I am frustrated. And depressed. First of all, the oil spill is just overwhelming. Everything about it. The amount of marine life killed, the wetlands destroyed, and then all of the extra disaster on top of the original disaster. As if all of the oil spilling into the Gulf wasn’t bad enough, then they had to go dump in a bunch of toxic dispersants. And when the EPA told them to stop using Corexit, BP basically gave the EPA a middle finger and kept on doing it. Then there’s the endangered sea turtles burned, the clean-up workers denied the ability to wear protective gear, and the media kept away from the clean-up, the wimpy six-month moratorium that should have been longer in the first place, and then even THAT getting turned over by a judge who gets his bread buttered by the oil industry.
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But that is just the start.
Oh and my actual title is We Are F**ked but the Swearing Police made me change it.
Now if Obama had been a progressive in the first place, which I don’t believe he ever was, he might have nominated someone better than Ken Salazar for Secretary of the Interior. And maybe something could have happened to fix MMS before now. But it didn’t. Maybe somebody would have noticed that every single oil company had practically identical clean-up plans in case of a spill, and they all included Caribbean walruses and contact info for a dead guy to call in case of an emergency? Maybe somebody, somewhere, would have given a shit about whether the oil companies actually had any technology to prevent spills and to clean them up if they happened.
But the truth came out. The U.S. government loves its oil money too. Recently, one of the news shows I listen to (Rachel, Amy, or Keith) suggested cutting all of the oil subsides we as a nation give to the oil industry. We’re in a “PAYGO” (pay as you go) environment in DC right now, which means that nothing gets extra money unless you make a cut or add a tax somewhere else. And I’m highly attuned to sources of money because my own pet bill – the school lunch program – needs BILLIONS more than it’s going to get. I was all ears when they brought up cutting oil subsidies. Seems only fair, right? They make more money than god, what do they need subsidies for?
And the answer came back that the U.S. relies on the money it gets from leases paid for by the oil companies. Now, I don’t see how cutting subsidies (saving money) will lose us that lease money from the oil companies. The oil’s there and they want it. They aren’t going to stop drilling tomorrow if we take away their subsidies. Believe me, we could take away an awful lot of money from them before they stop being profitable and can’t pay us for leases. But that was the reason given.
I’d bet it as a lot more to do with the fact that the oil companies are some of the top spenders on lobbying in the entire universe. (To find out who spends what on lobbying, go here.) In the first quarter of this year, ConocoPhilips spent over $6.4 mil in lobbying. BP spent $3.5 mil, Exxon Mobil spent nearly $3.4 mil, Chevron spent over $3 mil, and Shell spent nearly $2.3 mil. You can pick a quarter, any year, and they all spend that much or more, depending on what kind of legislation Congress is debating at the time.
It’s not just the oil I’m mad about. If it was just the oil, well, maybe we could keep fighting until the politics in this country changed and then get off oil later. I mean, it’s gonna run out one of these days, won’t it? And then we’ll have to get off of it. (And if it runs out before we’re ready, it won’t be pretty. Cuba found out what that was like in the early ’90s. I went there this year and blogged about it to document how they’ve adapted to life on little oil.)
But it looks like global warming’s gonna get us before Peak Oil ever will. And the injustice in that is that the rich countries in the temperate zones (i.e. us) will largely be okay. Oh, we might not have any more American maple syrup, which would be sad, but we’ll be okay. Countries in the tropics, by and large poor and developing nations, will be the ones who are hardest hit by changes in climate. They didn’t cause it but they’ll be the first ones to suffer from it.
So what are we doing about that? F**king around, mostly. Talking about “clean” coal and nuclear and ethanol, as if they are viable alternatives. (Last month when I visited DC, the ethanol industry – who has signed up Wes Clark as a spokesman – had the Capitol South metro station plastered in ethanol ads.) We talk about cap and trade, we leave major sectors like agriculture out of our climate change bills, the stupid Governor of West Virginia isn’t sure it would be in his best personal interest to appoint a Senator ASAP to replace Sen. Byrd…. and on and on it goes. A million reasons why nothing is happening and they all have the same effect. Nothing is happening.
Meanwhile, there are millions of ideas out there on how to solve our problems. About a year ago, I interviewed a guy who invented a plug-in electric hybrid designed so that you only fill it up 4 times a year IN THE MID-90s!!!! And what happened? All the auto-makers and the U.S. Department of Energy saw the car… and they did nothing. A few years later, one of the major automakers asked this guy to make them a prototype of a similar car, which he did. He delivered it to them, they did nothing with it. A full decade ago.
