Booms Away Thursday: July 22 BP Oil Spill Update

1. Oilcast.

No real change from yesterday's oilcast. As NOAA continues to forecast, prevailing winds for the next three days will be "ENE/NE at 10-15 kts" and the "leading edge" of the oil lake poisoning the Gulf of Mexico will continue "to move north towards the Chandeleur Islands and northwestward towards the Mississippi Delta."

Louisiana State University's Coastal Studies Institute graphically depicts this over the next five days (click above), showing relatively low surf and light winds over Pensacola coastal waters.

2. Tropical Depression.

Yesterday morning, as we wrote, NHC ranked the stormy disturbance in the Caribbean known as "97L" as having a 70 percent chance of becoming a tropical storm or hurricane. Throughout the ensuing daylight hours, however, they lowered the chances to 60 and then 50 percent.

This morning, we were back to 70 percent. (Click left.) The center of the disturbance was about a thousand miles southeast of Pensacola this morning.

Just before noon, the storm officially became a "tropical depression." It has--

developed a surface circulation and enough organized convection to be classified as a tropical depression. The depression is sheared at this time and its center is located on the southwest side of a cyclonically curved convective band. The shear appears to be relaxing a little...however...as indicated by the motion of the high clouds on high resolution images. The cyclone is still interacting with a strong westward-moving upper low to the west. This pattern would only allow the depression to strengthen a little as indicated in the official forecast...but this forecast is uncertain. In fact... none of the models show significant intensification.

A hurricane hunter was scheduled to take a closer look at it this afternoon, which NHC expects will help determine whether the depression has become Tropical Storm Bonnie.

3. Booms Away.

Yesterday at mid-day worries over the storm caused Florida officials to order the removal of "Tier 3" booms previously installed by local governments. Later the same day, the Unified Command ordered the dismantling of federally-authorized Tier 1 and Tier 2 booms as well.

Jamie Page reports on all this for the Pensacola News Journal ["Oil Booms Removed for Storm"]:

About 47,000 feet of boom already has been removed from Escambia and Santa Rosa County waters since Tuesday, said Brooke Thorington, spokeswoman for the Joint Information Center in Mobile.
* * **
Not all boom is being removed; only boom in navigable waterways, environmentally sensitive areas, and safe harbor areas where boats in distress may need to go during a storm, [Brooke] Thorington said. Any additional boom to be removed will depend on the forecast.* * *

The boom that is removed, and any associated equipment, will be temporarily stored in a secure location to protect it from weather-related damage and to protect fragile coastline from impacts caused by dislodged boom.

If you're interested in the numbers, Page has them. "BP deployed about 481,000 feet of Tier 1 and 2 boom along the most sensitive areas of Florida's coast" and "316,261 feet of Tier 3 boom" which was added and now will be removed by local governments "from Escambia all the way to Franklin County."

The boom is being removed by, among others, fishermen and "boaters with the Vessels of Opportunity program" as photo journalist Gary McCracken documents today. According to a state Department of Environmental Protection spokeswoman, "After the tropical activity passes, should further oil spill impacts be projected, officials will redeploy the boom."

4. Oil Pollution as a Growth Industry.

Consider this: all the millions upon tens of millions of dollars BP and local governments are expending to lay out new boom, take it up again, re-deploy it later, skim the oil, reimburse local businesses for tourism losses, etc. etc. etc. -- all of it eventually will make its way into calculations of the Gross National Product.

Yes, it will help to show economic growth in these "unusually uncertain times." But is it really "economic growth" when we commit vast sums of money to polluting the Earth and then spend more vast sums trying to clean up the mess we've made?

Some Louisiana residents seem to think so. Yesterday in Lafayette, Louisiana -- the heart of the Gulf Coast oil drilling industry -- "thousands" rallied to demand more deepwater drilling in the Gulf. Can you believe it? They want to risk repeating this catastrophe!

The gathering was political, of course. "The rally... featured speeches from elected leaders, along with representatives from the oil, restaurant and seafood industries."

Lt. Gov. Scott Angelle served as master of ceremonies and fired up an already lively crowd, proclaiming that “It is time to quit punishing innocent American workers to achieve some unrealistic political agenda.”

As if Angelle, himself, doesn't have an even more "unrealistic political agenda."

Just yesterday, we were speaking with an academic expert on the Gulf of Mexico who lives in Louisiana. He is beside himself with fury over the response of Governor Bobby Jindal, Angelle, and other politicians to the ongoing devastation of the state's coastal habitat.

"We’re in the middle of a war to defend our way of life,” Jindal speechified yesterday.

And that's the problem, our friend says. Instead of leading the way to develop industries founded on clean solar energy, which he says could create as many or more jobs in the state, Louisiana's present political leadership is trying to hang on to the old way that "is destroying the globe." Our friend explained:

Jindal is making a big deal out of building up barrier islands. Unfortunately, the media buys it. What he's really doing is dredging up polluted sediments from past mistakes by the industry and the Corps of Engineers and spreading them all over the coast. In one instance I've seen, Jindal created a mile and a half of nothing but polluted rubble. It's insane.

If the BP oil spill demonstrates anything, it is that we can no longer allow a single state, nation, or industry to preserve "a way of life" that is killing the planet. When that way of life risks poisoning the Gulf of Mexico and destroying the chain of life in our oceans, we need to find new political and business leaders who have the foresight and fortitude to set us on the path to a newer, more sustainable way of life.

5. Academic Free-for-All.

Academics like our friend may not be popular with the pols, but they're in high demand by oil industry corporations -- and by victims who are hoping to get proper compensation for the losses BP has caused them.

We've previously made light about the rush to monopolize expert witnesses. But, really, it's no laughing matter.

Ben Raines of the Mobile Register is the lead reporter in the nation on this subject for the moment. [See "BP Buys Up Gulf Scientists for Legal Defense, Roiling Academic Community," July 16.] Travis Griggs is out in front on the Florida university angle.

Last week, Raines reported:

For the last few weeks, BP has been offering signing bonuses and lucrative pay to prominent scientists from public universities around the Gulf Coast to aid its defense against spill litigation.

BP PLC attempted to hire the entire marine sciences department at one Alabama university, according to scientists involved in discussions with the company's lawyers.
* * *
More than one scientist interviewed by the Press-Register described being offered $250 an hour through BP lawyers. At eight hours a week, that amounts to $104,000 a year.

Scientists from Louisiana State University, University of Southern Mississippi and Texas A&M have reportedly accepted, according to academic officials. Scientists who study marine invertebrates, plankton, marsh environments, oceanography, sharks and other topics have been solicited.

A hundred G's annually is a bonus worthy of a Wall Street banker, never mind some poorly paid, obscure faculty member wearing a corduroy jacket with leather patches on the elbows. The catch is, BP's "research" contracts require the academics to remain mum about the data they collect and the results they obtain for at least three years.

Yesterday, Griggs reported that something close to the opposite is happening to Florida academics:

Researchers at Florida universities say BP has not offered them the lucrative research contracts it reportedly has offered to other universities in exchange for scientists' cooperation with its legal defense.

One well might consider that high acclaim, indeed, for Florida's universities. As Dick Snyder of the University of West Florida told Griggs, "I think we're looking at [BP] trying to control information about an environmental catastrophe." To resist the enormous pressure BP can bring to bear on the university system is admirable.

Nondisclosure agreements are common when universities partner with private industries for research and development or product testing, "but in this case, I think we're looking at something different than that," Snyder said.

"If you're working on some new chemical product they come up with, then yeah, we'll sign a (nondisclosure agreement) and help them with their research and development. ... But (this) is really pushing the edge of it. It's not a product the company is working on. What's the basis for the nondisclosure?"

