Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

permaculture - [permaculture] Why did the spill happen?

permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: permaculture

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Cory Brennan <cory8570@yahoo.com>
  • To: "cory8570@yahoo.com" <cory8570@yahoo.com>
  • Subject: [permaculture] Why did the spill happen?
  • Date: Thu, 6 May 2010 10:13:41 -0700 (PDT)

This is from another list, I have not done a formal verification of this
myself but it does have some documentation to it.

***

I've been doing a little reading today. I want to share what I found a few
miles down into the nightmare in the Gulf of Mexico on this Cinco de Mayo,
and Marx's 192nd B-day... I'm about to go to sleep, and I wonder.... I just
wonder ...what I will dream about... Here's a hint: Kill the industrial
machine!

WA Post on potential ways to stop "leak":
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2010/04/30/GR2010043003064.html

Amount of oil could soar if "cap" doesn't work: WASHINGTON — In a closed-door
briefing for members of Congress, a senior BP executive conceded Tuesday that
the ruptured oil well in the Gulf of Mexico could conceivably spill as much
as 60,000 barrels a day of oil, more than 10 times the estimate of the
current flow. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/05/us/05spill.html?hp

Published on Sunday, May 2, 2010 by CommonDreams.org
Was the Gulf Oil Spill an Act of War? You Betcha
by Randall Amster
"The cruel joke is that our willingness to continually flout nature's laws
leaves us in a perpetual state of scarcity and requires a regular
doubling-down on the very same logic that made things scarce in the first
place."
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/05/02-0

Obama biggest recipient of BP cash
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64420A20100505

BP Flouted US Safety Rules...By Jason Leopold...May 5, 2010 "OSHA has found
that BP often ignored or severely delayed fixing known hazards in its
refineries," Solis said. "There is no excuse for taking chances with people's
lives. BP must fix the hazards now."...Also notable about the nearly two
dozen alleged violations at Husky was that one matches allegations leveled
against BP a year ago by a whistleblower who said the company had been
operating its Gulf Coast drilling platform Atlantis without a majority of the
necessary engineering and design documents, a violation of federal
law...Atlantis is the world's largest and deepest semi-submersible oil and
natural gas platform, located about 200 miles south of New Orleans. The
whistleblower said BP was risking a catastrophic oil spill even worse than
the disaster now unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon
platform exploded and sank two weeks ago.
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/050510a.html

The Bush/Obama Administration is just as complicit as BP. U.S. exempted BP's
Gulf of Mexico drilling from environmental impact study
By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/04/AR2010050404118.html?hpid=topnews

Oil Companies Pay a Pittance in Penalties to Offshore Drilling Regulator
by Marian Wang, ProPublica - May 4, 2010 9:22 am EDT
http://www.propublica.org/ion/blog/item/oil-companies-pay-a-pittance-in-penalties-to-offshore-drilling-regulator

Gulf Oil Spill Puts Spotlight on Regulator With Mixed Record
by Marian Wang, ProPublica - April 29, 2010 2:09 pm EDT As The Wall Street
Journal reported this morning, the oil rig lacked a device—known as an
acoustic control—that would’ve served as a safeguard of last resort [3]....So
which regulator oversees rigs and made that decision? It was the Department
of Interior’s Minerals Management Service, an agency that has had a spotty
record over the past few years...“It was an agency that was very strapped in
its human resources, and essentially the priority for the agency was on
production rather than on regulation and oversight,”
http://www.propublica.org/ion/blog/item/Gulf-Oil-Spill-Puts-Spotlight-on-Regulator-With-Mixed-Record-

Gulf Oil Spill Pictures: Aerial Views Show Leak's Size
news.nationalgeographic.com — The spread of oil on the water&surface is a
main clue being used to determine the size of the leak from the Gulf of
Mexico rig disaster. National Geographic ...
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/04/photogalleries/100429-gulf-oil-rig-spill-worse-pictures/#gulf-oil-rig-spill-colors-show-depth_19688_600x450.jpg

Gulf Oil Spill a "Dead Zone in the Making"?
"We're wiping out critical elements of the base of the food chain of the
Gulf," Texas Tech's Kendall said. "This is an ecotoxological experiment
underway in one of the world’s most productive and fragile ecosystems."...As
oil droplets spread through the water column, the crude can be fatal to
plankton, the tiny, open-ocean creatures that many larger animals depend on,
according to marine biologist Earle....Rescue workers can clean and treat
oiled birds and other relatively large animals that come ashore. But "how do
you deal with deoiling plankton?" Earle said.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/05/100504-science-environment-gulf-oil-spill-dead-zone/

