi, AND the Gulf, leaves the water with no way out. So the only thing that kept the 3 major bodies of water out of the city were the levies that were poorly built and unmaintained. That's not just neglect, it's bordering on suicide.

parka 16y ago

It is very sad to see the extent of the problem. However, as much as I hate to say, it doesn't really affect us directly, probably not those that are reading this comment on HN anyway. Yes, we're angry, disappointed, disillusioned - throw in other emotions - but that's about all. Those who are directly affected are merely inconvenienced or at worst having to pay the price of cleaning up. The wildlife there are paying with their lives, because of us. I hope people with the power to effect change can learn something from this disaster, especially the CEO of BP who's going to get his million dollar paycheck anyway at the end of the year.

RyanMcGreal 16y ago

For all those holdouts still insisting that peak oil is just a silly theory, I ask you: if the easy-to-reach reserves weren't already in production, why would we be trying to pump oil out of risky, technically-difficult places like this?

tumult 16y ago
What if 99% of the world's oil was in more difficult places like this, but we had already extracted the 1% that was easy to get? I'm not sure what the point of your question was.
- jbooth 16y ago
  Then we wouldn't have gotten so addicted to begin with. The point is that current oil consumption rate and projected growth are completely unsustainable, as we're just going to have to keep doing crazier and crazier stuff like an addict on the street who needs the next fix.

davi 16y ago

On the need for a second try at inserting a 4 inch tube to capture some of the oil coming out of the 21 inch riser pipe: '“This is all part of reinventing technology,” Tom Mueller, a BP spokesman, said on Saturday. “It’s not what I’d call a problem — it’s what I’d call learning, reconfiguring, doing it again.”' http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/18/us/18spill.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/18/us/18spill.html

thefool 16y ago

the sad part it, it seems as though this spill is getting comparatively little attention compared to other disasters. Hell, this will probably much more damaging than Katrina in the long term, but the difference in the levels of conversation are staggering.

Tamerlin 16y ago
Agreed. Worse still is the fact that since the oil companies run america, this will get swept under the rug. The ecological and economical damage will last for more than half a century. And there are hundreds of these things scattered along the now-trashed Gulf coast.