Probably true. Situation is beyond fucked, beyond belief.
My sister just returned from The Gulf. She sent me a message on my birthday that said that what she witnessed with her own eyes was far and beyond anything she could have imagined, saying that after the magnitude of what she came across, she's convinced that "Gulf coastal life in the Southern United States is over." And the Media blackout is just a kick in the balls. From her site:
(the) media blackout is causing people to have no idea about the human scale of this catastrophe. It's abstract until you are literally on the beach and then, from over a hundred miles away from the gusher site, I stood on a beach and saw oil as far as I could see in either direction. This was in Waveland, MS, where I planned to go BEFORE the beach was closed and people were still fishing and swimming... but oil showed up before me. Oil in all different forms was in the soil across the street from the beach, buried under the sand on the beach, on top of the sand, on everything that was on the beach, the booms, the docks, the seawalls; visible oil "patties" ranged from smaller than a dime and bigger than at least a yard across, oil was on top of the water with a visible sheen, oil was in the water showing up with bands of brown clouds. Oiled clouds of minute debris floated in the water and that looked black, as opposed to brown.
Clean up crews were working with no respirators. Photos can't describe the problem with this: they are picking up oil that's melting in the sun and there's oil in every direction. It's not like someone poured motor oil on the beach, there's many forms of oil and all the forms of oil are cooking in the heat. And the clean up crew is breathing that in. Now, maybe that's ok, what the hell do I know about breathing in hot oil... but it seemed to me like respirators should be standard for the people who are working on the beach all day.
Shit is incredibly fucked up... like apparently at this point completely irreparable. There's all this talk about "Methane Extinction Bubbles" and all that crap which may or may not just be science fiction. Dealing with absolute FACT, shit is apparently done for good down there. This is out Chernobyl, but to a scale that dwarfs the Russian disaster,
She was there, all in the mix. She has a really amazing talent for getting people to open themselves up to her. So while CNN was completely denied access to so many sites, my sister, the 40 year old Jewish lesbian anarchist from South Philadelphia, was given access to Coast Guard flights over a massive stretch of The Gulf, as well as a ton of restricted inland areas in Louisiana.
And with what she saw, she tells me it's a wrap. She's not a fatalist in any sense, quite the opposite in fact.
But it's over, dudes. Biggest fuck-up in human history.
Clean up crews were working with no respirators. Photos can't describe the problem with this: they are picking up oil that's melting in the sun and there's oil in every direction. It's not like someone poured motor oil on the beach, there's many forms of oil and all the forms of oil are cooking in the heat. And the clean up crew is breathing that in. Now, maybe that's ok, what the hell do I know about breathing in hot oil... but it seemed to me like respirators should be standard for the people who are working on the beach all day.[/i]
I can't deal with the entirety of this without collapsing into depression, so I'll address this one aspect.
First of all, doing this work in the hot sun with a respirator on would be torture - it would fill up with sweat every 30 seconds and that's not an exaggeration.
As a former construction project manager with 200 or so guys on my crew I can tell you that it was very hard to get dudes to wear dust masks, much less respirators. They are uncomfortable, and don't underestimate the macho factor in these situations - it's huge. I literally had shouting arguments with dudes twice my size who flat out refused to wear anything while they were huffing plaster/silica dust etc.
Right now NYC is looking at huge lawsuits for 9/11 responders with respiratory problems. Well, the other day there was a report on this on television and it showed extensive footage of the crews at work - NOBODY out of the hundreds of workers I saw was wearing a respirator, much less a dust mask. There they were working on smoking heaps of debris in clouds of toxic dust and they were just breathing it all in. Thing is, I know that they were distributing masks, but the macho dudes refused to wear them and now they're suing for mega millions. The same thing will inevitably happen with the Gulf workers also.
HarveyCanal"a distraction from my main thesis." 13,234 Posts
The Earth will rightly repair itself, just not necessarily within our own lifetimes. There is no better filter than marshlands, and while they will indeed be fucked for quite some time, they will eventually sort this shit out. Not saying this isn't a catastrophe, but I'm trying to find some optimism within all of this peril.
is this fucked up situation already halfway fixed now?
they say the leak is fixed but not how they did it, is it still just the cap? was the second relief well already successful? i dont trust all this quiet news. i instead would have expected some big "we BP, ??hm, HERO BP & HERO US Gov. together fixed all this crazy mess for all you oil consuming human beings, yeah, we did our job to save the nature" tam tam bah bah bah...
is this fucked up situation already halfway fixed now?
they say the leak is fixed but not how they did it, is it still just the cap? was the second relief well already successful? i dont trust all this quiet news. i instead would have expected some big "we BP, ??hm, HERO BP & HERO US Gov. together fixed all this crazy mess for all you oil consuming human beings, yeah, we did our job to save the nature" tam tam bah bah bah...
Honestly, I don't think that's going to happen. After several PR blunders I suspect they have experts telling them to tone it down. Plus, they won't know for a while if this is actually going to work and it could backfire in a big way.
What's bothering me is this whole 'the oil has disappeared!' BS. The dispersants were used to keep it thousands of feet down where it will be very hard to observe, but it will be out there like a snake waiting to strike when currents shift or a hurricane stirs things up. They would have you believe that it evaporated, was eaten by bacteria or magically 'dispersed', but it hasn't.
is this fucked up situation already halfway fixed now?
they say the leak is fixed but not how they did it, is it still just the cap? was the second relief well already successful? i dont trust all this quiet news. i instead would have expected some big "we BP, ??hm, HERO BP & HERO US Gov. together fixed all this crazy mess for all you oil consuming human beings, yeah, we did our job to save the nature" tam tam bah bah bah...