There’s a similar story for agriculture. You can grow corn and soy organically, using your same equipment, getting the same or better yield than you do now, AND sell it for organic prices, using up to 2/3 less oil, AND while sequestering carbon into the soil, and yet few farmers do it. There’s no incentive for them to do it. In fact, there are a number of disincentives, since your first few years in transition you have decreased yields and since you aren’t certified organic yet, you still get paid conventional prices. Plus the infrastructure in place makes it very easy to go with the flow planting GE corn and using fertilizer and herbicides and much harder to be organic or even non-GE. And even harder if you want to grow something other than corn and soy.
We have experts who say we need to change the way we grow our food but make no headlines, and then we have the fuckwits appointed by Obama (like this guy, who came to USDA directly from Monsanto’s non-profit) who are for continuing the status quo and exporting it around the world.
It’s amazing what a tiny role facts play in the decisions made at the top levels of our government. Colbert said that reality has a well-known liberal bias. Well, I still believe that is true, but our government sure isn’t liberal. We’ve got a Democratic House, Senate, and White House, and there’s very little in the way of liberalism actually happening in Washington.
This is more than sad, pathetic, and depressing. It’s tragic. We’re gonna take ourselves down in flames and take the entire planet down with us, and we probably won’t even know it’s happening until it’s too late.
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In 2003 I wrote, “If George W. Bush had run for president on a platform of making the world uninhabitable for humankind, he could scarcely have done better at starting us down such a path.”
His first nail in the, um, platform was to allow Dick Cheney to select himself as vice-president. His second was in elevating Cheney to the status of co-president almost immediately. In his second administration–two wars and a million deaths later–Bush demoted Cheney, but by then it was too late. Cheney had unleashed forces that will haunt the world for decades if not centuries.
Even now oil gushes from a hole in the bottom of the sea, thanks to Bush, Cheney, Halliburton and BP.
Don’t get me wrong. Obama is not absolved. He’s been worse than disappointing in this crisis. It would’ve been heartening to see him direct an armada of ships from many nations into the Gulf of Mexico to suck up oil and otherwise contain the damage. It would’ve been wonderful to see him in boots and protective gear leading armies of volunteers and actual soldiers to scoop oil off beaches and clean feathers of sea-gracing birds. It would’ve been marvelous to’ve beheld a panel of actual scientists telling us what was really going on and rapidly assessing options proposed by everyone from actor Kevin Costner to Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal.
Still, make no mistake. The Great Gulf Gusher of 2010–like institutionalized torture, never-ending Middle Eastern war, unprecedented domestic spying, the great economic collapse of 2008, unprecedented media lies and so much else I’ve documented–was a Bush-Cheney production.
After losing the popular vote in 2000, yet winning the White House by one Republican vote on the Supreme Court, the first order of business for Bush-Cheney was to appoint a special energy task force to write energy policy for the new administration. As author Rodrigue Tremblay (“The New American Empire”) and many others have documented, Cheney, former CEO of Halliburton, brought in his old cronies from across the corporate energy spectrum–oil, gas, coal, nuclear, etc., and held meetings–most of them secret–for over 100 days in 2001.
From then on it was “drill baby drill.”
In quick succession, Bush-Cheney recommended ways to expedite all sorts of energy development, named Iraq as a competitor to watch, invaded that country–with Halliburton a major actor–cut regulations for all sorts of activities, lopped budgets for clean, alternative energy programs, proposed tax cuts for fossil fuel producers by over $30 billion and proposed opening Alaska’s National Wildlife Refuge to drilling.
The Senate rejected this bill, but Bush-Cheney followed up in 2005 by subsidizing the oil companies by some $27 billion.
“Then again, on July 14, 2008, just months before leaving office, President George W. Bush signed an executive order to lift the moratorium on offshore drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico and off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.”
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More to the point, “the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service decided on Aug. 30, 2005, that oil companies, rather than the government, were in the best position for determining their operations’ environmental impacts. In effect, MMS decided on that date to de facto merge its services with those of the oil companies, even to the point of letting the oil industry fill out MMS’s inspection reports,” writes Tremblay.
“Oil companies persuaded the Bush-Cheney administration that expensive security measures were not required, even for drilling in deep oceanic waters. For example, MMS decided not to require oil companies to install a remote-control oil blowout preventer on their deep-sea oil drilling rigs, i.e. an acoustic blow off valve that immediately chokes off the flow of oil in an emergency. Even though they are expensive, (they cost $500,000 each), most offshore oil rigs in other countries–in Norway and in Brazil for example, but not in the U.S. or the U.K– have such a switch installed for cutting off the flow of oil in an emergency by closing a valve located on the ocean floor. No such emergency switch was available on April 20, 2010, when BP’s 18,000-foot-drilling-deep floating oil rig blew up, a catastrophe that killed eleven workers, injured many others, and which has spewed, so far, as much as 100 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico”.”