BP Oil Spill Highlights Poor Safety Record, the Worst of Any Oil Company in
America
Deepwaterhorizon-fire...“BP is a London-based oil company with one of the
worst safety records of any oil company operating in America,” says Tyson
Slocum of Public Citizen. “In just the last few years, BP has paid $485
million in fines and settlements to the US government for environmental
crimes, willful neglect of worker safety rules, and penalties for
manipulating energy markets.” We speak with Slocum and with an attorney
representing several workers who survived the blast that sank BP’s Deepwater
Horizon rig. He’s also representing the wife of one of the 11 workers now
presumed dead who is filing a lawsuit accusing BP of negligence. [Includes
rush transcript] http://www.democracynow.org/2010/5/5/group_bp_has_one_of_the

There Will Be Blood...Sen. Bill Nelson wants the government office infamous
for its "sex orgies and pot parties" probed for its lax oversight of offshore
drilling....— By Kate Sheppard...Wed May. 5, 2010 3:00 AM PDT"In the Bush
administration, these were the guys that were having sex orgies and pot
parties and weren't showing up for work," Nelson told reporters, referring to
the 2008 scandal in a Colorado regional MMS office in which it came to light
that agency employees had been partying with industry execs rather than
collecting millions of dollars in royalties for lease deals. Nelson has asked
the agency's inspector general to investigate, among other things, the extent
to which the oil industry has influenced the agency’s rulemaking
process....The disaster in the Gulf has once again cast a spotlight on MMS, a
troubled division with a long history of regulatory negligence. Conservatives
have dubbed the spill "Obama's Katrina." But the roots of
the disaster, which could potentially have been prevented by enhanced safety
measures, stretch back to the George W. Bush years. During that era, Interior
became a revolving door haven for industry lobbyists.
http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/05/bp-bill-nelson-oil-spill

WEDNESDAY 5 MAY 2010...Whistleblower: BP Risks More Massive Catastrophes in
Gulf...Friday 30 April 2010...by: Jason Leopold, t r u t h o u t | Report: 95
percent of Atlantis' subsea welding records did not receive final approval,
calling into question the integrity of thousands of crucial welds on subsea
components that, if they were to rupture, could result in an oil spill 30
times worse than the one that occurred after the explosion on Deepwater
Horizon last week.
http://www.truthout.org/whistlelower-bps-other-offshore-drilling-project-gulf-vulnerable-catastrophe59027

What If BP Were A Human Being?...Wed, 05/05/2010 - 14:00 — Bruce A. Dixon...
Among flesh and blood humans, there are no precise analogs to what
corporations do when they buy and sell each other. The acts of matrimony and
cannibalism perhaps comes closest, with consenting or non-consenting spouses
and/or victims, along with assumption of the spouse and/or victim's assets.
Among humans, marriage is a reason to change one's name, too. Another reason
to change one's name is simply to escape one's old record and reputation.
Among humans, that's called assuming an alias. So our immortal, immensely
wealthy human BP may have been married several times, perhaps several times
at once, could be a cannibal, albeit with sometimes willing victims, and
operates under several aliases....You don't have to look too long and hard to
understand why a flesh and blood BP would need aliases. The objective of the
Anglo-Persian Oil Company was to monopolize the rich oil
resources of what is now Iran.
http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/what-if-bp-were-human-being

Slick Operator: The BP I've known too well...Wednesday, May 5, 2010...by Greg
Palast for Truthout.org
May 5, 2010And here we go again. Valdez goes Cajun....BP's CEO Tony Hayward
reportedly asked, "What the hell did we do to deserve this?"...It's what you
didn't do, Mr. Hayward. Where was BP's containment barge and response crew?
Why was the containment boom laid so damn late, too late and too little? Why
is it that the US Navy is hauling in 12 miles of rubber boom and fielding
seven skimmers, instead of BP?
http://www.gregpalast.com/slick-operator-the-bp-ive-known-too-well/#more-3650

Things Fall Apart...Tuesday 04 May 2010...by: William Rivers Pitt, t r u t h
o u t Op-Ed..."..."Things fall apart," William Butler Yeats wrote. "The
center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed
tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned." He
could have been talking about us, about this past week in America, about what
happens when madness, greed and fear combine and conspire to show us what it
looks like when the gates of Hell crack open.Asked Friday to comment on the
document, NOAA spokesman Scott Smullen said that the additional leaks
described were reported to the public late Wednesday night. Regarding the
possibility of the spill becoming an order of magnitude larger, Smullen said,
"I'm letting the document you have speak for itself."...In scientific
circles, an order of magnitude means something is 10 times larger. In this
case, an order of magnitude higher would mean the volume of oil coming
from the well could be 10 times higher than the 5,000 barrels a day coming
out now. That would mean 50,000 barrels a day, or 2.1 million gallons a
day..." http://www.truthout.org/things-fall-apart59152






  • [permaculture] Why did the spill happen?, Cory Brennan, 05/06/2010

Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page