You are in the current BP disaster ROV, number 197. Number 196 is here.
Please DO NOT Rec this diary, rather REC THE MOTHERSHIP instead. She needs your love to stay afloat.
Please be kind to kossacks with bandwidth issues. Please do not post images or videos. Again, many thanks for this.
PLEASE visit Crashing Vor and Pam LaPier's Diaries to find out how you can help the Gulf now and in the future. We don't have to be idle! And thanks to Crashing Vor and Pam LaPier for working on this!
For a description of the mothership/ROV liveblogging process, check out this thread.
Must read: Lax Oversight Seen in Failure of Oil Rig's Last Line of Defense. Watch video and interactive graphic page, too. Best overview of how the BOP works, and doesn't work, and the management interference that caused the accident.
Deepwater Horizon BP Oil Spill Reference Material - from Whitis is the best source for everything.. The quantitative data diary has also been moved there.
Jeff Masters of Weather Underground posted his take on the effects of a hurricane passing through the Gulf and making landfall.
Please DO NOT Rec this diary, Rec the Mothership here.
BP put up a video explaining the LMRP procedure and the future plans.
Go to the Deepwater Horizon Data Summary for a wealth of actual data from the Department of Energy.
The BOP and pressure drawings are viewable here. The CAD drawings come highly recommended by the techies among us. h/t Claudius Bombarnac.
This is what BP DOES NOT WANT YOU TO SEE. The following images are guaranteed to make you SICK AT HEART.
These images are not for the faint of heart - DO NOT VIEW THEM LIGHTLY.
Really, I mean it. Hold somebody's hand. Grab a tissue.
A brief reference guide to nicknames you may see in the ROV diaries:
- Gertrude, aka Gerty: the oil volcano
- Lizzy: the diamond saw cutter
- Clampy: the cute ROV
- Crunchy: 30 ft shear. bit the pipe, now a movie star
- Wanda: the dispersant sprayer
- laundry basket: yellow thing that brings things up and down
- Thingy: those things, you know, those things
- Shiny Thing: those really neat things
- Ms. Blanche Flo, aka Blanche, aka Flo: the manifold thingy
Thanks to dov12348 for publishing a diary on Oil Terminology.
Here is a tutorial on the sources of pressure on the well
H/t to Pluto for finding this:
The official casing configuration under the wellhead.
The initial approach above will be followed by open hole and drill pipe magnetic ranging. After they get within 5 feet of the blown out well's lower casing they will ream, case and cement the relief well prior to reaming through the blown well's casing. (Photos from The Oil Drum)
Audio, a slide presentation, and a transcript from Kent Wells' 6-28 briefing is available.
The video feeds we are watching:
==== ROV Feeds =====
44287/44668 - OceanInterventionROV1
44838/45135 - OceanInterventionROV2
46566/54013 - Viking_Poseidon_ROV1
55030/56646 - Viking_Poseidon_ROV2
31499/31500 - Boa_Deep_C_ROV_1
22458/23729 - Boa_Deep_C_ROV_2
45685/49182 - Skandi_ROV1
45683/45684 - Skandi_ROV2
47175/21144 - Enterprise_ROV_1
21145/21327 - Enterprise_ROV_2
37235/37270 - Q4000_ROV1
35523/35624 - Q4000_ROV2
Possibly outdated or redundant links (from The Oil Drum):
46245 - BP "Official" #1 (primary)
46260 - BP "Official" #2 (secondary)
46661 - BP mystery feed #1
46663 - BP mystery feed #2
Restricted to web browser based viewing:
CNN Video Streams Note: multi-view is sometimes unavailable.
PBS (fewer security issues than some others)
BP videos Links to all available live feeds from BP.
WKRG - Mobile/Pensacola (Contains link for an iPhone app at the bottom.)
ABC 7 Chicago Live Video Multiple ROV Camera Views (h/t to temptxan for the great find).
Multiple stream feeds (hard on browser/bandwidth):
The best multi-view feed Be patient as load time may take a bit.
Markey's multi-view page
Lusty's multi-feed page (originally created by papicek, but a huge improvement made by Lusty, who also kindly hosts it :^)
Vote For America's awesome clickable multi-view Courtesy of one of our very own Kossacks.