As I say, Obama is not absolved. Just weeks before this well blew, he proposed opening much more of our off-coastal sea floors to drilling, and he kept far too many Bush-Cheney appointments in place. But let’s be clear. This is not his gusher.
It’s one more tragic legacy from the most destructive co-presidency in history–Bush-Cheney.These erstwhile gushers of toxic history wreak havoc with our world still.
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Don Williams is a prize-winning columnist, short story writer, freelancer, and the founding editor and publisher of New Millennium Writings, an annual anthology of literary stories, essays and poems. His awards include a National Endowment for the Humanities Michigan Journalism Fellowship, a Golden Presscard Award and the Malcolm Law Journalism Prize. He just finished a novel, “Oracle of the Orchid Lounge,” set in his native Tennessee. Publishers or agents may inquire via email. His book of selected journalism, “Heroes, Sheroes and Zeroes, the Best Writings About People” by Don Williams, is due a second printing. In 2007, he gave up his weekly column at the Knoxville News-Sentinel rather than see it cut back to every-other-week by editors who endorsed Bush-Cheney.
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Environmental groups are challenging ongoing oil operations in the gulf that are exempt from Obama’s moratorium.
Although President Obama has extended the moratorium on new deepwater drilling permits for six months and halted operations at thirty-three deepwater wells in the Gulf of Mexico, some oil rigs are continuing their operations. The Center for Biological Diversity has filed a lawsuit to halt forty-nine offshore drilling plans in the Gulf of Mexico that were approved without full environmental review. Meanwhile, the group Food & Water Watch is leading an effort to shut down the Atlantis, another BP oil rig in the Gulf. The group warns an oil spill from the Atlantis could be many times larger than the current spill and even harder to stop.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined by two guests in San Francisco. Wenonah Hauter is executive director of Food & Water Watch, and Miyoko Sakashita is the oceans director at the Center for Biological Diversity.
Wenonah Hauter, let’s begin with you. Your response to President Obama going to the Gulf, what you think needs to happen right now?
WENONAH HAUTER: Well, the first thing that needs to happen is that the BP Atlantis platform needs to be shut down before we have another accident. For the last year, we’ve been trying to get MMS to act on this, and we now believe that it’s President Obama who needs to take action in shutting down this very dangerous platform. We filed suit last week against MMS, demanding that the platform be shut down. And we’re asking people to go to the website spillthetruth.org and ask President Obama to shut it down immediately.
AMY GOODMAN: Just one minute on this issue of Atlantis. I don’t think most people realize that these oil—deep sea oil drilling sites are continuing now, as they talk about moratoriums and the closings of, shutting down of these in the Gulf of Mexico. Wenonah Hauter, where is the Atlantis deep sea oil drilling rig?
WENONAH HAUTER: The Atlantis is 150 miles offshore from New Orleans, and it’s 7,000 feet deep. So it’s much deeper than the Horizon. And none of the safety documentation has been verified. So we’re very concerned that there could be an accident at any time.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And in terms of this particular platform’s importance to the general Gulf oil production, how big is it? And why is there such a resistance to looking at it?
WENONAH HAUTER: Well, it produces 8.4 million gallons of oil every day. And so, if there were to be a spill, it would be five—it could be five times larger than the Horizon spill within five days. And the thing is that we have a lot of evidence about what’s going on with BP Atlantis because of a whistleblower, but we suspect that this is the case with all of the deepwater platforms. And it’s one of the reasons that we’re calling on President Obama to also order an independent investigation of the safety documentation for all deepwater platforms and to also—we believe that there needs to be a new agency created to actually regulate the deepwater platforms and the oil industry, because MMS, even as it is broken up, with its entrenched staff, is not likely to do a better job.
AMY GOODMAN: So what does it mean when President Obama, in the statement we ran of Obama’s just a minute ago, say when he says, “And four, we will suspend action on thirty-three deepwater exploratory wells currently being drilled in the Gulf of Mexico,” “we will continue the existing moratorium,” as well?
WENONAH HAUTER: Well, what that means is that they’re talking about wells that will be drilled. They’re not talking about the existing platforms. And we think that MMS, at best, is dysfunctional and incompetent, and at worst, has been willfully complicit with the oil industry. And there’s every likelihood that the safety documents that are missing from BP Atlantis—and that’s 6,000 out of the 7,000 documents—that this is probably the case with other platforms and that there needs to be an immediate and serious investigation, not just talk.