W. Ross Ellington, head of the Oil Spill Academic Task Force at Florida State University, told Griggs:

"The only time we would withhold research data is if we want to publish before our competitors publish. But in this case, because it's so important, the free dissemination is going to be very important."

Our own coastal scientist friend says that in Louisiana and Mississippi it's become an "academic free-for-all" as faculty, staff, and independent researchers try to climb aboard the BP money wagon without getting polluted by the money.

6. McUniversity.

The problem is hardly new to academia or industry. Books have been written on what has come to be known as the rise of "Academic Capitalism," sometimes less charitably known as "McUniversity," after George Ritzer's famous neologism.

The reasons are not complicated, either. As one student of the sociology of science put it a few years ago, citing two other pioneers who saw the same conundrum:

On the one hand, in order to remain competitive in global markets, companies increasingly seek for new knowledge and science-based products and processes from universities. On the other hand universities need new sources of income, as state funding for higher education has been diminishing. Thus "the corporate quest for new products converged with faculty and institutional searches for increased funding."

Oli-Henlenya Ylijoki, "Entangled in Academic Capitalism?
A Case-study on Changing Ideals and Practices of
University Research," 45 Higher Education 307 (2003)

In other words, we've brought this on ourselves. For industry it's money, money, money. Nothing new about that. But for academics, the need is driven by the "diminishing" financial support by our political organs for public colleges and universities.

Our coastal science friend says all corporate research grants are "dirty money." But he sees nothing unethical in a scientist contracting to work as an expert witness so long as he or she has the integrity to observe traditional academic values, does all the research necessary (rather than merely that which would support a preconceived viewpoint), and presents conclusions objectively and without favor.

Ah, but there's the rub. What litigant wants an expert witness who will be fair and impartial? In Florida, our own attorney general was merely following the industry standard when he hired a self-loathing crackpot at twice the normal fee to testify against his own gay proclivities. Watch what he says, not what he does.

Oil company litigants want an expert who shares their view of the case and who has the scientific fire-power to win it for them. None of them are in the business of paying "a fair and impartial" researcher for his time and expense in offering research results to a court or the public at large.

The whole mess is something important that remains unresolved. That's why our coastal scientist friend also says, "If the money isn't from the National Science Foundation, it's dirty."

7. Rapid Response System.

One way to alleviate, though perhaps not completely solve the problem, is suggested by yesterday's news that "four of the world’s biggest oil companies" have committed "$1 billion to create a rapid-response system to deal with deepwater oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico... ."

Of course these mega-corporations aren't ponying up a quarter of a billion dollars, each, out of eleemosynary motives. They want to burnish their public image and "restore public confidence in the industry after the BP disaster painfully exposed how unprepared the industry was for a major accident."

The plan is to jointly create "a new nonprofit entity, called the Marine Well Containment Company" which would "be in charge of operating and maintaining" an emergency capability of responding to broken well or other oil spill emergencies.

The entity, modeled in part after the Marine Spill Response Corporation, which was set up after the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska, will also finance research to look into new ways of tackling an underwater spill.
* * *
"Companies have used their technology to get into the deep water but they didn’t have an adequate plan to intervene at these depths or to contain a large-scale spill,” [an energy expert says].

This joint "nonprofit" project obviously will be dominated and run by Big Oil. But something along similar lines-- a research grant foundation funded by oil companies but run by, say, institutional representatives from Gulf Coast universities and the National Science Foundation -- just might work as a joint funding source and distribution agent for academic oil pollution research grants supporting coastal studies, sea life damage, and coastal restoration research.

While it wouldn't entirely eliminate the ethical challenge facing academics working for industry, it has the potential to relieve a large part of the problem, if done right. One might even dare hope that it could eventually lead to eliminating the threat oil leaks -- or even our own petroleum dependency -- pose for the planet.

8. (Oil) Men at Work.

More than seventy percent of all Floridians want to see a drilling ban constitutional amendment on the ballot. That makes no difference to state representatives Greg Evers Dave Murzin (a candidate for Santa Rosa Escambia county commissioner) or Clay Ford. They're hard at work making sure that the people have no voice in this democracy.

It's "political theater as farce," the Pensacola News Journal editorializes today:

[B]oth representatives voted last year for a bill that would have ended the legislative ban on drilling in Florida waters — an effort that died in the Senate when the Deepwater Horizon exploded and sank in the Gulf of Mexico.

The paper rightly points out that "House Republicans weren't serious" from the get-go about letting voters have a voice in the matter. In coming up with such transparent, outright lies to justify their own actions in denying a meaningful voice to the people of Florida, Murzin and Ford have disgraced their public office and betrayed the voters who sent them to Tallahassee.

Storm Coming, Booms Going

Late this morning the State Emergency Response Team announced the temporary "removal of supplemental Tier 3 boom within the next 72 to 96 hours in the Panhandle counties." In a formal statement [available here], it is said:

The removal is in light of the potential tropical activity in the Gulf of Mexico.

“During a tropical storm boom can cause additional damage to the natural resources that we are trying to protect from oil spill impacts,” said [state] DEP Secretary Michael W. Sole. “Given the current oil spill trajectories and the tropical activity in the Gulf of Mexico we think this is the best decision for Florida’s communities.”
* * *
Following the tropical activity, should further oil spill impacts be projected, officials will redeploy the boom.

"Tier 3" boom are those deployed by state and local governments at their own expense in areas additional to sensitive coastline areas approved by the Unified Command under the U.S. Coast Guard’s Area Contingency Plan (ACP).

No appreciable change has been made in the earlier forecast of the National Hurricane Center. It continues to state:

A tropical depression is not expected to form today but environmental conditions are still favorable for some development as the system moves toward the west-northwest at about 10 mph away from Hispaniola into the Bahamas on Thursday. There is a high chance...60 percent...of this system becoming a tropical cyclone during the next 48 hours.

Bloomberg News reported at mid-morning that "heavy rain showers over the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Puerto Rico" were diminishing the chance of strengthening. But Bloomberg also quotes a meteorological consultant for businesses as predicting that Invest 97L would become a Category 1 "by the weekend."

If so, the next tropical storm name on the list is "Bonnie." We have a good friend by the same name. She's a gentle, humorous soul who wouldn't hurt a sand flea. We'll take that as a good omen.

Whopper Wednesday: July 21 BP Oil Spill Update

1. Oilcast.

If you want to beach it, the next several days look like the surest opportunity for a pleasant, relatively oil-free time in weeks. NOAA reports (see above) that overflights at BP's well site "indicate the surface oil is breaking up into numerous patches separated by clean water - for the first time no surface oil was observed in the vicinity of the source."

Locally, NOAA expects wind and wave forecasts (below) will be pushing comparatively cleaner water westward over the next 72 hours.
2.Tropical Report.

Get that beach experience in before the weather turns next week. The National Hurricane Center is now saying "there is a high chance... 70 percent" of Invest 97L "becoming a tropical depression or a tropical storm during the next 48 hours."

Right now, the slow-moving system is north of Puerto Rico and soon will be passing the Dominican Republic. The Miami Herald reports, "strong winds and heavy rain" are expected in south Florida by late Thursday.

All the early computer-generated spaghetti projections (left) have the storm heading into the Gulf. After that, they come up with a wide scattering of potential targets ranging from Morgan City, Louisiana to Apalachee Bay, Florida. Pensacola Beach, wouldn't you know it, is just about in the middle.

A hurricane hunter aircraft will be gathering more detailed data later today.

