Gulf of Mexico oil spill was many times the government figures

Researchers from Columbia University (NY, USA) conclude that the amount of oil released daily by BP's Deepwater Horizon well until the first cap was placed on June 15 was 56-68,000 barrels per day, maybe more. This is many times more than the official figures, which evolved from a ridiculous claim of of one thousand barrels to 19,000.

The total oil released to the environment is at least 4.4 million barrels, most of which is still there even if it has been hidden by the use of massive amounts of highly toxic dispersants, in what is the most massive environmental and public health scandal in US history and globally only comparable to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986.

Possible variations in the flows from day to day lead to some uncertainty. Additionally, the analysis does not include other smaller plumes from several holes near the broken pipe, holes that are believed to have grown with time.

Lead author, Timothy Crone, developed his technique of optical plume velocimetry to study deep undersea thermal vents in the Pacific Ocean in 2006.

Source: Science Daily.

Reference: Timothy Crone and Maya Tolstoy, Magnitude of the 2010 Gulf of Mexico Oil Leak. Science 2010. Pay per view.

100 million Indians strike against liberalization

Besides French, Indians also went to general strike yesterday, with the main goal of blocking the growing prices of basic products, specially food and oil, and of stopping the sale-out of public companies.

While the figure is high, we should remember that India has some 1 billion inhabitants of which maybe half are actual workers. On the other hand, the wide spread of irregular economy and mafioso pressures of the capitalist class surely also influenced the outcome. So I admit it is difficult to judge if this figure represents a mere 20-30% of strikers (still a major figure, specially for such a large and heterogeneous country) or it is in fact a much larger fraction of the regular workers.

Whatever the case it seems that the impact was very irregular with maybe 99% success in communist-ruled states of Kerala, West Bengal and Tripura and variable impact in other states. In Delhi and Mumbai, the strike was only apparent in the absence of rickshaws, whose drivers massively seconded the walk out. Other affected states were Manipur, Assam, Maharastra, Gujarat, Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh.

Sources: Insurgente, People's Daily, The Jakarta Post. The information I found is not too precise anyhow, so complementary accounts and links are welcome.

UN whitewashes the ecocide and genocide of Shell in Niger Delta

If BP is insulting and harming the US people and clearly manipulating the US government, go figure what can happen in a much poorer country like Nigeria!

But what about the United Nations? It seems that Royal Dutch Shell, the second largest company of the world and one with a very murky past (specially remembered for its support of the Apartheid regime in South Africa), is also perfectly able to buy its favors.

This is what Black Agenda Report denounced a few days ago: that the study by the UN Environmental Program, paid by Shell, blames locals and the guerrilla for 90% of polution and spills in the Delta Region, once known as Biafra. However it seems that it has backtracked and claims now that no official report is due until next year.

Whatever the case the situation in the Niger Delta, denounced by AI, may be even worse than that of the Gulf of Mexico, at least in many aspects.


The true scope of Niger River Delta pollution is catastrophic, with the equivalent of 9 to 13 million barrels of oil fouling the waterways, farmlands and mangrove forests of Africa's largest wetland. That's at least twice as much oil as escaped in the recent Gulf of Mexico disaster, thus ranking Nigeria and Shell as the number one oil polluters in the world (Glenn Ford at Black Agenda Report).

Huge underwater "dispersed" oil plume confirmed and other Louisiana catastrophe news

As I have said before, I feel overwhelmed by the amount of information and misinformation around the Louisiana Deepwater Horizon catastrophe and hence I cannot follow it here at Leherensuge with the intensity I would like. I have mentioned also that other more dedicated blogs, such as Washington Blog, Alexander Higgins' Blog and Florida Oil Spill Law, provide a much better and comprehensive critical following of the catastrophe at official and unofficial levels.

But today I must mention some important news. However I am in a hurry, so I apologize in advance for being brief.

Giant oil plume scientifically confirmed at 1 km depth

This is official enough to have made it to the mainstream media. BBC (watch out for a clear pro-BP bias in all British media) and Science Daily report on it, for instance.

The plume is made up of dispersed oil, up to the point that is not easy to see with naked eye. Yet it is there, it is huge and it is not being degraded biologically because water temperature is way too cold.

The news comes from a research paper, published at Science magazine yesterday, by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). However they had to stop their field research short because of bad weather. Therefore the plume has not been fully mapped yet.

This confirms the previous denounce by other scientists about the US administration oil figures being a fairy tale. Most oil is still there and because the use of dispersants (which are still being sprayed and are themselves highly toxic) the oil cannot be cleaned up (nor easily found) at surface nor can be degraded naturally by microorganisms, posing an even worse threat.



Independent expert speaks out

Washington Blog published yesterday an interview with University of California professor Dr. Robert Bea, engineer with ample experience in offshore drilling.

According to him, the good news is that the methane bubble doomsday scenario is most unlikely to be a real risk. All the rest are bad news: the geology is fractured and oil will follow such fractures and possibly leak out to the sea many kilometers from the damaged well. Solving the leak certainly will need relief wells - some previous such incidents have needed as many as five different relief wells.


