Happy Earth Day, Panhandle Style, 2012

Virgil Caine is my name,
and I drove on the Danville train,
'Til so much cavalry came
and tore up the tracks again
--The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,
The Band

"O Oysters," said the Carpenter,
"You've had a pleasant run!
Shall we be trotting home again?'
But answer came there none--
And this was scarcely odd, because
They'd eaten every one
--The Walrus and the Carpenter,
Lewis Carrol

In the morning laughing happy fish heads
In the evening floating in the soup
Ask a fish head anything you want to
they wont answer they cant talk
--Fish Heads, Barnes and Barnes
___________________

Happy Earth Day, 2012. This weekend marks the second anniversary of the BP Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico. This will be a post of local concern, but the consequences ripple outwards.

The Panhandle of Florida doesn't have much to be proud of, but Apalachicola Bay oysters and scallops used to enjoy national renown; no more. A recent study showed 89 percent of post-spill specimens displayed the signs of metaplasia, a condition in which tissues are transformed in response to stress. Oysters suffering from the condition often have trouble reproducing, which could have detrimental repercussions for the species further up the food chain that depend on them (Gulf Oysters Full of Heavy Metals.)

The government study group will tell you not to worry. Don't believe them.

Because you won't see the shrimp without eyes or eye sockets or decay on their heads because the restaurant will kindly remove it for you. You won't see the eyeless fish or their fin rot, or the festering sores, because we don't like fins and fish heads, anyway, and the purveyors will kindly fillet the rotting innards of certain seafood, which is also being found off of our Gulf Coast (2 years later, fish sick near BP oil spill site.)


Accommodation can be made for the crabs lacking claws; they can just be sold as lump crab meat and no one will be the wiser that they, too, lacked eyes as well.

The AP toes a bureaucratic line, saying, "[t]he illnesses are not believed to pose any health threat to humans", and the lead of the federally-funded team Murawski (and former government adviser) says, "It's not a people issue, and people should not be concerned about fish entering the market." What does that final statement even mean? Of course it's a people issue, and of course we should be concerned if these fish enter the market!

How can they say "don't be concerned" with any certainty when they follow with, ". . . the immune systems of the fish were impaired by an unknown environmental stress or contamination." In addition to the oil, the dispersant Corexit is mutagenic; several generations of shrimp and small fish have spawned since the environmental disaster and their terrible deformities are heritable. Worse, we do not know the effects farther up the food chain.

Dahr Jamail at Al Jazeera has the story (Gulf Seafood Deformities Alarm Scientists), and it would not do it justice to condense the reportage; read it, and weep for the once lively Gulf fisheries. The refrain of scientists and fishermen alike is, "We've never seen anything like it" when referring to the terrible blight of the sea creatures in the region. Daily KOS has also covered it here: We've never seen anything like It.

Independent journalist Greg Palast is one of the few who has actually gone deep into this story since it happened. (I had the pleasure of speaking with Mr. Palast briefly tonight on the radio program of South Florida activist Rick Spisak, and Palast said he was preparing to bring his findings before Attorney General Holder; thanks for the heads-up, Rick.)

Palast's latest post on 4.19.12 -- "BP Cover-up 'They Knew'" -- tells his story of finding the same blowout protector failure in a BP rig blow up in the Caspian Sea in '08, two years before the Deepwater Horizon blowout, and for the same reasons. He found some of his materials in Wikileaks, and he went to Azerbaijan himself to follow the story. Vultures Picnic is his latest book on the dirty dealings surrounding the tragedy.

Everyone can do something to help preserve the earth. Become your own advocate and voice your concerns. Get involved, and don't listen when they tell you it's a "fish problem", not a human one. Maybe the wealthy ones can just rattle their jewelry, to borrow from John Lennon.

Bottom line: Don't eat them oysters.

Zombielaya

This is not a road
--Louisiana fish kill, Field & Stream (9.23.10)

Zombielaya (df.):

Cajun food to keep the undead dead,
made with contaminated gulf seafood

To believe it is to see it

Murdoch? Oh, well, he's gone on
to his great reward.
Yeah... yeah, they say he's in Florida somewhere.
--The Big Kahuna (1999)
__________________

You won't read much about it in the news (the BP oil spill is so yesterday), but Louisiana has just suffered a major fish kill. Field & Stream asks, "Is Massive Louisiana Fish Kill BP Related?" Naw, it couldn't be -- could it? Unfortunately, these disasters are messy, and lack for a discrete end point. Oil spills are a gift that keeps on giving.