JUAN GONZALEZ: This is now the largest oil spill in American history, but there was a prior even bigger oil spill off the coast of Mexico back in—I think it was 1979. Could you talk about what was learned in terms of the impact of that spill on the Gulf?
WENONAH HAUTER: Well, I think that it takes many, many years for the species to be—to come back and that there are still impacts on the Gulf today.
AMY GOODMAN: We are also joined in San Francisco by Miyoko Sakashita, oceans director at Center for Biological Diversity. Why are you suing the government?
MIYOKO SAKASHITA: We’re suing the government because they’ve continued—the problem with the oil spill that we have at BP actually started much sooner than the April 20th explosion, and it goes back to when the Minerals Management Service has been evading environmental review of all of these projects before they go forward with drilling. So our lawsuit challenges forty-nine of these exploration plans and drilling plans that have actually gone forward and are moving forward without doing any sort of environmental review. And this is actually a problem that’s been pervasive throughout the Gulf of Mexico oil and gas drilling. And it’s essentially—we have an agency that oversees it here, headed by Ken Salazar, that has somehow made the Gulf of Mexico a real lawless zone, where the environmental laws, the marine mammal protection laws, endangered species laws have been able to be—turned a blind eye to them, basically, while rubber-stamping oil industry plans to go forward with drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, in his press conference yesterday—it was an unusual press conference for President Obama. First of all, he hasn’t had a full one now in ten months. But also, he was remarkably defensive about what had occurred and said that there were major mistakes that had occurred. Do you feel that the administration is finally moving in the direction of trying to clean up the existing culture of coziness that existed between the Minerals Management Service and the oil industry from the Bush administration?
Deepwater BP Oil Spill Presidential Press Conference
MIYOKO SAKASHITA: Well, the steps that President Obama announced yesterday, as well as other steps to start to break up the Minerals Management Service and have the environmental oversight separate from the people who receive revenues from the oil and gas industry, are steps in the right direction, although I would say that they don’t go far enough. And one of the things that we really need to do is have a complete halt, a moratorium, to offshore oil and gas in Alaska, the Atlantic and expanded areas in the Gulf of Mexico. And right now all we have is a suspension for six months, which is an important first step, but we really need to take it all the way and really stop the drilling.
On top of that, the problems with the Minerals Management Service really should have been addressed before we had such a catastrophic accident. And when Ken Salazar came into office, we already knew that we had a Minerals Management Service that was cozy with industry, had been involved in a scandal with having too cozy of relationships with industry. And Ken Salazar came in and said, “I’m the new sheriff in town, and I’m going to clean up this agency that’s been, you know, too much run by the oil industry.” But yet, in the, you know, year and a half, two years that we’ve had opportunity for reform in that agency, it really took something as disastrous as the Gulf of Mexico spill to start to implement those changes. And there’s just really no excuse for that. And we really needed reform before then, and it was well known sooner than this.
AMY GOODMAN: What about the firing or the resignation of the head of the Mineral Management Service, Elizabeth Birnbaum, Miyoko Sakashita?
MIYOKO SAKASHITA: It would seem as though that that is related to an agency that’s just really been rife with corruptness and needs a complete overhaul, from the top to the bottom. And those changes, we have yet to really see what true changes will come about. You know, at first, we heard, “Well, there’s a moratorium on drilling, we’re not moving forward,” and then we’ve come to learn that that moratorium was very narrowly defined, and projects were still being approved in the meantime. And so, the announcement that we had yesterday, although we do hear some possibly positive steps that are coming from it, I would say the proof is in the pudding, and we still have yet to see what actual changes are implemented to make sure that we don’t have another big disaster. ….
HOUSTON — BP engineers struggled Friday to plug a gushing oil well a mile under the sea, but as of late in the day they had made little headway in stemming the flow.
Amid mixed messages about problems and progress, the effort — called a “top kill” — continued for a third day, with engineers describing a painstaking process of trying to plug the hole, using different weights of mud and sizes of debris like golf balls and tires, and then watching and waiting. They cannot use brute force because they risk making the leak worse if they damage the pipes leading down to the well.
Despite an apparent lack of progress, officials said they would continue with the process for another 48 hours, into Sunday, before giving up and considering other options, including another containment dome to try to capture the oil.
Read An Unnatural Disaster, The New York Times, May 28, 2010, by Bob Herbert, excerpt quoted verbatim:
“Where I was wrong,” said President Obama at his press conference on Thursday, “was in my belief that the oil companies had their act together when it came to worst-case scenarios.”