3. Oily Legislators Spin Whoppers.

Gannett Corp.'s capital bureau in Tallahassee covered yesterday's abortive special session of the legislature, called by Governor Charlie Crist to consider placing a referendum on the November ballot that would have banned drilling off the Florida coast. A constitutional amendment is believed necessary as an additional bulwark against future sneak attacks on the existing statutory ban against near-shore drilling which the state has enjoyed for many years.

There once was a time when that drilling ban enjoyed broad bipartisan support. But the extremists who have taken over the state's Republican party were on the verge last April of repealing that statute when the Deepwater Horizon platform blew up, exposing the folly of their plans.

Jim Ash's report today from Tallahassee reveals -- surprise, surprise -- that local legislators are saying one thing to the home folk and doing another in the state capital. Yesterday, every single Republican in the state House of Representatives voted to adjourn the special session after only 49 minutes without even taking up or debating the governor's proposal.

Yet, for the consumption of folk back home, state representatives Clay Ford (R-Gulf Breeze) and Dave Murzin (R-Pensacola) are spinning big whoppers to create the impression they were "disappointed... there was much left undone with regards to oil drilling in the Gulf."

Ford is particularly oily. About Governor Crist's proposal, he claims, "I was in favor of putting it to a vote. I would have voted to put it on the ballot in November."

If that were so, then why would he vote to adjourn the special session before the proposal even could be raised? Ford isn't saying. He doesn't have to. His actions speak louder than words. For Clay Ford, party loyalty trumps protecting his constituents from environmental catastrophe.

Murzin, too, voted in lock-step with the Republican statehouse leaders to deny voters a chance to vote on the constitutional referendum. This is the same leadership behind the sneak attack last April to revoke the long-standing offshore drilling ban.

The excuse Murzin is offering is risible. He claims the offshore drilling ban "might have unintended consequences on the inland oil production in Santa Rosa County known as the Jay Fields." The Jay Fields, which are nearing depletion anyway, are located well inland -- 35 miles north of Pensacola.

4. Murzin's Mendacity.

Dave Murzin wouldn't want you to know this, but the exact wording of the proposed resolution that would have put the drilling ban issue on the ballot is here, in the underlined language starting on page 2.

It would have added to Article II, Section 7 ("Natural resources and scenic beauty") the following new subsection (boldface added):

(c) The exploration and drilling for, and the extraction and production of, oil are prohibited in and beneath all state waters located between the mean high-water line along the coastline of the state and the seaward limit of the state's boundaries, as now or hereafter fixed by this constitution or the Congress of the United States, whichever such boundary is farther from the coastline. This prohibition shall not apply to the transportation of oil produced outside of such waters.

What do you suppose it is about the phrases "mean high water line" or "seaward limit" that confuse state representative Murzin? The nearby Jay airport has an elevation of 254 feet above sea level. The Jay Field will be inside the mean high tide line of Florida about a week after the surf begins washing over the top of Portofino Towers.

Murzin may or may not be rock-stupid, but apparently he thinks the voters are.

5. Ad for Tourism Promotion.

In today's News Journal, reporter Jamie Page covers the YouTube video recently produced by the Appleyard ad agency to promote local tourism in the midst of the BP oil spill. The ad was produced for the tourist promotion arm of the Pensacola Bay Chamber of Commerce.

The title of Jamie Page's article is "Ad Spins Beach Bummer into Fun Summer." After Gannett's self-defeating web policy disappears the article behind a cumbersome and expensive archival system, you can still see the video for free on YouTube.

The ad is supposed to be a semi-comic look at oil cleanup workers enjoying the tourist sites around town. The video, Page reports, hasn't actually been placed yet for paid broadcast anywhere --

but it saw some major publicity over the weekend by "NBC Nightly News" and the "Today" show before it was posted Monday on YouTube. It is now on MSNBC's website. If the video gets a positive reaction from the public, then Visit Pensacola likely will turn it into a 30-second television commercial... .

In other words, it's a work in progress. Viewer reactions are being sought.

Now, we have no expertise whatsoever in advertising or marketing. Over the years, we've worked diligently to develop a constitutional immunity against advertisements of every kind.
Never read 'em, never watch 'em. Couldn't tell you what feminine hygiene deodorant or erectile dysfunction drug we're supposed to be using, or what anti-depression medication we should be demanding our doctor give us.

The story line of the Visit Pensacola ad, according to its producer, is supposed to use "these negative images [people] have seen and... show them in an absurd light and make them funny and use them to our advantage to show all the fun things to do in Pensacola."

Does it work? Our guess is the ad will appeal to locals who know how the BP clean-up workers' hazmat suits look and who will recognize film clips taken around town -- bicycling down South Palafox (good luck with that!), Fort Pickens, the Naval Aviation Museum at N.A.S., the Lighthouse, the war memorial, and so on.

Personally, however, we can't imagine distant viewers appreciating the humor or figuring out what the images depict. One of the scenes (above left) even looks to us like the clean-up workers are about to mug some doofus on the street.

As we say, however, we don't know anything about advertising. You, dear reader, whoever you are know more than we do. Go to the YouTube page and leave your comment for the benefit of all the Pensacola Beach tourist businesses who have been wrecked by BP's criminal negligence.

Florida G.O.P. Subverts Drilling Ban

The Florida House of Representatives today met for 49 minutes and then adjourned without even considering whether to give voters the chance to vote on a proposed constitutional amendment against oil drilling.

The vote was 44 Democrats in favor of letting voters decide and all 67 Republicans against it.

That's helpful, in a way. Now, it will be easy to tell whom to vote for. If you see a Florida Republican office holder you know he is for oil spills and against democracy. The party-line vote made it simple as that.

Although the state Senate remains in session as this is written, by adjourning House Republicans made sure voters will not have a chance to vote on the issue in November.

Oily Opening Tuesday: July 20 BP Oil Spill Update

1. Oilcast.

NOAA's 72-hour oilcast map, above, dramatically shows how persistent southeast winds are likely to push BP's oil back where it belongs, off the shores of Bobby Jindal's drill-happy Louisiana. They want it? They can have it.

Probably based on the same data, the Jackson County Floridian reports:

No additional oil from the Gulf of Mexico spill will wash up on the Panhandle and other Florida beaches, because of a combination of westerly [sic] winds and the newly-capped gusher, state officials say.

If the favorable weather holds, no oil sheens are expected to stain Pensacola’s sugar-white beaches for at least a week, Florida Department of Environmental Protection Secretary Michael Sole said at a news conference this morning.

“Most of the oil is significantly offshore—about 85 miles,” Sole said. “There are no expected impacts to Florida shorelines this entire week. Still, we’re going to be ready ... until all this oil is gone.”

On the other hand, The Gov Monitor, which also has offices in Florida as well as overseas, reports a darker possibility today:

Isolated impacts of crude oil tar balls and tar patties are expected to continue in Northwest Florida over the next 72 hours. State reconnaissance teams operating by air, land and sea continue to identify potential impacts and are actively coordinating with cleanup teams.

However, the web site's own interactive map indicates no new reports of oil coming ashore have been received as yet.

Probably, the truth is they're all correct. The main oil slicks are going to be nudged west again while some of the oil tarballs already off the Northwest Florida coast could stop circling out at sea and come ashore in the surf. It shouldn't be much, but any amount is too much.

By all means, come to the beach but avoid the odd looking stones and pretty little orange spongy-looking things. They're toxic.

2. Tropical Points of Interest

Jim Williams at Hurricane City is predicting a tropical storm named "Bonnie to form S.E of TX/LA as a minimal tropical storm setting the stage for next week." Right now, the Hurricane Center is watching "Invest 97L," just passing Puerto Rico.

"There is a high chance... 60 percent... of this system becoming a tropical depression or storm during the next 48 hours," the National Hurricane Center says.