Seafloor fractures in detail

Alexander Higgins has a great article today on how the macondo well might have fractured the geology of the area and its consequences. It can be synthesized to some extent in this image:


There are many other news, many of great interest, but I seriously recommend you to browse the blogs I mentioned in the first paragraph because I have no room in Leherensuge nor even in my mind for all them.

Very bad looking steady black flow from the Louisiana oil spill spot

Just posted at Florida Oil Spill Law with time stamp of 3:00 am today (local time, I presume):



I am more and more concerned. Well, more like beginning to panic, admittedly. They have no damn idea of what kind of forces they are dealing with and the only thing it seems to matter is profit and/or cutting losses.

Even if the doomsday scenario hypothesis does not become true (and I do not know what to think really), such an uncontrolled flow of oil and methane is a true disaster. It was already the worst oil-related disaster ever but it will be even worse, as it seems it is going to run uncontrolled for months or who knows for how long.

I am in Europe, many many kilometers away... but if you follow NOAA predictions (which only reach to mid-July) the oil has already reached the Atlantic Ocean and will keep flushing in that direction (all that is not skimmed or end ups into beaches and such). Eventually it will reach here too, as the Gulf Stream ends in the Atlantic coasts of Europe. Typically that is a blessing, allowing for several degrees of temperature above what is usual for these northernly latitudes, but now it seems it may become a curse.

Expert who denounced BP found dead

Mathew Simmons, former chairman of Simmons & Co. International, advocate of peak oil theory and heavy critic of BP's management and misinformation on the Louisiana oil disaster was found dead yesterday in the bath tube, allegedly drowned after suffering a heart attack at the age of 67.

Simmons became rather prominent in the last months as he denounced in the media that there must exist another much bigger leak, some five or six miles away from the one reported and seemingly "killed". For him what we could see in the underwater cameras could not account for the real figures of the spill, even when these were minimized by BP and the US government.

More controversially he proposed to tackle the problem using a controlled nuclear explosion.

But crucially he denounced that nothing was being done apparently to quell the main spill, in a most serious case of environmental crime. He also suggested early on that the USA should have taken military control of the problem instead of letting the fox, BP, to take care of the chickens (oil disaster).

Suspicion of assassination is of course widespread through the Internet because the most prominent critical voice on this disaster has been silenced this way. See for instance: Alexander Higgins' Blog, .

In this sense I must mention that the modus operandi, if we are in front of a murder, is very similar to the one used by the Mossad in Dubai some months ago, to murder Hamas member Mamouhd al Mabouh, whose death was for more than a week officially believed to be caused by a heart attack... until French laboratories confirmed the presence of such a high tech poison.

Some 300 videos of Simons' opinions on the oil spill can be found at YouTube.

Update (Aug 12): just to mention that three people working for BP cleanup operations have died. One apparently shot himself, another one died of an apparent heart attack and drowning at a swimming pool (curious coincidence with Matt Simmons' death) and the other is only mentioned by number (source).

Louisiana oil disaster: the more I read/watch, the more pessimistic I am

In theory they have capped it and that's about it. In practice it is extremely worrisome that they are systematically falsifying, hiding, photoshopping the truth.

Like this bubbling methane seep captured yesterday by one of BP ROVs but hidden by something as simple as darkening the image:



It's just an example. There's a lot more really depressing and hidden-under-the-carpet stuff at Florida Oil Spill Law and Alexander Higgins' blogs. You have to like research journalism though.

It is also worrisome, beyond the immediate disaster the consequences that the lack of a grassroots political organization of the working class can carry: millions of people are being affected by this, including not just the disaster as such but criminal mismanagement at all levels, directly affecting health and jobs, as well as the whole ecological balance of one of the most diverse seas on which these rely and where is the response?

There is only limited response because there are not class organizations beyond unions and sectorial activist groups in the USA. As some member of the fishing community of Louisiana put it already months ago: "we are expendable". It only matters to pretend that everything is under control and to minimize losses to the big corporations.

Even if the doomsday scenario forecast by several people of the oceanic bottom ripping off and causing a huge tsunami and releasing cataclysmic amounts of usually frozen methane to the atmosphere fails to happen (I really hope so), the damage caused by corporate interests is already immense and will grow in the following months as the remainder and future residues of oil and corexit poison spread around. This should warrant people going out to the streets in protest at least every other weekend... but nobody is mobilizing this anger and frustration and the corporative masters and their politician and judiciary minions do as they please therefore.

More info resources on the Louisiana catastrophe

I recently mentioned a couple of resources to follow the oil spill info beyond what the corporate media wants to show. Another fantastic and daily updated blog I found dealing mostly with this disaster is Alexander Higgins Blog, a true research journalism site on the matter, where you can get at least some of the info denied or hidden by the authorities and the media.

Today, among other stuff, he posted this oddly beautiful (albeit sad) video made by himself with pictures of the oil spill and music from Rick Barry ("Atlantis", a song on the effects of Katrina hurricane):




The details (description and dates) for the images can be found here.

