Gulf Coast oil spill could eclipse Exxon Valdez

This is going to be in court for years.. maybe decades

Ugh, this one is the worst. The Mississippi River meeting an oil slick...

Oh and this whole thing just basically got a shit ton worse...

Estimated 50,000 - 100,000 barrels per day instead of the earlier 5,000 -> 25,000 barrels per day estimates

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...ryId=126809525

Basically, the worst fears are coming to life

I'm rooting for mother nature!

thank heavens that stuff ended up in the water, can you imagine if it had ended up as particulate matter in the air?

What? but there's the water cycle and evap.....Ahhhh, hahahaha I see what you did man. I see what you did....

we're all fucked!

Go humanity!

Seriously....

Go....

Also,

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/13/wheres-the-oil-your-gover_n_575647.html

They don't even know where most of the oil is because it is traveling under the surface through the currents... it could be anywhere...

ahhh, humanity. and we'll learn so little from this.

fuck blaming BP, or the fools who botched the blowout preventer or whatever it is that failed--i blame whoever it is that approved the construction of that thing in the first place. which i assume is the US govt.

if this sort of disaster is possible from one component's failure, the risk assessment behind the approval and the subsequent oversight is absolute shit. there's the fucking crime.

don't approve drilling if you have no fucking clue what the potential risks or environmental impacts are, and if you have no intention of ensuring that several, several, several layers of redundancy are wrapped around any potential failing points. fuck you. a billion times fuck you. look what you did, you piece of shit.

Looks like James Bond lost this one

  On 5/12/2010 at 8:36 AM, lumpenprol said:

(also, why is it no surprise Halliburton is involved):

no way? really? i didn't know this.

this is the last straw for me. i'm going to go on a stabbing rampage. (i'm joking)

Holy Shit , the news got bored.

Apparently shit's getting worse.

jazz

Gas DOOOOOOOOM

Gas leak 3000 times worse then oil leak

There is 3000 times more natural gas coming out of the leak than oil. The damage of the massive amounts of Gas being released into the gulf is worse than the oil.

Oxygen levels in some areas have dropped 30 percent, and should continue to drop, Joye said.

"It could take years, possibly decades, for the system to recover from an infusion of this quantity of oil and gas," Joye said. "We've never seen anything like this before. It's impossible to fathom the impact."

The Federal Minerals Management Service (MMS) contracted a study to see how badly a deep water drilling oil spill would deplete the gulf of oxygen. this study underestimated the current leak by a factor of 26. It was NOT peer reviewed and did not consider that the damage would occur at depth greater than 700 meters. In other words, the determination of the potential impact of deep water drilling on the ecosystem by the federal agency that regulates these activities was a TOTAL SHAM.

http://rense.com/general90/gasleak.htm

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/...SxVPAD9FO07J00

A BP executive stated that they were removing 3000:1 gas to oil at the well before the explosion. (thats 3000 cubic feet of gas for every barrel of oil) The amount of oil leaking into the gulf is 25,000 to 70,000 barrels.

a 3000:1 ratio would mean 75 - 210 million cubic feet of gas per day being released.

There is 5.64 cubic feet of gas per barrel.

That would mean there is 13.3 to 37.2 million "barrels" of gas being released each day.

(note: this is at standard atmospheric temp and pressure. At the ocean floor and 2,400 pounds per square inch, this gas is compressed by a factor of of over 1000 and will expand as it rises. So, in the video coming out of the pipe it looks like 75,000 to 210,000 barrels of gas per day.

Yes, the Gulf is very large. But look at the surface oil as of now and keep in mind that the majority of the oil is sub-surface, in massive plumes:

Gulf Oil Leaks Could Gush for Years

"We don't have any idea how to stop this," expert says.

National Geographic

an exxon valdez every four days... this is getting fucking intense. like bruce willis armageddon intense

lol, they nicked the earth's carotid

Don't mean to downplay it, this is clearly a big deal, but in theory if we weren't fucking the earth in a million other ways (CO2 emissions causing the ocean to reach its saturation point, for example), the earth should be able to handle something like this. When you think of the "black smokers", and all the other junk that must be release in subduction zones and from underwater volcanoes, and it's hard not to conclude that this sort of event could just as easily be caused by mother nature herself (think underwater krakatoa) Still a shame that those idiots triggered it.

i heard something on the radio about them planning to plug the hole with "golf balls and knotted rope". wtf!

from the nat geo link above-

  Quote

"We don't have any idea how to stop this," Simmons said of the Gulf leak. Some of the proposed strategies—such as temporarily plugging the leaking pipe with a jet of golf balls and other material—are a "joke," he added.

 

"We really are in unprecedented waters."

we are fucked, that engineer was right, no amount of human machinery is going to stop the pressure... will take months to build a relief drill

whats the fallout from this going to be, say, five years from now?

not sure...

more doom news today, I keep waiting for better news :(

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/us_and_canada/10127904.stm

US oil spill 'enters Loop Current' with Florida at risk

BP started this shit with an oil well, and now they are gonna build more?

if BP or the us govt could choose between letting 80% of the oil out and recovering 20% of it or stopping the leak right now and recovering 0% of it, i'm pretty sure i know what they'd choose.