cool66616 wrote:

cool66616 wrote:NEW ORLEANS | It took almost five years for the flooding of New Orleans post-Katrina to be nationally referred to as a massive failure of engineering rather than a storm. And that was by a fictional character in "Treme." How long it will take to remove the word "spill" from the description of the BP Deepwater Horizon rig explosion is anybody's guess. Possibly it will become known as a leak instead of a spill after millions of gallons of oil flow from the ocean floor all summer.

A spill has a finite amount of oil, but what has happened here is that a shutoff valve failed after the Deepwater Horizon rig collapsed. Now 11 workers are missing and presumed dead. The first coating of oil will probably hit Venice today. You can already smell it in parts of New Orleans. Dr. LuAnn White, a toxicologist at Tulane University, told WWL that people with asthma, emphysema or other respiratory problems may need to stay indoors.

Watching a slow-motion disaster, with business and government pointing the finger at each other and volunteers being asked to pick up the slack, triggers memories of the years after the levees failed. The rig failure has seeped into our consciousness already. Eating seafood at Jazzfest reminds you that fishermen have been given permission to re-open the season and harvest shrimp before the oil gets to shore. That has never happened before.

This disaster will affect the rest of the nation from the seafood industry to wildlife to the already endangered wetlands. There's talk of a controlled burn of the oil on the surface of the water, but that can't succeed before the oil begins coming ashore. No matter what happens, we are in for one of the worst U.S. environmental disasters on record. All of this is in the face of the herculean Gulf Coast recovery efforts after Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Gustav.

Rep. Charlie Melancon has said on the Huffington Post, "The oil spill presents a very serious threat to the fragile ecosystems that support Louisiana's oyster, shrimp, and fishing industries -- a major source of jobs and a huge part of the economy here in southeast Louisiana. Regardless of how many barrels of oil are leaking every hour, the oil sheen seems endless on the water. We know that weather conditions are pushing oil north toward the coastal wetlands near Venice, LA -- and projections are that it may come ashore as early as this evening. You can see from the air the massive "booming" operation trying to contain the spill. The effort now is to pull these booms by boat to block oil from reaching the most sensitive areas of our coast."

The sheen seems endless, and that's from the Congressman who has flown over and seen it. No sheen estimates are credible right now since the worst case scenario has already been surpassed several times. I'm calling it a sheen because it has to be referred to as something. Maybe linking it to celebrity Charlie Sheen will get the nation to pay attention and help.

Some members of Congress have launched investigations into the cause of rig failure, but Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu has said that the sheen shouldn't "be used inappropriately" to halt President Obama's recent push for expansion of offshore drilling. Landrieu's brother Mitch becomes the Mayor on Monday and I'm waiting to see what he'll have to say about the BP disaster.

"We have some of the greatest science minds available," said Ayana McIntosh-Lee on PBS of installing a blowout preventer. It would seem that the blowout has already happened, so she's talking about the broken shutoff valve. It is high time we started calling things what they are. This is a massive engineering failure and any attempt to mask our outrage as politicizing disaster is the same information warfare we've gone through for almost five years post Katrina. Watch for who speaks out on saving our environment from the oil sheen of historic proportions. Then watch for who can't.

http://media.al.com/mobile-press-register/photo/dauphin-island-birds-may-2-2010jpg-5c5515fbca4bbe9a_large.jpg
Pelicans, terns and cormorants rest on the north jetty at Billy Goat Hole on Dauphin Island on Sunday, May 2, 2010. Sporadic reports of birds being found coated with oil have already surfaced off the Louisiana coast, which hasn't yet seen the worst of the spill make landfall.

cool66616 wrote:NEW ORLEANS | It took almost five years for the flooding of New Orleans post-Katrina to be nationally referred to as a massive failure of engineering rather than a storm. And that was by a fictional character in "Treme." How long it will take to remove the word "spill" from the description of the BP Deepwater Horizon rig explosion is anybody's guess. Possibly it will become known as a leak instead of a spill after millions of gallons of oil flow from the ocean floor all summer.

A spill has a finite amount of oil, but what has happened here is that a shutoff valve failed after the Deepwater Horizon rig collapsed. Now 11 workers are missing and presumed dead. The first coating of oil will probably hit Venice today. You can already smell it in parts of New Orleans. Dr. LuAnn White, a toxicologist at Tulane University, told WWL that people with asthma, emphysema or other respiratory problems may need to stay indoors.

Watching a slow-motion disaster, with business and government pointing the finger at each other and volunteers being asked to pick up the slack, triggers memories of the years after the levees failed. The rig failure has seeped into our consciousness already. Eating seafood at Jazzfest reminds you that fishermen have been given permission to re-open the season and harvest shrimp before the oil gets to shore. That has never happened before.

This disaster will affect the rest of the nation from the seafood industry to wildlife to the already endangered wetlands. There's talk of a controlled burn of the oil on the surface of the water, but that can't succeed before the oil begins coming ashore. No matter what happens, we are in for one of the worst U.S. environmental disasters on record. All of this is in the face of the herculean Gulf Coast recovery efforts after Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Gustav.

Rep. Charlie Melancon has said on the Huffington Post, "The oil spill presents a very serious threat to the fragile ecosystems that support Louisiana's oyster, shrimp, and fishing industries -- a major source of jobs and a huge part of the economy here in southeast Louisiana. Regardless of how many barrels of oil are leaking every hour, the oil sheen seems endless on the water. We know that weather conditions are pushing oil north toward the coastal wetlands near Venice, LA -- and projections are that it may come ashore as early as this evening. You can see from the air the massive "booming" operation trying to contain the spill. The effort now is to pull these booms by boat to block oil from reaching the most sensitive areas of our coast."

The sheen seems endless, and that's from the Congressman who has flown over and seen it. No sheen estimates are credible right now since the worst case scenario has already been surpassed several times. I'm calling it a sheen because it has to be referred to as something. Maybe linking it to celebrity Charlie Sheen will get the nation to pay attention and help.

Some members of Congress have launched investigations into the cause of rig failure, but Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu has said that the sheen shouldn't "be used inappropriately" to halt President Obama's recent push for expansion of offshore drilling. Landrieu's brother Mitch becomes the Mayor on Monday and I'm waiting to see what he'll have to say about the BP disaster.

"We have some of the greatest science minds available," said Ayana McIntosh-Lee on PBS of installing a blowout preventer. It would seem that the blowout has already happened, so she's talking about the broken shutoff valve. It is high time we started calling things what they are. This is a massive engineering failure and any attempt to mask our outrage as politicizing disaster is the same information warfare we've gone through for almost five years post Katrina. Watch for who speaks out on saving our environment from the oil sheen of historic proportions. Then watch for who can't.