Despite the impossibility of closure, BP's Macando well was officially declared "permanently killed" on 9.18.10 by Adm. Thad Allen "point man" for the incident. The WaPo reported "several clues indicated it had been done successfully."

"Allen said that the relief well lost drilling fluids, which was a sign it had broken through. The drill bit encountered extra resistance, indicating it had pierced the Macondo well's casing. And readings from the Macondo well's new blowout preventer also seemed to agree that something had changed far below the seafloor" (BP's Macondo well to be permanently "killed" by Saturday).

In our impossibly sketchy coverage of this spill, it is always a comfort to know that something has changed. One thing for sure that has changed since the well's kill is the directionality of hundreds of thousands of fish off the Louisiana coast who have decided to go belly up (Louisiana Seeks Cause of Massive Fish Kill.)

Says Parish President Billy Nungesser (R), who asked the state and federal governments to test the waters in the area, "We can't continue to see these fish kills." And Billy speaks more truth than he knows, for it's the seeing that's the damn thing. If the fish had only had the good manners to sink to the bottom, we mightn't have been bothered by this distressing news which does not accord with the sanguine government reports (or media non-reports).

The press reports of Mr. Obama's 27-hour visit to the Gulf in mid-August grated. No photographers or tv video crews were allowed to witness Obama's ballyhooed "swim the Gulf". The official line was that the White House didn't want to make the ladies swoon over photos of the president's thin, heaving, hairless chest.

This is absurd, as most presidents readily o.k. beach photos. It shows they are a man of the people, and none would do so more than a collection of photos of Obama and family frolicking in the polluted waters of the Gulf. After the fact, one solitary photo was released by an official White House photographer of the president up to his neck, with daughter Sasha in an indeterminate body of water.

The London Independent identified the swim as actually occurring at Alligator Point in St. Andrews Bay, well to the East of the spill zone. In any event, the official photo lacked any identifiers, like the name of the boat or shore-side signage. Nothing was evident in this photo aside from water and two people (minus the FLOTUS), which makes me doubt the sincerity of Obama's "personal assurances of (the) Gulf's safety." The AP would not publish the WH's handout photo.

I really can't blame Mr. Obama for not wanting to hang out at the Redneck Riviera, and he and the missus were soon off for their second trip this summer for 10 days in Bar Harbor, Maine. Even sans the oil, the Gulf Coast is not a very chic hangout. But the Apalachicola Bay did produce some of the country's best oysters and shrimp, and those days are gone.

Despite the massive fish kill, "Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, in coordination with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries, has ordered an emergency reopening of all fishing in 210 square miles of state waters west of Bayou Lafourche previously closed due to the BP oil spill. With today’s action, 95 percent of state waters are opened." Oysters are still verboten. One wonders why the rush to judgment? Methinks the governmental agencies doth protest too much.

Who knows -- maybe the agencies will also discover that the oil dispersant Corexit (whose presence is not being tested for in the fish flesh) is good for what ails you ("Corexit'll Correct It!"), and better living through chemistry will be more than just another fallow promise.

The Gulf fiasco -- "the worst ecological disaster in the nation's history" according to FSU Biological Oceanographer Ian McDonald -- has been dwarfed by other, more visible national dissipations. McDonald is an international expert on oil spills who estimated early on that the amount of oil spilling was at least five times BP estimates.

How much oil was actually spilled and how much remains is anyone's guess. The UK Telegraph reports 4.4 million barrels; the NYT, 4.9 million bbls. Researchers have found a 2-inch slime carpet on the ocean floor, and report, "It's kind of like a slime highway from the surface to the bottom" (Scientists Find Thick Layer of Oil on Seafloor.)

And what of the 22-mile, 3-mile-wide column of oil below the surface, and other such findings? The news stories conflict: Oil Spill Persists, Oil Plume is not Breaking Down Fast, Oil from spill not going away quickly.

But y'know, Halloween's fast approaching, and I've seen Thanksgiving tchotchkes in the stores, so there's plenty else to distract us before Christmas gets here.