3. Well well enough?

New Orleans Times-Picayune reports, "Scientists have discovered four gas "seeps" at or near BP's blown-out Macondo well since Saturday... .

Bubbles have been spotted on the seabed about three kilometers away from the well, a few hundred meters from the well, at the base of the original blowout preventer on the well, and coming out of a gasket in the flange on the capping stack that was installed last week.

In addition, the Washington Post reports:

[V[ideo provided by BP showed drops of oil and gas leaking from a piece of the new containment cap just below three rams designed to cut off the flow from the well. The leak has caused the formation of some hydrates -- slushlike crystals of natural gas and water that torpedoed earlier containment efforts. But, Allen said, "we do not believe this is consequential at this time."

Sounds like success, eh? Not. National Incident Commander Admiral Thad Allen is still keeping BP's latest fix-it effort on a short leash:

Pressure in the well remains lower than what BP had originally expected to be, but climbing. Pressure currently stands at 6,811 pounds per square inch, and is rising by about one pound per square inch each hour.

Allen said the well will remain shut in for another 24-hour observation period. However, if there is any sign of a significant drop in the well's pressure, officials are prepared to reopen the well immediately.

Moreover, yesterday Allen imposed on BP a new condition to keeping the cap closed. If new anomalies are seen, "BP has to report to us and act on those within four hours."

Scientists are huddling today, according to the Associated Press, "to analyze data from the ocean floor as they weigh whether a leaking well cap is a sign BP's broken oil well is buckling."

If BP's latest attempted fix goes well, it will be the first time anything the corporation has tried actually works well since April 20.

4. The BOP Leak.

What are the odds of BP finally getting something right? Not good, as testimony showed early today at the resumed U. S. Coast Guard-Bureau of Energy Management joint investigative hearing in Louisiana. You can watch the hearing when in session on C-Span here.

Today, BP's well site leader at the Deepwater Horizon platform, Ronald Sepulvado, testified that--

before he wrapped up his stint as BP's top man on the rig four days before the April 20 accident, he reported that one of the control pods on the blowout preventer, or BOP, had a leak.

He said he told his supervisor in Houston, BP team leader John Guide, and assumed that Guide would notify federal regulators at the Minerals Management Service. According to investigators, that never happened.

Federal Regulation 250.451(d) states that if someone drilling in federal waters encounters "a BOP control station or pod that does not function properly" the rig must "suspend further drilling operations until that station or pod is operable."

Asked if that was done, Sepulvado said it wasn't.

"I assumed everything was OK because I reported it to the team leader and he should have reported it to MMS," Sepulvado said.

5. Bullheading by Boys.

The dirty secret about oil engineers is that they're really little boys at heart. They like making lots of new toys, but in their enthusiasm they also break a lot of them.

Today, the New New York Times reports:

Kent Wells, a senior vice president for BP, said the company was studying the possibility of a “static kill,” in which heavy mud would be pumped into the recently capped well. Also known as bullheading, the procedure would force the oil and gas back down into the reservoir.

“The static kill does give us a new option,” he said at a briefing in Houston. A decision to proceed could be made in several days, Mr. Wells said.

Either these guys enjoy the challenge of beating the monstrous oil leak and they want to keep going with the game; or, one could take this as an early sign that BP engineers have their own doubts about how long the 3-cap stack can hold back fresh oil without busting the seafloor wide open. It looks to us like Admiral Allen is afraid the latter is the case.

6. Florida's Oily Legislature.

Today, the Florida legislature convenes in the special session called by Governor Charlies Crist in early July to consider a proposed constitutional ballot measure to ban drilling off the Florida coast. It could turn out for many of the lawmakers to be their own political death.

If so, the funeral with last rites will be held November 2 at a polling place near you. Suggested entries for the gravestone are welcome. Here's the first we received from a poetic reader:

Here lies the Republican party.
No longer hale and hearty.
They wanted to drill
But BP did spill
So the voters have had their fill.

On the other hand, pro-drilling legislators may be looking forward to new riches if they beat back the governor's proposal. Did you ever wonder how it is politicians get rich on their paltry public salaries? The St. Petersburg Times hints at a possible answer:

A Times/Herald review of campaign contributions to legislators and their political committees shows that between Jan. 1, 2009 and March 31, 2010, lawmakers received $278,452 from the oil and gas industry and their affiliated companies, including nearly $185,800 to the Republican Party of Florida and $77,000 to the Florida Democratic Party.

During that time, next year's House speaker, Rep. Dean Cannon, R-Winter Park, pushed a bill to lift the Florida drilling ban. He has since backed off on that plan.

Today's PNJ editorial issues a Quixotic call on the lawmakers to "Just Say It." Be honest. Go ahead, shout 'Drill, baby, drill' again:

[D]rilling advocates offer increasingly specious arguments against letting voters decide the matter.

They tell us we shouldn't put such a big decision on the shoulders of voters at a time when they might make an "emotional" decision. But if it wasn't emotion driving repeal of the drilling ban this spring, could it have been heavy spending by pro-drilling lobbyists?

And drilling supporters tell us that a ban wouldn't have protected us from the current disaster... because this spill occurred off Louisiana! OK — and if it happened 10 miles off Florida's beaches?

Why won't drilling advocates be honest and admit they don't want to risk letting Florida voters ban the drilling legislators were about to approve?

Rather a silly question, don't you think? The answer, of course, is that if Florida Republicans were honest with the voters they wouldn't be raking in the big bucks from the oil industry.

7. New Voices.

The thing is, new voices and new politicians always arise in times of crisis. This time, they're coming from all the opponents to offshore drilling. One of them is "Hands Across the Sand," headed by Dave Rauschkolb of Seaside, Florida.

He owns three Panhandle restaurants along the beach, is a lifelong surfer and an avid fisherman. The decisions of other Gulf states, he says, are motivated by money, but have a far wider effect.

"There are some things that we need to see not only in economic terms. The soul of America is being lost because of things being seen only in economic terms," he said. "They'd have to be blind and deaf to not see how their actions affect the other Gulf states."

Quite possibly, Mr. Rauschkolb is just one of those "new" voices or people who'd like to take a crack at running for state office.

8. Lockerbie Labyrinth.

David Cameron, prime minister of Great Britain, is visiting the White House today. Two items sure to be on the agenda are the BP oil catastrophe and the release of convicted Libyan terrorist Abelbaset Ali al-Megrahi. Cameron also will meet with four U.S. senators who have particularly pointed questions about the al-Megrahi scandal.

You know about the unbridled defense of BP Corp. mounted by British politicians and the British press in the wake of the Gulf drilling catastrophe. They're not concerned about their own precipitously declining investments in British Petroleum -- excuse us, BP Corp. stock. Of course not. You think politicians or newspaper publishers could be so selfish?

No, what they're worried about are all the poor little old lady pensioners in Great Britain who are depending on BP stock to put bread on the table instead of cat food. Even though, as the UK's Daily Finance reports, "many people" in Great Britain "will not be affected."

Late last week before leaving for Washington Cameron signaled that he intends to use his face-time with Obama to "discuss oil giant BP... with U.S. President Barack Obama... and stress how important a 'strong and stable' company is to both nations." Yes, indeed. Where would the Gulf coast be today if BP Corp. hadn't existed?

It has been absolutely cringe-inducing to watch all these government and corporate officials lie so openly and obviously about the BP-engineered release of the convicted Lockerbie bomber. Both BP and the Labor Party ministers who played key roles in al-Megrahi's release are terrible, terrible liars. Yet, they do it with such a straight face that it makes the bottoms of our feet tickle as we watch them tiptoeing along the edge of a steep, unstable precipice of transparent prevarications.