A multi-view Contains feeds from BP, C-SPAN-2, WKRG, and PBS
High-def video feeds
See this thread for more info on using video feeds and on linking to video feeds.
Again, to keep bandwidth down please do not post images or videos.
Links, courtesy of several Kossacks
ACTION
- X Prize Competition for oil spill fix announced
- Requiring a Relief Well: Let's Write a Bill! A diary series by Garret
- National Science Foundation rapid response research grants for Gulf oil spill research
- ERMA: Environmental Response Management Application
BACKGROUND
- Google Crisis Response page for Gulf Oil Spill
- Wikipedia: Deepwater Horizon oil spill
- BP has a good diagram of the cutting process that partially succeeded
DATA
- Sketch Map of Subsea Operations - from Another Kevin
- GeoPlatform - Gulf Response: Mapping the Response to BP Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico
- Kent Wells' technical update, June 10, 2010
- dov12348's oil toxicity links
- dov12348's Ocean currents, wind currents, and hurricane links
- Visualize the spill
- SkyTruth
- Images of the Oilpacalypse, from Tomtech.
- Visit the Oil Spill Crisis Map to see where oil, mousse, tar balls, and eau de crude have been reported on the Gulf coast.
- The BP Deepwater Horizon Unified Command official website. Wherein you can read latest post warning of employment scams associated with the event and much more from the folks handling this.
- Timeline of response here.
- Department of Energy BP Deepwater Horizon Spill site updates.
- Department of Interior BP Deepwater Horizon Response site provides updates, reports, data, links to pictures, etc.
- Rigzone for specific disaster news and news about the offshore industry, in general.
- Courtesy of profgoose here is a list of links from The Oil Drum links on newer developments, etc
- Maritime ship tracking -- courtesy of johnsonwax
- Map of things on the sea floor there. -- outdated, based on unreliable data
- Calculator for distance from BOP. -- not reliable
- NOAA Spill tracking site
HEALTH AND SAFETY
- 2010 Gulf Oil Spill Crisis Wiki
- NIH National Library of Medicine Crude oil spills and Health
- ATSDR (Agency for Toxic Substances & Disease Registry) Total Petroleum Hydrocarbons (TPH): ToxFAQs™
- CDC Emergency Preparedness and Response: 2010 Gulf of Mexico
Includes fact sheets and health and safety information for Gulf Coast Residents, Response Workers, and Health Professionals
- Reducing Occupational Exposures while Working with Dispersants During the Gulf Oil Spill Response
- EPA Response to BP Spill in the Gulf of Mexico
Includes Air Monitoring Data Reports, Daily Average Particulate Matter, Air Sampling Data Files, Real-time Air Monitoring (including TAGA data), and Downloadable data set of hourly air monitoring
LEGISLATION/FEDERAL RESPONSE
- Administration response to spill.
PERTINENT BLOGS and collections of Oil Spill-specific JOURNALISM
- The Daily Hurricane: Blog run by Bob Cavnar
- Nola.com Oil Spill News
- Sun Herald (Biloxi, MS) Oil Spill News
- Mobile (AL) Press-Register Oil Spill News
- St. Petersburg Times (FL) Oil Spill News
- World newspapers oil section
- The Oil Drum
- Oil & Gas Journal
- Offshore Magazine
- Petroleum News
- Your Oil and Gas News
- World Oil
- Bit Tooth Energy blog (technical discussions) by the famed Heading Out, well known key poster on The Oil Drum blog site.
WILDLIFE
- Help Cornell Lab of Ornithology collect bird information on the Gulf
- Center for Biological Diversity list of Gulf species threatened by the spill
- International Bird Rescue Research Center: Info on bird survival rates
- Summarized tally of affected wildlife
- US Fish & Wildlife Service Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Response h/t to CindyMax Left side of page has "Daily Wildlife Collection Reports" that details wildlife found oiled, alive, deceased, and/or released.