[Cross-posted @ BigBrassBlog]

Bust a Cap

And he smote them hip and thigh
with a great slaughter: and he went down
and dwelt in the top of the rock Etam
--Judges 15:8

Tyger, Tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
--The Tyger, William Blake

After all, we are not children.
It's time we planned our life.
--Moshe Dayan
________________

These are frightful times, we are told. Apocalyptical, for some. How to survive? Hunker down and trust those in power have got your six is the answer for most people. And the power we seem to most trust is delivered by those who co-opt the posture and jargon of the military. Militarism has infiltrated almost every sphere of activity today.

The "Houlihan" olive drab fatigues are the woman's best-selling pants this season (Reporting for Duty, the Houlihan), and everything red-white-and-blue is always a good seller. It seems like most t.v. shows revolve around the police or military hunting down the relentless menace.

And look at the above images from the latest Brownell's Police catalog. Behold the Darth Vadar look-alike with his tricked-out black rifle and the assault team gracing the cover -- the only friendly character is the dog.

The police shifted a while back from the old "protect-and-serve" paradigm to being paramilitary organizations. In some cases, their role has been further removed to performance art, as in the case of the Detroit Special Reaction Team team which partnered with a television crew to film their May dynamic entry gone wrong, in which a 7-year-old girl was killed after a flashbang grenade landed on the sofa where she was sleeping.

Retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, supervisor of the Gulf oil spill, has been speaking of the hopeful moment when the "well is killed" (BP aims to deal well a death blow.) What -- is everyone a Samurai today? An oil well is an inanimate object, foundering or not. One cannot "kill" that which does not live.

Perhaps this is the result of too much Twilight, vampires and zombies. Since these creations walk and talk on-screen, that must mean their menace lurks amongst us. Invasion of the Body Snatchers was the penultimate trope, for who is to say they do not walk among us? We all have to sleep sometime, and who hasn't wondered precisely who is that person sleeping next to us?

Yesterday we were told the oil has gone "rogue", as in the rogue oil will be "bullheaded" back down into its source rock (bad oil). Sorry --elephants may go rogue, but oil cannot. Oil is a blob, a slick -- it covers and smothers passively, and gets pumped into tanks -- but it cannot go rogue. Going rogue may be the prerogative of Sarah Palin, but never an animate chemical, which is a life form several layers below that of La Palin.

Early reports of the gusher said it had gone "asymmetric", implying that the oil in its well-behaved state had a symmetric structure. In fact, the media was borrowing from the military jargon, and we all know (if we don't understand) that asymmetry has something to do with terrorism and warfare.

We should get a grip, and that begins which reifying our terms. Not everything is out to get us, despite the magazine articles which trumpet the killer microbes on our kitchen countertops, killer fat and killer obsessive-compulsions.

We may all be vying for limited resources and our little niche, but the confrontational military model might not be the one most likely to ensure survival.

--Jim & Lisa

Primitives Are Us

It is better to offer no excuse
than a bad one
--George Washington

"If seven maids with seven mops
Swept it for half a year.
Do you suppose," the Walrus said,
"That they could get it clear?"
"I doubt it," said the Carpenter,
And shed a bitter tear
--The Walrus and the Carpenter,
Lewis Carroll

It takes some cheek to go and use a sunflower
logo when your business is dirty oil
--Ben Stewart, Greenpeace activist
_________________

Sunday homily: Totemism

Yesterday and today there was a heavy haze over Tallahassee, and I am not the only one who thought there was a faint whiff of petroleum in the air. We are only 30 miles from the coast. But of course, such group sensory phenomena are known to happen.

But now word comes that Tony Hayward, that uppity Brit, will step down in October due to his monstrous handling of the debacle. And that will slake some of our anger, as though his being had anything to do with the catastrophic event. While non-Californians laugh at Burning Man, Mr. Hayward will be our Burning Man.

Why do these simplistic, symbolic gestures seem so comforting and necessary to people? It is like the razing of the Amish school post school-shooting or Abu Ghraib, or the current demands for the resignation of the Duisburg mayor following the deaths at the Love Festival: These people or structures are not the cause of the problems; how can their removal effect their repair? Resources and manpower are finite quantities. Every demolition or firing is a loss of materiel.

Last week a study on the dispersants used in the Gulf of Mexico (Corexit = "corrects it" -- the arrogance!) claims they "do not seem to disrupt marine life." Of course, the tests were done on a cells in a petri dish vs. real, live animals, so the results should be taken with a heaping serving of caution.