We've already summarized the oily details about how al-Megrahi won his freedom after being convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the murder-by-bombing of two hundred and seventy PanAm passengers over Lockerbie, Scotland. It's even more difficult for government officials to lie when Libyan officials themselves, as the New York Times reports, "have said Libya made clear to Britain that if Mr. Megrahi were not included in the transfer agreement, lucrative oil deals for British companies would not be approve."

How many Libyans in British prisons were there, anyway, and of those how many had been convicted of terrorism offences? Long-time British cabinet minister Jack Straw provided the answer when called to account:

As at 31/12/08 there were 26 Libyans in UK prisons, of whom 25 were in England and Wales and one in Scotland. * * * One prisoner only has been convicted of a terrorism-related offence.

Guess who that one prisoner was.

Subsequently released government documents show that Libya had warned Britain if al Megrahi were to die in a Scottish prison, "it would have 'catastrophic effects for the relationship between Libya and the U.K.'" Even the son of Muommar Gaddafi admits the obvious:

According to a transcript of comments made by Saif Gaddafi, the son of the Libyan leader, Megrahi's release was "on the table in all commercial, oil and gas agreements" and other dealings with Britain.

In response to the overwhelming evidence that the British government was induced to release al-Megrahi by the promise of new drilling rights for BP Corp. in Libya, the British, Scottish, and U.S. governments are playing a painfully transparent game of pointing fingers at one another in hopes of confusing everybody.

• 'Not our fault' claims Downing Street. 'Scotland has an independent judiciary that made a "profoundly misguided decision".'
• 'It wasn't us," the Scottish Justice minister says. 'Ask the British government about "the deal in the desert."'
  
• 'Don't look at me,' whines Tory prime minister Cameron. 'It was Scotland's decision or maybe Gordon Brown's Labor Party did it.'
• But you Tories," replies the currently headless Labour Party, 'are the ones who invited BP's convicted perjurer-bandit, the infamous former BP chief executive, Lord Browne of Madingley-- into your Government "to resurrect his tarnished career." He's the guy who first established BP's culture of criminal negligence that led to the Gulf oil spill.
  
• 'Get your stories straight,' Secretary of State Hillary Clinton more or less said in a press statement yesterday. 'Whoever did it, we can't say it was in the interests of justice.'
• 'Send more troops to Afghanistan to bale my centrist-loving ass out and we'll believe any excuse you cook up,' President Obama is expected to add.

Mordant Monday: July 19 BP Oil Spill Update

1. Oilcast.

Light southerly winds should shift later today to easterly winds, persisting at least through Wednesday, according to NOAA's oil spill forecast (above). You can see what that looks like by viewing the animated forecast of the Ocean Circulation Group at the University of South Florida.

NOAA forecasts locally that the surf should be calm with "a low risk of rip currents." It looks like several relatively good days at the beach. Quick! Book your marriage on the beach.

By the way, if you've been thinking of getting away from the long-lasting BP oil spill by moving to, say, Phoenix or Albuquerque -- think again. NOAA's latest prediction is, "drought conditions in the Southwest U.S. to worsen." What's more, with last month having been the hottest June on record and sales of fuel-efficient cars actually dropping in the U.S. over the last five months, we don't expect the rest of the century to get any cooler.

2. Anomalies at the Well.

Shortly before eight o'clock last night, Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen of the Unified Command sent a sharp, biting letter to BP's managing director, Bob Dudley. He extended the test period for the new 3-stack cap "contingent upon the completion of seismic surveys, robust monitoring for indications of leakage, and acoustic testing by the NOAA vessel PISCES in the immediate vicinity of the well head."

The pressure test of the well now gets extended day by day. The reason is that a "seep" of oil has been detected some distance from the well. Plus, there are reported anomalies at the well head itself. This tends to confirm concerns which revived when pressure readings on the cap turned out lower than hoped for that there is a leak in the wellbore or the seafloor. If the cap isn't reopened, the environmental disaster could become even worse and harder to fix.

First word of this came late yesterday in an AP dispatch which attributed knowledge of a seafloor leak to an anonymous "administration official."

An administration official familiar with the spill oversight, however, told The Associated Press that a seep and possible methane were found near the busted oil well. The official spoke on condition of anonymity Sunday because an announcement about the next steps had not been made yet.

BP's chief operating officer, Doug Suttles, would admit in a press conference yesterday morning only that "a few bubbles" had been found around the well. But a sketchy early morning report today by Reuters News alludes to BP engineers as the source of the information that oil is leaking from the seafloor. It also appears the company may be trying to claim the leak comes from some cause other than the Deepwater Horizon explosion that blew things to smithereens.

3. Unified No More?

Admiral Allen sternly laid down additional conditions for continuing the pressure testing. The manner and substance of his directive to BP manifest serious tensions between the Government and the mega-corporation over just how much information BP has been sharing with the Unified Command.

Wrote Allen:

[Y]ou are required to provide as a top priority access and coordination for the monitoring systems, which include seismic and sonar surface ships and subsea ROV and acoustic systems. When seeps are detected, you are directed to marshal resources, quickly investigate, and report findings to the government in no more than four hours. I direct you to provide me a written procedure for opening the choke valve as quickly as possible without damaging the well should hydrocarbon seepage near the well head be confirmed.
* * *
Now that source control has evolved into a period beyond the expected 48 hour interval of the Well Integrity Test, I am requiring that you provide me a written update within 24 hours of your intentions going forward. I remain concerned that all potential options to eliminate the discharge of oil be pursued with utmost speed until I can be assured that no additional oil will spill from the Macondo Well.
* * *
I direct you to provide a detailed plan for the final stages of the relief well that specifically addresses the interaction of this schedule and any other activity that may potentially delay relief well completion.

Three shockers inspired Allen's letter, as one can discern from Henry Fountain's front-page article in today's New York Times.

4. Out of Sight, Out of the News.

First, as mentioned above, Allen's letter reveals that the ambiguous pressure test results show that oil and methane gas is seeping from the seafloor. This means the cap hasn't necessarily stopped the leak, as so many news sources were erroneously reporting yesterday; the leak likely continues from the seafloor, out of sight of underwater cameras available to the public and, perhaps, the Government.

Second, yesterday BP launched a widespread public disinformation campaign with press releases, anonymous official statements, and web updates all emphasizing that 'currently the well remains shut-in with no oil flowing into the Gulf.' BP made no mention about leaks at the seafloor.

NPR's persistently miserable coverage by studio-bound Richard Harris is a prime example of the stenographic coverage offered by most news sources yesterday. Relying as he so often does on BP's sunny press releases, Harris reported yesterday:

And they said the well looks good still. The pressure is holding. They're surveying the seafloor with cameras and sonar and they're not seeing any oil come up. That's good. They're also using deep penetrating surveys to look deep underground and they're not seeing anything alarming there either. So that looks good.

Harris' credulity is boundless when it comes to swallowing BP's claims. He wasn't alone in that. The UK Guardian summarized BP's blitz of press statements yesterday this way:

Tests over the weekend on the new cap placed over the broken well suggested that it was working, there were no leaks, the flow had been stopped and – wonder of wonders – it might stay that way until the well is finally and conclusively plugged, probably next month.

Third, BP began making noises that it intends to abandon the plan worked out earlier with the Unified Command. As Henry Fountain puts it:

[A] senior BP official said Sunday that the company’s recently capped well in the Gulf of Mexico was holding up and that BP now hoped to keep the well closed until it could be permanently plugged.* * * That BP plan differs sharply from the one the company and the federal government had suggested only a day earlier, to eventually allow the flow of oil to resume temporarily, collecting it through pipes to surface ships.