Honestly, I don't think that's going to happen. After several PR blunders I suspect they have experts telling them to tone it down. Plus, they won't know for a while if this is actually going to work and it could backfire in a big way.
What's bothering me is this whole 'the oil has disappeared!' BS. The dispersants were used to keep it thousands of feet down where it will be very hard to observe, but it will be out there like a snake waiting to strike when currents shift or a hurricane stirs things up. They would have you believe that it evaporated, was eaten by bacteria or magically 'dispersed', but it hasn't.
2nd.
They had the science correspondent on NPR this morning explaning about 3/4 burned, evaporated or was eaten by bacteria. Hard to believe.
Still just 1/4 makes it the worse single spill of all time.
There will be no celebrations.
I think the key word there is YET.
We haven't had to time to feel the full catastrophic effects of this disaster.
One that has been shrouded in media secrecy and will no doubt be felt for decades to come.
Comments
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/dcnow/20...baby-drill.html
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2010/07/you-are-not-authorized-to-see-these.html
Any strutter in the area of the shorelines got any stories?
Probably true. Situation is beyond fucked, beyond belief.
My sister just returned from The Gulf. She sent me a message on my birthday that said that what she witnessed with her own eyes was far and beyond anything she could have imagined, saying that after the magnitude of what she came across, she's convinced that "Gulf coastal life in the Southern United States is over." And the Media blackout is just a kick in the balls. From her site:
(the) media blackout is causing people to have no idea about the human scale of this catastrophe. It's abstract until you are literally on the beach and then, from over a hundred miles away from the gusher site, I stood on a beach and saw oil as far as I could see in either direction. This was in Waveland, MS, where I planned to go BEFORE the beach was closed and people were still fishing and swimming... but oil showed up before me. Oil in all different forms was in the soil across the street from the beach, buried under the sand on the beach, on top of the sand, on everything that was on the beach, the booms, the docks, the seawalls; visible oil "patties" ranged from smaller than a dime and bigger than at least a yard across, oil was on top of the water with a visible sheen, oil was in the water showing up with bands of brown clouds. Oiled clouds of minute debris floated in the water and that looked black, as opposed to brown.
Clean up crews were working with no respirators. Photos can't describe the problem with this: they are picking up oil that's melting in the sun and there's oil in every direction. It's not like someone poured motor oil on the beach, there's many forms of oil and all the forms of oil are cooking in the heat. And the clean up crew is breathing that in. Now, maybe that's ok, what the hell do I know about breathing in hot oil... but it seemed to me like respirators should be standard for the people who are working on the beach all day.
See more at her site: http://zoestrauss.blogspot.com/
Shit is incredibly fucked up... like apparently at this point completely irreparable. There's all this talk about "Methane Extinction Bubbles" and all that crap which may or may not just be science fiction. Dealing with absolute FACT, shit is apparently done for good down there. This is out Chernobyl, but to a scale that dwarfs the Russian disaster,
The CNN video is so crazy about not being allowed to take photos in public space.
And with what she saw, she tells me it's a wrap. She's not a fatalist in any sense, quite the opposite in fact.
But it's over, dudes. Biggest fuck-up in human history.
I can't deal with the entirety of this without collapsing into depression, so I'll address this one aspect.
First of all, doing this work in the hot sun with a respirator on would be torture - it would fill up with sweat every 30 seconds and that's not an exaggeration.
As a former construction project manager with 200 or so guys on my crew I can tell you that it was very hard to get dudes to wear dust masks, much less respirators. They are uncomfortable, and don't underestimate the macho factor in these situations - it's huge. I literally had shouting arguments with dudes twice my size who flat out refused to wear anything while they were huffing plaster/silica dust etc.
Right now NYC is looking at huge lawsuits for 9/11 responders with respiratory problems. Well, the other day there was a report on this on television and it showed extensive footage of the crews at work - NOBODY out of the hundreds of workers I saw was wearing a respirator, much less a dust mask. There they were working on smoking heaps of debris in clouds of toxic dust and they were just breathing it all in. Thing is, I know that they were distributing masks, but the macho dudes refused to wear them and now they're suing for mega millions. The same thing will inevitably happen with the Gulf workers also.
http://www.wjhg.com/home/headlines/98295519.html
before she hops on the plane to Maine for vacation number three.
they say the leak is fixed but not how they did it, is it still just the cap? was the second relief well already successful? i dont trust all this quiet news. i instead would have expected some big "we BP, ??hm, HERO BP & HERO US Gov. together fixed all this crazy mess for all you oil consuming human beings, yeah, we did our job to save the nature" tam tam bah bah bah...
post some good recent articles please!
Honestly, I don't think that's going to happen. After several PR blunders I suspect they have experts telling them to tone it down. Plus, they won't know for a while if this is actually going to work and it could backfire in a big way.
What's bothering me is this whole 'the oil has disappeared!' BS. The dispersants were used to keep it thousands of feet down where it will be very hard to observe, but it will be out there like a snake waiting to strike when currents shift or a hurricane stirs things up. They would have you believe that it evaporated, was eaten by bacteria or magically 'dispersed', but it hasn't.
2nd.
They had the science correspondent on NPR this morning explaning about 3/4 burned, evaporated or was eaten by bacteria. Hard to believe.
Still just 1/4 makes it the worse single spill of all time.
There will be no celebrations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exxon_Valdez_oil_spill
We haven't had to time to feel the full catastrophic effects of this disaster.
One that has been shrouded in media secrecy and will no doubt be felt for decades to come.