But we like to be told things will be well. People are esp. sympathetic to the plights of helpless animals, so it plays well to lessen their mental anguish, such as it is.

Estimates of how much petroleum has poured into the Gulf vary widely. BP's party line escalated slowly from 1,000 barrels per day to 5,000, then ten thousand or more, as other agencies began to surveil the flow. Using private scientific estimates, the rate of flow ranged from 20,000 to 80,000+ barrels per day. Internal BP documents estimate as much as 100,000 barrels per day.

Using 50,000 barrels per day as a mean, this would indicate 4,300,000 barrels of oil flowed into the Gulf over the almost 3 month span of the incident. "The Gulf of Mexico has been inundated with the equivalent of more than an Exxon Valdez-size spill each week" (Research on Gulf oil spill shouldn't take a backseat to litigation) and the 1989 Valdez spill has devastated Prince William Sound for decades.

Three months of living in the newly-toxic Gulf is not enough time to claim no effects from dispersants. Is anyone that gullible? There is one thing I do not like, and that is an outright lie. Corexit was banned in Britain for killing the limpet population. Do not tell me this toxin, dispersed with protective suits, is benign.

I lived in Central Florida, where a major lake (Apopka) was slowly killed due to pesticide and fertilizer runoff from the surrounding muck farms.

Lake Apopka was once a fisherman's paradise in the mid-20th century, but no more. The lake is the subject of much research, as it is here the androgynous frogs live. Two-headed frogs; male frogs with female reproductive systems. The ramifications are broad, as Lake Apopka was the headwaters of the Chain of Lakes, so many other lakes were also poisoned as well.

Yesterday congressional investigators"railed" against the Coast Guard and BP for their over-use of the dispersants:

"The investigators said the U.S. Coast Guard routinely approved BP requests to use thousands of gallons of the chemical per day to break up the oil in the Gulf, despite a federal directive to use the dispersant rarely. The Coast Guard approved 74 waivers over a 48-day period after the Environmental Protection Agency order, according to documents reviewed by the investigators. Only in a few cases did the government scale back BP's request.

"Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., released a letter Saturday that said instead of complying with the EPA restriction, 'BP often carpet bombed the ocean with these chemicals and the Coast Guard allowed them to do it'" (Congressmen: Too Much Dispersant Used in Oil Spill).

Of course, we are told the Gulf of Mexico Has Long Been Dumping Site, and other stories to mitigate our concern. We have heard the routine before from other chemical giants like Dow and Monsanto.

But it turned out the stuff in the orange barrels used in Vietnam wasn't that benign, after all.

_________________


There's still time to make an entry in the "Define Patriotism" contest! Win nifty prizes by saying what patriotism means to you. Yer a bunch of military guys (mostly), so you ought to have an idea, right?

Play HERE.

[Co-posted @ Big Brass Blog]

Put a Lid on It

George Costanza with the Titleist fix

We are in the same boat, and we're seasick
--G.K. Chesterton

But I dillied and dallied, dallied and I dillied
Lost me way and don't know where to roam
--My Old Man, Marie Lloyd

Right now, there are 600 Titleists that I got
at the driving range in the trunk of my car.
Why don't we drive out to Rockaway and
hit 'em...into the ocean?
--Kramer, Seinfeld (The Marine Biologist)
______________

What do you do when you have a lot of toxic fluid spewing forth from a pipe sticking out of the ocean's floor? Well, BP really hasn't any idea, so it's borrowing from semi-analogous situations in terrestrial life.

First it was the LEGO-like roof or diaphragm non-solution, if you will. No go -- the flow was too incessant. Could be 5,000 barrels a day, other models say up to 80,000 barrels (Giant Plumes of Oil Forming Under the Gulf.) No way to know because when oceanographers from Wood's Hole offered this week to give a definitive measure, BP turned them back saying it would not affect their efforts anyway.

Yesterday it was the sippy-cup solution (a tube surrounded by a stopper), which Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said had run into indeterminate problems (Latest Effort to Stop Leak Hits Snag). Clearly, BP is grasping at straws.

Reports today say the pipe part of the sippy cup was successfully inserted into the pipe on the ocean's floor, but BP says there is no way to know how much oil is being sucked up. "At optimum this pipe will suck up 75% from the most significant tube, leaking 85% of the oil." This means if everything is perfect, this "fix" will only suck up ~64% of the oil being released.