At bottom, as Fountain writes, "the company very much wants to avoid a repeat of the live underwater video that showed millions of gallons of oil spewing from the blown well for weeks" and "the government wants to eliminate any chance of making matters worse." Clashing objectives, obviously. Will they lead to all-out disagreement?

The larger question all of this poses is whether BP considers itself subordinate to the commander of the Unified Command. Once again, it seems, as with BP's shadowy connection to the Lockerbie bomber's release we find our era rhyming with the fourteenth century when the economic and political organization of the western world was radically changing. Popes, like Boniface VIII, kept issuing their usual encyclicals but leaders of the newly-empowered nation-states, like Phillip IV, started defying them.

For the moment -- or, rather, for the next twenty-four hours -- a direct confrontation has been avoided. Early this morning, Admiral Allen released a statement saying that in overnight conversations, "the federal science team got the answers they were seeking and the commitment from BP to meet their monitoring and notification obligations." Accordingly, the cap will remain in place for another twenty-four hours while pressure testing of the well continues and additional seismic surveys are undertaken.

5. Sand Story.

Kimberly Blair has been doing a terrific job for the PNJ covering Pensacola Beach issues about the oil catastrophe. Today, she has an 1100-plus word investigative report on what's happening with the famously white sand on the beach.

We've all seen it: BP clean-up workers grabbing not only tarballs but also large hunks of sand. Bulldozers are even less discriminating as they scrape up enormous shovel-fulls of sand and tar and then pour them into the beds of waiting dump trucks, which disappear into the night.

"[F]or every tar ball and oil blob scooped up during the cleaning process, a chunk of the signature sand goes into a clear plastic bag," Blair writes. Where's it all going? she asks. To "Waste Management's Springhill Landfill north of Panama City," she answers.

The bags filled by individual cleanup workers contain "Between 10 to 20 percent... oil and 80 to 90 percent sand," Keith Wilkins tells Blair. Wilkens, who is Escambia County's deputy chief of Community Services, has emerged as the local answer man for most oil related questions. Doubtless, the percentages are much worse for the 'dozers and sand scrapers. But even he can't say how much oil the heavy equipment has round into the layers of sand beneath the feet of beach-goers.

Scoopers and scrapers took up too much sand. Heavy tractors and trailers destabilized the shoreline, making it vulnerable to natural erosion. The weight of the heavy machines forced oil deeper into the sand and created a public safety hazard for beachgoers.

As of Wednesday, 13,382 tons of crude-contaminated debris, including sand, from oil-impacted beaches of Northwest Florida, has gone to the landfill. Of that, an estimated 1,600 tons, or 2,400 cubic yards, of sand have been removed from Escambia County beaches, said Amy Graham with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.

County and island officials are now reconsidering past approaches, Blair reports.

The environmentally friendly cleanup methods Escambia County is adopting are similar to what Gulf Islands National Seashore has been doing all along, Barbara Dougan, the Seashore's oil-response spokeswoman, said. Rakes and small shovels are being used to scoop up the sand and sift it through fish nets. Sieves and even french frying baskets are being tested with great success in the seashore's Mississippi parks, she said.

Heavy equipment is not allowed on the sensitive seashore, which is a critical habitat for nesting sea turtles and shore birds. The park will use the beach rakes only in areas where they won't damage the invertebrates that live along the shoreline.

Sand renourishment well may be required, similar to what Pensacola Beach residents have seen and paid for twice in the past eight years, Blair calculates. And she's not counting post-Hurricane Opal renourishment, which was the first for Pensacola Beach.

But what to do with the oiled sand already collected? Well, that's a work in progress. A Waste Management spokeswoman says, "It is still in the experimental stage, but we are committed to finding a green solution."

As for the buried oil still on the beach below the surface sand, "that's something we have to leave in place and address at the end of all of this with a major excavation," Wilkins told Blair. "We can't (remove it) with major oil hitting our beaches every week."

Or every month or, god forbid, every year if the well and seafloor leaks continue indefinitely. Once again, it seems, BP's environmental catastrophe has left us with an unprecedented problem that will be with us for generations.

Survival Sunday: July 18 BP Oil Spill Update

""In ecosystems, when you wipe out large segments of them, the ecosystem responds to the absence of those things and other things come in to take their place and you don't return to the way things were."-- Stan Senner, Ocean Conservancy (quoted by BBC News, July 13, 2010)

1. Oilcast.

Click image to read:

2. The Hyppocratic Oilth.

In a statement by Adm. Thad Allen released yesterday, it was announced:

The federal science team has been closely overseeing BP's well integrity test with the goal of first doing no harm to the well.

We'll call that the Hyppocratic Oilth. Adm. Allen goes on:

Based on the data and pressure readings compiled to date, the test has provided us with valuable information which will inform the procedure to kill the well and a better understanding of options for temporary shut in during a hurricane.
* * *
As we continue to see success in the temporary halt of oil from the leak, the U.S. government and BP have agreed to allow the well integrity test to continue another 24 hours.

The government has ordered additional monitoring of the area while the test continues which includes doubling the seismic mapping runs over the well site. A NOAA sonar ship has also been brought to the site to assist in monitoring the entire sea floor area around the well. The ship will make regular passes around the well looking for any hydrocarbon release subsea, and both acoustic and visual monitoring of the area with ROV's will continue.

Happy days will not be here again even if the tests disclose no known leaks. The admiral's statement makes it clear that "when this test is eventually stopped, we will immediately return to containment... ." That means, opening up the well again and collecting more oil-mixed-with water.

This morning, BP announced in a statement that the "test" will be completed Sunday afternoon. And, you'll be shocked to hear that BP's spokesman says everything is going just peachy.

As always, the permanent solution still is weeks away, when and if the relief wells hit their target and heavy mud and cement seal the well for good.

3. Relief Wells.

"Can it work?" Thyrie Bland Travis Griggs asks about a relief well in the headline of today's Sunday Pensacola News Journal. Bland Griggs offers an admirably vivid and compelling word picture of the process, leaving no doubt how dicey are the prospects:

Deep beneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, past where blue water fades to black, past the point where the pressure would crush a nuclear submarine, past the frigid sandy seafloor and thousands of feet of shale and stone — is where engineers must stop the Deepwater Horizon oil spill for good.

With a long string of steel and a rock-crushing bit, engineers must carve a three-mile path, weaving through pockets of explosive gas before feeling their way with high-tech sensors toward a target no wider than a telephone pole. In a delicate dance orchestrated from 18,000 feet above, the drill must brush — but not bump — alongside the steel casing of the ruptured Deepwater Horizon well.

With their eyes glued to pressure gauges, engineers will lower a tool to cut a window through the steel wall of the errant well. When they strike oil, they go in for the kill.

With massive pumps pushing fluid as fast as 100 fire hoses, engineers pump a heavy sludge into the bottom of the gushing well. At first the oil will sweep the kill fluid toward the surface, but as thousands of gallons of heavy mud fill the three-mile well bore, its weight pushes back against the pressure of the oil.

The pumps race. The pressure builds. And if everything goes right, the oil stops.

But relief wells don't always go right. Bland Griggs doesn't blanch at telling us about last year's Timor Sea disaster or the 10-month-long Pemco blow-out at the Ixtoc well in the Bay of Campeche, or a shallow-water gas well blow-up off the Louisiana coast.

He could have mentioned dozens of others, neatly cataloged here on a British web site into categories like "deadliest," "most expensive," "sunk rigs," and so on. Some took as many as five tries at a successful relief well. Another catalog of petroleum pollution, indexed by corporate identity, is provided by NOAA here.

"Everybody's confident that we'll get it," Bland Griggs quotes BP drilling advisor Terry Jordan as saying.

"Get it" as in eventually, someday, capping BP's runanway oil well? Yes, probably.