- BP doesn't want photos of dead animals
- Washington Post: People Come Together to Save Coast's Oil-Covered Wildlife (h/t Humphrey)
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When I was a kid, the Fourth was almost a bigger holiday than Christmas. We’d go to the beach – maybe out to Ship or Horn, or Chandeleur, and we’d blow up things at home. I’m sure my Dad hoped the Catholic Diocese of Biloxi would give him a boy, but since he got two girls – me from the Catholics, my kid sister from the horribly named “Sellers” agency in Slidell – he taught us to tie knots, bait hooks, and not be afraid of gutting fish, using firearms, or lighting our own sparklers, bottle rockets, or Roman candles.
One year, Dad wanted to see what would happen if he put a string of M-80s in the mailbox. This, too, was the man who’d been banned as a child from returning to summer camp in Pass Christian because he and his brother dropped cherry bombs down the toilets, but I digress. In case you’re wondering, Rural Free Delivery post boxes don’t do well when pitted against M-80s. It was collapsed on one side and exploded on the other – but what FUN! I thought my Momma was going to explode, too, when she saw what we’d done.
One of our dearest family friends was Mr. Wilbur. He tuned pianos at the college where my Dad worked and, one summer when I was a teenager, he had a big tuning gig on the coast and was staying in the dorms at the University of Southern Mississippi’s Gulf Park campus in Long Beach to save him a daily commute from Hattiesburg. Working with Wilbur was my standard end-of-summer job. After working with the munchkins for a couple of weeks, I'd spend the rest of summer and early fall working for Wilbur. I have perfect pitch, and Dad couldn’t think of any better way for me to exploit that talent than working for a tuner. So, during the summer and early fall, I’d tour churches and farmhouses from Hattiesburg to Picayune, from Pass Christian to Hurley, learning the delicate art of being a piano technician. It’s a hobby I wish I’d turned into a real job, especially once I managed to overcome the “talent” of perfect pitch to become a decent tuner. I enjoy working with my hands, pulling up old, mis-treated pianos in a couple of meetings, repairing clicking and stuck keys and rusted pins that are part-in-parcel of owning a piano in the humid, salty air of the coast. That summer, we worked on a rich matron’s un-played concert Bosendorfer and little rickety Young Chang spinnets, but our biggest job was Mr. Wilbur’s extended thing at USM-Gulf Park. They had 12 Kawai uprights, two Steinway studio uprights, a Steinway concert grand, and a Steinway baby grand. The concert grand was new enough that it still smelled of lacquer and felt hardener, and my hands shook visibly as I played scales and wielded the tuning wrench over the pins.
Wilbur and Dad shared the same rather dangerous affinity for pyrotechnics, which when combined resulted in interesting explosions around the 4th and New Year's. For the 4th that year, we had a display that would've made Eugene Debs Hartke proud. Sometime that year, a Hattiesburg church had a catastrophic piano accident: The new Baldwin grand they purchased from Roseberry's Pianos was (gulp) dropped, and the case was so badly damaged that they ended up getting a new piano, I think. The bits that remained became part of Wilbur’s shop at his house in Hattiesburg until the summer, and he had the case with him in Long Beach, and after finishing the college, he pulled up in his big blue Suburban and called for Dad to come lend a hand, but since none of the people we’d seen that day needed anything large, I couldn't figure out what was going on. They unloaded that piano case right into the sand and he pulled out his tackle case with pliers, a drill, and string cutters, sitting it on the ground next to the case. We set old pins in the inside of the case, ran strings across, and wired all sorts of firecrackers to the strings. Then, well after dusk, we set the whole thing on fire - a piano shaped conflagration! It was gorgeous, and capped with one of Dad's favorites - the squawking chicken that shot fire out of its ass like eggs and hopped along the middle of the "piano" under an archway of sparklers.
We sat on the beach for hours, talking and singing, painting the sky with sparklers and a bunch of Dad’s chickens. We had a sieve box to rake up our explosive refuse and leave sand on the beach, and as the night wore on, we eventually raked up behind ourselves aided by a couple of big lanterns. We sat with our toes in the lukewarm flop of water that approximates “tide” in the Sound, and talked about the weather and told macabre stories of hurricanes gone by. Dad told the one about when, after Camille, when he and Mom were dating, they walked along the beach. Dad kicked up part of a kitchen chair, then a newel post or part of a bed frame, then a large hunk of what clearly used to be a comforter before deciding he didn’t want to find anything else on the beach after the biggest storm of his lifetime. Mr. Wilbur, who’d been through Betsey at his grandma’s house in Picayune, gave us all gooseflesh with his story about alligators and the dismembered hand he found under the shoo-fly. We watched the moon rise, slapped gnats and mosquitos, and two-stepped in the sand as Mom joined us and we sang anything we could come up with in lopsided four-part harmony.