Using the 25,000 barrel per day figure as a charitable mid point between what BP says is being released and computer modeling, that means 9,125 barrels per day will continue to flood the Gulf. As the final fix (another well) cannot be completed for at least two months, that means this spill will still exceed that of the Exxon Valdez sometime next month. (Even at BP's lower estimate of 5,000 barrels/day, their fix leaves 1,813 barrels escaping daily, still exceeding their cheery initial estimates of 1,000 barrels per day.)

The spill has also most likely entered the loop current, the largest in the Gulf, which will take the oil around to the Eastern US coast.

The "Junk Shot" is next: "The method involves pumping odds and ends like plastic cubes, knotted rope, even golf balls — Titleists or whatever, BP isn’t saying — into the blowout preventer, the safety device atop the well" (Junk Shot is Next Step). This one is straight out of a Seinfeld episode, when the hapless Kramer lodged a Tilteist in a whale's blow hole providing a glory moment for opportunist George, who feigns being a marine biologist.

It is all a bunch of schmegegge. It is closing the barn door after the horse is out. It's going to couple's counseling after you've been loathing each other for years. It's just not gonna work. And nothing will set the Gulf back to where it was a month ago. This "accident" will foul our ecosystem for decades or more.

The booms or dams which are set up in hopes of holding the oil offshore are notoriously flimsy, and a friend tells me some are already collapsing in the wind. It is like using a condom after an ejaculation (Officials' forecast grim about massive oil spill), and calling the resultant pregnancy a "miracle baby" after that one unfortuitous shot.

It is just as wrong as Texas Governor Rick Perry's announcement that the spill was an "act of god" -- it is nothing of the sort. It is humans screwing up as they are wont to do, and looking for a justification. There is none; in both cases the buck stops with Piss Poor Prior Planning.

BP has also been using tons of chemical dispersants both on the ocean floor and on the surface. This deep use has never been done before, and the chemical manufacturers will not release their composition citing proprietary interests (In Gulf of Mexico, Chemicals Under Scrutiny.)

The main dispersants applied so far, from a product line called Corexit, had their approval rescinded in Britain a decade ago due to limpet die off, and the bacteria that feed off the dispersants (as well as the oil) deplete the oxygen in the Gulf. One report says "a few countries forbid their use because their long-term effects are somewhat uncertain" (Methane Bubble May Have Triggered Oil Rig Blast), but that is a squidgy statement -- something is either certain, or not.

It was reported today that giants plumes of oil lie throughout the Gulf -- too numerous to count. Some are up to 10 miles long and three miles wide. The oxygen content around the plumes is reduced by 30%.

Recent hearings in Washington and Louisiana "uncovered a checklist of unseen breakdowns on largely unregulated aspects of well safety that apparently contributed to the April 20 blowout aboard the Deepwater Horizon: a leaky cement job, a loose hydraulic fitting, a dead battery. Company officials insist what caused the accident is not yet clear" (BP's Next Try to Stem Oil Gusher: Smaller Tube.)

Unseen, but not UNFORESEEN. I understand the need to offset journalistic liability, but it seems we would be on safe footing to declare that these failures DID contribute, though the degree of culpability assigned to each failure is a guessing game.

A tragedy has occurred due to greed and lax oversight. Where have we heard that before? An accident at the deepest oils well yet drilled should have been an anticipated eventuality, and every protection should have been in place.

Instead, we are fed the lie that this was "inconceivable". Just as with the Miracle Baby, it is all quite conceivable, and preventable. Humans are so good at self-deception.

UPDATE (5.17.10):

AP reports:

"BP PLC chief operating officer Doug Suttles said Monday on NBC's "Today" that a mile-long tube was funneling a little more than 42,000 gallons of crude a day from a blown-out well into a tanker ship.

"That would be about a fifth of the 210,000 gallons the company and the U.S. Coast Guard have estimated are gushing out each day, though scientists who have studied video of the leak say it could be much bigger and even BP acknowledges there's no way to know for sure how much oil there is.

Speaking of the uncounted oil plumes discovered this weekend, Samantha Joye, a professor of marine sciences at the University of Georgia says:

"The discovery of these plumes argues that a lot more oil and gas is coming out of that well every day, and I think everybody has gotten that fact except BP," she said (Worry that Gulf Oil Spreading Into Major Current.)