But "get it" as in waking up to see that this dangerous source of energy is poisoning the planet and we need to rush the development of alternatives? That remains to be seen.

4. Surviving Species.

"How much damage has the BP oil spill done?" BBC News asked this week. "And when will it be fully repaired?"

The answers are "we aren't sure" and "probably never." The warmth of the Gulf should help degrade the leaked oil much faster than in a cold climate like Prince William Sound -- where ninety percent of the Exxon Valdez oil persists in the water, under rocks, and in the soil. That doesn't mean, however, that the oil and its penetrating effects on the chain of life will totally vanish from the Gulf of Mexico anytime soon. Not even in the life time of everyone alive today.

Summarizes the BBC:

There may be oil which becomes buried on shore, and oil may end up at the bottom of the sea in anaerobic areas - places where there is no oxygen to allow the microbes to do their work.

"We have never seen these clouds or plumes of oil dispersed in tiny droplets in the water," says [Stan] Senner. "We don't know how much is ending up on the bottom. Onshore, we don't know how much is being buried."

Habitats where the oil has sufficiently penetrated the several thousand known species of sea grasses, marine algae, fungi, and other "submerged aquatic vegetation" will die -- as will the more complex forms of sea life that depend upon them. If the oil penetrates the roots of coastal sea oats, succulents, ferns, shrubs, and trees, these plants also are unlikely to survive.

Where such plants are stabilizing islands, wetlands or estuaries, "then you are going to lose those areas altogether. [Wetlands] will go to open water and will never recover," Senner says.

As for fish, bird, and animal species, experts interviewed by the BBC suggest that the shorter the life span, the quicker a specie may recover if there are sufficient unaffected like-kind organisms to breed in their place; but longer-lived animals like "dolphins, whale sharks and sea turtles... might not fully recover for 10-20 years."

And that's the optimistic view. Endangered species, like Kemp's Ridley sea turtle and the Bluefin Tuna, which have the misfortune to breed near where the Deepwater Horizon platform was, may disappear altogether.

The largest changes may be undetected for some time. Senner warns:

In ecosystems, when you wipe out large segments of them, the ecosystem responds to the absence of those things and other things come in to take their place and you don't return to the way things were. * * * Ecosystems are always dynamic.

As Charles Darwin taught us, all living things may become displaced by other organisms when habitats change by natural causes or the hand of man. An asteroid collision with Earth renders dinosaurs extinct and clears the way for small nocturnal mammals to evolve, some of them eventually evolving into homo sapiens. Humankind's coal-fired furnaces almost wipe out light-colored pepper moths by making them easy prey to spot against the coal-dust darkened lichen of trees, resulting in 98% of the moths being darker colored.

As Stephen Jay Gould also argued compellingly, "contingency, or shaping of present results by long chains of unpredictable antecedent states" inevitably influence how the "timeless laws of nature" work.

Relief wells or no, the Gulf will never be the same. What that means for shrimp, fish, dolphins, sea turtles, and the humans who live here may not be known for a very, very long time. But it will never be the same.
correction to substitute
Travis Griggs as author 7-20 pm

Perplexing Saturday: July 17 BP Oil Spill Update

1. Oilcast.

There is a new normal on Pensacola Beach. "It's been fairly nice" means, in Kimberly Blair's paraphrasing of a local county official, "Most of the tar balls on the beach are weathered and appear to be left over from the major impact in mid-June, though fresher, oily tar balls have begun dotting the high-tide line on Pensacola Beach and Perdido Key... ."

That official, director Keith Wikins of Escambia County's Community Service Bureau, reads the forecast as keeping "the oil plume hanging offshore south of us" for the next few days. That's also consistent with what Louisiana State University's WAVCIS projections by the Coastal Studies Department show (above).

L.S.U.'s Coastal Studies Department has another useful animation showing the 120-hour "Surface Current Forecast." CLICK HERE to see it.

2. Well Test.

Osha Gray Davidson explains what's "really been happening" at BP's leaking well site. Looks like we're not the only ones frustrated by National Public Radio's lousy coverage:

[T]he BP well has not been plugged. It hasn’t been stopped, capped, or extinguished.

It has been “controlled,” just like the cockroaches that are guaranteed to return once the poison wears off.

The press has been getting this wrong from the git-go and they are still screwing up. Yesterday, I heard the usually reliable NPR repeat the false notion that BP is testing the cap. No, they’re testing the well by using the cap.

This isn’t just word-play. Once the distinction between testing the cap and testing the well was lost, people were certain to celebrate victory when the cap worked, even though we knew it would.

Here is what’s actually happening.

To make sure that the well bore — the part below the seafloor — is not damaged and leaking oil into cracks or holes in the rock, the cap is tricked out with pressure gauges. Now in place, the cap is controlling the oil flow. But time is the key. More time = greater pressure = well integrity.

2. Puzzling Pressure.

What are the results to this hour? Perplexing:

Pressure readings in the well rose significantly in the 24 hours after the valves were closed on a cap at the top of the well, an indication that the well was in good shape. But officials voiced caution, saying that they had expected that the pressure might rise even higher, and that the possibility of damage from the April 20 blowout could not yet be ruled out.

On PBS' News Hour Thursday, the night before the new blow out preventer on the stack cap was closed, Washington Post reporter Joel Achenbach was asked about the possible outcome of this experimental reality show in the Gulf. Here's his answer:

Lots of possibilities.

Now, the worst-case scenario is kablooey, OK, that, when you close the well, the pressure builds. And you can just imagine that the casing of this well down below the Gulf floor may be damaged. And so you could have a further kind of a lateral blowout into the rock formation.

Then you could have a situation of sort of cratering, of erosion, of gas and oil surging up in multiple leaks around the blowout preventer. Now, that, however, is not the most likely scenario. And there is no sign that that has happened.

The other possibility is -- and The Washington Post today is reporting -- I talked to one of the top scientists -- the other possibility is the pressure readings could be ambiguous. It is not what you want to see. It's not terrible. You have to sit there and figure out, well, what's going on here?

So far, that's where it seems BP is at the moment -- scratching its oily corporate head while wondering where did the pressure go?

Is it lower than expected because over the past three months BP's well already released an abundance of poisonous gas and crude oil into the human habit? Is some of it escaping out a hole in the well casing BP hasn't found? Is the oil and gas perhaps being squeezed into subsurface cracks in the rock formations, like toothpaste escaping through holes in the bottom of the tube?

The BBC reports "the company will soon run another seismic survey to check for any evidence of ruptures." A second seismic survey wouldn't have been of much use if President Obama's energy secretary, Steve Chu, hadn't insisted on a baseline survey before closing the stack cap. Thanks to Chu, BP will have something with which to compare the latest seismic imagery.

3. Chu Knew.

What a difference brains in an office-holder make, eh? The last two U.S. Secretaries of Energy were (1) a middling-level pol whose chief claim to fame was he introduced a bill in the U.S. Senate to abolish the department of energy; and (2) a complete non-entity who previously headed the fourth-worst air polluting company in Texas.

Secretary Chu, by contrast, is a "board-certified genius" and Nobel Prize winning physicist who "has stepped in repeatedly to take command of the effort to contain BP’s runaway well, often ordering company officials to take steps they might not have taken on their own."

In early May, he suggested using gamma ray imaging to determine the condition of the well’s blowout preventer, a move no one at the company had considered.

A few weeks later, he overruled some BP officials and ordered the company to stop the “top kill” effort, citing “very, very grave concerns” that it could backfire.

He insisted in late June that a tighter cap be installed on the leaking riser. And on Tuesday, over the strenuous objections of top BP officials, he ordered a 24-hour delay in plans to conduct a pressure test on the well, saying that more safety precautions and analysis were necessary.