There are many interesting articles in this blog, but what really brought me there was this excellent research on the methane gas seeps around the DWH site. It seems that BP may have drilled right away through a methane field, the huge nearby RIGEL field, what may be at the origin of most of the trouble past, present and future. Because this disaster is surely not over.

Update: see also this article with maps from three days ago that contradict the claims that skimmers can't find anymore oil: it is all around!

Could the Louisiana catastrophe had been prevented by a unionized workforce?

That is what In Defense of Marxism seems to think and to me their arguments are self-evident:

Much is said in the news about the disastrous situation that now exists in the Gulf of Mexico as a result of the Deepwater Horizon explosion. An ecological disaster of gigantic proportions has been created by the profit motive, which is what drives the BP executives. However, were the company to be thoroughly unionised, with workers’ representatives controlling every level of safety, this disaster could have been averted.

Amidst the acres of newsprint about the Deepwater Horizon blowout little has been said about those who are most affected - the BP workforce.

The mood in Sunbury, in the BP head offices, is a mixture of denial and anxiety, expressed in a bitter gallows humour and blunt cynicism. Long-term employees have had several decades of management cock-ups, re-organisations, cut backs, more re-organisations, and more cut-backs. Everywhere, whether in the office decor or the lines on people’s faces, are the symptoms of 20 years of lucrative deals at the top which eventually have brought this company to its knees. Nobody - nobody - is surprised at what has happened. Every long term employee knows what lies behind this disaster. Since the 1990s the company has been running on thin air, vital services have been outsourced, and quality, like the pipelines, has decayed. "The new paradigm", the Thatcherite policy of cutting to the bone and outsourcing to the cheapest bidder, has turned into the old paradigm - long hours, poor quality, insecurity and stress.

Read full article at IDOM.


________________________

Update (Jul 25): You may also want to read this article of similar content at RandomPottins: If they had listened to workers, maybe there'd have been no disaster, and BP would not need to be "buying" scientists. (Suggested by Joe, at comments).

Excellent coverage of oil disaster at Washington's Blog

The Louisiana oil catastrophe, with its many aspects (toxic dispersants, ecological and economic impact, BP owners, hidden data and even possible doomsday scenarios), is something I have covered only sparingly. This is partly because it is a main page news issue and partly because I'm truly overwhelmed by the many ramifications of the catastrophe.

However I imagine that many among Leherensuge's readers would appreciate more quality and intensive information about it. I know of two written sources (I don't watch so many visual media, sorry):

One is Global Research and the other and most important one is Washington's Blog. I say most important because many of the materials found at Global Research and elsewhere actually come from this blog and that's how I found it myself. The blog is a general "news and analysis" blog but as of late it has become almost monolithically focused on the Louisiana hecatomb.

I've been trying to add this blog to the blogroll and follow it via Google but it seems to have some strange problems with the feedback link: it works perfectly in Google Reader however. In any case I hope these links are of use to you... because the mainstream media after all is the monopoly of a few oligarchs who simply are not going to put any effort in keeping you properly informed if they can help it.

Dead zone: 10 years later Brazilian oil spill mangrove bay has not recovered

A warning for those in Southern USA, this is what will be, probably, of your coast and sea after the BP oil disaster:


Ten years later neither the mangrove nor the fish at Guanabara Bay, in Brazil, has recovered at all, nor does it look it will do any time soon.

The affected Brazilians express their thoughts in length on their own local catastrophe ten years ago and the Louisiana oil spill today at Al Jazeera.

Could Russian subs help close the Louisiana oil leak?

Today seems a day of mystery news that one doesn't really know what to do with them. After mentioning the apparently severe but otherwise unheard of political conflict in Puerto Rico, now I stumble with another strange and rather hidden news item at BBC: the captain of a special high depth Mir submarine claims they could close the Louisiana oil leak but clarifies that top level institutional decisions would be needed.

The two Mir submarines are nowadays searching for methane hydrates (an alternative source of energy) in the depths of Lake Baikal, the deepest lake on Earth, and have previously worked in the Arctic. He speaks confident of their capabilities but laments that there seems to be no interest in asking the Russians for help at all.

Puzzling to say the least.

Gulf oil disaster will reach the Atlantic

This is the estimate for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill in less than a year, according to simulations by US scientists:

The simulation is based on 5 typical years' climate and does not include any estimate of biological degradation or other accumulation processes such as the formation of tar balls. Whatever the case it is a most worrisome forecast for SE USA, parts of Mexico and even possibly Europe, where the Gulf Stream eventually ends.

The catastrophe, still mostly uncontrolled, has began to be dubbed "the American Chernobyl".

Source: Science Daily.

Growing prices and growing tensions

I know it's going on for a while but some mornings when reading the news you can't but help thinking we're heading to a catastrphe rapidly.

It's not just that oil prices have risen 10 bucks in one single day, dragging Wall Street with them, that Israel is threatening to nuke Iran and that the dump and the corruption nightmare of Campania's dump has begun affecting Germany. It's that all that seems to describe our damn impossible reality in too clear and crude terms.

Or maybe it's business as usual and I'm just having a bad day?