I think, maybe, it was RubyR’s mention of two-stepping, but I dreamed, vividly, last night, that I was dancing on moonlit Long Beach with an old friend who smelled of Old Spice, Dri-Glide, and graphite, and with my Daddy, who I had to con into taking off his shoes so he wouldn’t break my toes.
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Previous liveblog ROV diaries:
Daily Kos Gulf Watchers ROV #196 - BP's Gulf Catastrophe - Gulf Watchers Overnight/peraspera
Daily Kos Gulf Watchers ROV #195 - BP's Gulf Catastrophe - Ekyprogressive
Daily Kos Gulf Watchers ROV #194 - BP's Gulf Catastrophe - CindyMax
Daily Kos Gulf Watchers ROV #193 - BP's Gulf Catastrophe - Kimberley
Daily Kos Gulf Watchers ROV #192 - BP's Gulf Catastrophe - Gulf Watchers Overnight/peraspera
Daily Kos Gulf Watchers ROV #191 - BP's Gulf Catastrophe - Yasuragi
Daily Kos Gulf Watchers ROV #190 - BP's Gulf Catastrophe - Twilight On The Beach Edition - Pam LaPier
Daily Kos Gulf Watchers ROV #189 - BP's Gulf Catastrophe - Yasuragi
Daily Kos Gulf Watchers ROV # 188 - BP's Gulf Catastrophe - Gulf Watchers Overnight/peraspera
Daily Kos Gulf Watchers ROV # 187 - BP's Gulf Catastrophe - Darryl House
Daily Kos Gulf Watchers ROV # 186 - BP's Gulf Catastrophe - khowell
Previous motherships and ROV's from this extensive live blog effort may be found here.
in the dark time we held vigil,
we held vigil against the night,
we raged against the storm,
we moved with the force of nature
to right a great wrong,
to howl like the wind,
to hold the line,
to renew an ancient vow,
a sacred purpose,
to recall to life the human spirit,
to safeguard that which is most holy to us,
to forge and reforge,
this, above all, to be true,
to awaken our greater nature,
to commune from the deepest regions of our soul,
to heal this realm, to heal our people,
to guard all life, to guard life,
for this generation,
and all to come,
this is why we hold vigil ~
~ ArthurPoet ~
| We Are Here |
| We are here. |
| We are watching. |
| Years from now, |
| if anyone asks, |
| we will tell them: |
| We were there. |
| |
| Maybe it will not matter. |
| Maybe nothing matters. |
| But if we throw up our hands now, |
| maybe someday, |
| years from now, |
| we will ask ourselves, |
| why did we not at least keep watch, |
| why did we not? |
| |
| Maybe someday, some of us |
| will talk with someone younger, |
| and tell of the time we watched. |
| Maybe that someone younger |
| will try harder next time, |
| will do more next time, |
| remembering |
| the time we watched. |
| |
| -- bigjacbigjacbigjac |
We're all stunned and horrified by this disaster. Huddling with good people to calculate the damage and monitor progress, have a laugh when we can, share the sorrow we feel, and learn a lot in the process... That's what I'm really here for.
This is how I best cope. And if it turns out to be a useful thing to others, then that's great.
Kimberley
This is where you want to be for discussion, worrying, tearing up, and caring for each other. It's also where you're welcome to be angry and scream and curse and cry and rant at the criminal negligence and greed that have brought us all together. Most importantly, though, it's where we can learn from those kossaks among us (I'll not name names for abject fear of leaving one of you out, but you know who you are.) who bring the light of knowledge - sometimes with heat, sometimes without it - and teach us about what's happening beneath our Gulf of Mexico. On a personal note, I'll ask you to please be kind to each other in our little boats. There's enough hurt going on outside without bringing it here. - khowell
Bandwidth Warning: NO IMAGES and NO VIDEOS. Readers who are on DIALUP will thank you!