If there's a bright spot anywhere to be seen as we look back over the past three months, it's that Steven Chu has probably saved us from the absolute worst of which BP is capable.

4. Pensacola Beach Cleanup Continues.

Salon reported yesterday that "on Pensacola Beach... dozens of BP workers in neon vests operated heavy equipment up and down the beach throughout the night and early morning."

Workers used shovels and rakes to comb through the sands for pieces of tar. Other workers then collect the clumps of tar in bags, which are carried by the front-end loaders to dump trucks and hauled away down the beach.

We saw a lot of that as we took a tour down the road to Ft. Pickens. A dozen or more white vans stuffed with workers were coming back toward the central core even as two huge buses filled with more BP workers was heading in the opposite direction toward the fort. Heavy equipment was scattered all along the seven miles stretch of beach -- road graders, dump trucks, and oversized dune buggies predominated.

Two large boats were just offshore (above). We couldn't be sure if they were looking for oil slicks or skimming it.

A helicopter flew low above the beach (below left). It appeared to be a spotter, looking for tar mats.

In the midst of all this, here and there small knots of scantily-clad sunbathers were stretched out on the sand, clean-up workers in hazmat suits combed the beach for conspicuous tarballs and trash, and the occasional tourist could be seen wading thigh-deep in the surf as if nothing had changed.

As we say, it's the new "normal."

5. Can't Fool Mother Nature.

Welcome as all the hour-by-hour and day-and-night clean-up activity may be, as Rene Shoof writes for McClatchy newspapers, the truth is "nature will have to do most of it."

While BP has hired thousands of people to boom, skim and burn large amounts of crude, the bulk of an estimated 200 million gallons of oil that spewed into the water is actually beyond human reach. As a result, the ultimate cleanup will be left to nature and to colonies of oil-chomping microbes.

Capturing most of the spill is now all but impossible to do.
* * *
"I think the bottom line is that once the oil gets into the water column — not just the surface — the genie is out of the bottle (and) that we do not have any effective ways to get the genie back into the bottle," said Robert Bea, a University of California engineering professor and an expert on offshore drilling.

Bea worked for Shell Oil on the Santa Barbara oil spill in 1969 and the Bay Marchand, La., spill in 1970 and for the Mexican oil company Pemex on the huge Ixtoc spill in 1979. In the years since those spills, the technology of cleanup hasn't changed, he said.

What's worse, no one knows what the consequences of all this oil in the Gulf will be.

Bea said that two of the newer approaches used by BP to combat the blowout didn't work very well. The unprecedented use of chemical dispersants — more than 1.8 million gallons — helped keep oil off beaches, where people notice it, but the dispersants were ineffective and environmentally destructive, he said.

6. Is the plural of oil mousse "meece?"

A beach friend called out attention to this lexicon of oil spills. Study it. Pop quiz tomorrow.

Anxiously Waiting Friday July 16 BP Oil Spill

1. Weekend Oilcast.

However welcome the latest news, below, the weekend could get oily for parts of Pensacola Beach and nearby beaches. NOAA's 48-hour oil projection map, above, shows us just outside the dreaded Zone of Uncertainty. But the Mobile regional weather office reports:

Southwest Atlantic Ridge will build westward today as a tropical wave moves westward resulting in an increasing southeasterly wind flow which will persist through the period. Seas will build to 3 feet by late today and become fully developed on Saturday and remain near 3 feet through Monday when subsiding seas will occur.

Heavier, sustained seas from a southerly direction are not good. We need a north wind. If near-shore seas are more moderate, however, we may get lucky again. Keep an eye on the colored flags at Pensacola Beach. Red and yellow are bad, green good.

2. Anxious Waiting, Cautious Hoping.

Harry Webber for the Associated Press has it exactly right:

BP finally gained control over one of America's biggest environmental catastrophes by placing a carefully fitted cap over a runaway geyser that has been gushing crude into the Gulf of Mexico since early spring. Engineers, politicians and Gulf residents will watch anxiously over the next day and a half to see if it holds.

After nearly three months and up to 184 million gallons, the accomplishment was greeted with hope, high expectations — and, in many cases along the beleaguered coastline, disbelief. But no one was declaring victory just yet.

Locally, the PNJ relies on a report from its sister newspaper, USA Today, that adopts the same cautiousness. ["Oil Stops Flowing But Is It Over?"] Dan Vergano explains:

The success of the new cap, the best hope yet of containing the leak, still rides on pressure tests that began late Wednesday. In a metaphor for the bumpy progress of containing the disaster, the testing halted when a valve in the new cap started leaking. It was fixed, and the oil stopped flowing.

But for how long? Engineers will monitor the pressure readings over a period of 48 hours.

Looming even larger is the work on a nearby relief well that BP continues to bill as the permanent solution to stopping the spill that has triggered a $3.5 billion response.

Here in Pensacola, Sean Dugas supplements the national news with reactions from a few local residents.

"I think we have a long road to hoe, but this will lift people's spirits. Now we know where we stand. As long as it was flowing, it seemed like there was no hope." - Darice Langham, 40, of Pensacola

"It's about time. If they would have taken care of the blowout value in the first place, we wouldn't be in this mess now. It's sad. It's just sad." - Diane Nelms, 55, of Milton

Campbell Robinson and Henry Fountain in the New York Times quote another coastal resident, a fisherman from Louisiana:

"It’s like putting a Band-Aid on a dead man in my opinion, said Jeff Ussury, 48, who considers his days as a crabber over for good. He doubted the news of the capping was even true.

“I started out kind of believing in them,” he said, “but I don’t believe in them at all anymore.”

We don't remember cynicism being one of the stages of oil grief, but it makes sense under the circumstances. Even if the pressure tests hold, there are more hazards to be overcome. Not the least of them is the tropical storm season and what it could wash up on our shores even months after the BP oil leak is stopped at the source -- if it ever is.

3. Rubio's Poopy Platform.

Andy Marlette's editorial cartoon for the PNJ today reminds everyone that Republican senatorial candidate Marco Rubio still favors drilling off the Florida coast. What it reminds us about is what we've been told is an old Vaudeville joke: "Some dirty pigeon stooled on me."

Those "drill, baby, drill" pols are still out there, even if they are laying low for now. While we hope for a permanent stop to the leak, they're hoping the voters get amnesia and forget the devastation which indiscriminate deep water drilling in the Gulf can cause.

4. Europe Learns.

Having watched with horror our misfortune, the European Union is now considering a ban on deep water drilling.

5. Rebranding BP.

As we have cautioned, even if the leak has been stopped for good lasting damage has been done to the Gulf and to coastal communities in five states. Some worry that BP's image is a little dented, too.

In a parody of those authoritarian stalwarts who look forward to the day when BP once again rules MMS and drills wherever it wants however it wants, Great Britain's chapter of Greenpeace has been holding a "rebranding contest" for BP. Multiple entries have been received in the categories of Best Logo, Best Illustration, Best Wildlife, Best Slogan, and -- our favorite category -- "WTF?"

And, you get to vote for the ones you like best! Our personal favorite is in the "best slogan" category. It pokes fun at two villains with one blow:

6. Unbelievable.

Would you believe there was more drilling of oil wells in the very same quarter of the year BP's Deep Horizon platform blew up than in the year before? It's true, according to the American Petroleum Institute:

After posting a 22% decline in the first quarter, US oil and natural gas drilling activity staged a turnaround in Q2, with completions rising 38% from the same period of 2009, the American Petroleum Institute said in a report this week.

An estimated 10,358 oil wells, gas wells and dry holes were completed in Q2, API said.

minor edit 7-16am