With all due respect to the president, who is a very smart man, how is it possible for anyone with any reasonable awareness of the nonstop carnage that has accompanied the entire history of giant corporations to believe that the oil companies, which are among the most rapacious players on the planet, somehow “had their act together” with regard to worst-case scenarios.
These are not Little Lord Fauntleroys who can be trusted to abide by some fanciful honor system. These are greedy merchant armies drilling blindly at depths a mile and more beneath the seas while at the same time doing all they can to stifle the government oversight that is necessary to protect human lives and preserve the integrity of the environment.
The petroleum companies are ruthless and regulation has failed. Perhaps it is time for radical measures.
Nearly every day brings fresh evidence of the malfeasance, corruption and recklessness that led to the Deepwater Horizon disaster, provoking widespread rage at BP and by implication the rest of the oil industry. Public anger at the Obama administration festers, too, as citizens recognize the pitiful impotence of the federal government in these circumstances. But are they furious enough to consider a radical response? If voters are sick of corporate misconduct and government paralysis, after all, there is an alternative to both: nationalization — or at least public development of petroleum resources on federal property.
UPDATE: See Feds weigh a criminal probe of BP, Los Angeles Times, May 28, 2010, by Richard A. Serrano, Tribune Washington Bureau, excerpt quoted verbatim:
The investigators, who have been quietly gathering evidence in Louisiana over the last three weeks, are focusing on whether BP skirted federal safety regulations and misled the U.S. government by saying it could quickly clean up an environmental accident.
The team has met with U.S. attorneys and state officials in the Gulf Coast region and has sent letters to executives of BP and Transocean Ltd., the drilling rig owner, warning them against destroying documents or other internal records.
UPDATE: See Oil spill cam becomes Internet sensation, Associated Press hosted on Yahoo News, May 28, 2010, by Ben Nuckols and Greg Bluestein, excerpt quoted verbatim:
ROBERT, La. – The hypnotic video of mud, gas and oil billowing from the seafloor has become an Internet sensation as Americans watch to see whether BP’s effort to plug the gusher in the Gulf of Mexico succeeds.
BP warned Friday that it could be Sunday or later before the outcome of the cliffhanger becomes clear. And scientists cautioned that few conclusions can be drawn with any certainty from watching the spillcam coverage of the “top kill.” But some said the video seemed to suggest BP was gaining ground.
In an operation that began Wednesday, BP has been pumping heavy drilling mud into the blown-out well in hopes of choking it off and putting an end to what is already the biggest oil spill in U.S. history, at anywhere from 18 million gallons to 40 million by the government’s estimate.
Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said the denser-than-water mud was able to push down the oil and gas coming up at great force from underground, but it had not overwhelmed the gusher. The trick is to pump the mud with such force that it stops the upward flow of oil, and it’s impossible to know how much mud that will take.
BP chief operating officer Doug Suttles said Friday the top kill was going basically as planned, though the pumping has stopped several times.
Prolonged exposure to crude oil and chemical dispersants is a public health danger, environmental scientists warned yesterday as BP spent a third day trying to initiate a “top kill” operation to cap the ruptured well on the sea bed.
The oil firm moved to a second stage of the procedure by injecting material such as golf balls, shredded tyres and rope into the well. But John Pack, a spokesman for BP, said it would not be clear until tomorrow if it would work. “We have never said there is a deadline or a schedule,” he said. “We need to take this pretty slowly, but everything is going according to plan.”
President Obama on Friday vowed justice for workers who died in the April explosion of a BP-operated oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, and to personally take responsibility for the spill in the days to come.
“I’m the president and the buck stops with me,” Obama said.
“Justice will be done for those whose lives ended with this disaster,” he said. “That is a pledge that I am making.”
Comment by Evans Liberal Politics owner Paul Evans: Strong and fine words from the President…. If Obama didn’t own this spill before — if people mainly blamed BP, Transocean and Halliburton — I think it fair to say, the President owns this one now. That’s true despite the fact that it is BP which is the organization with a long record of safety violations and spills. Barack Obama had better make darned sure that everything is being done that can be done. With what people had hoped was the apparent success of the kill shot, and then its failure, now the onus for protecting Gulf residents and cleaning up this spill lies squarely with the President.
The AlterNet article above makes crystal clear that MMS needs a complete overhaul from top to bottom. I sincerely hope that the President realizes just how much he owns the whole issue of environmental safety in the Gulf now. Please Mr. President, make Ken Salazar overhaul MMS from top to bottom. The only real question is why the cozy relationship within MMS between so-called environmental officials there who in fact were receiving royalties from the oil industry weren’t disciplined, and the agency overhauled, before the worst environmental disaster in Gulf history had to occur.
MMS officials were allowing the oil industry to write their own impact reports in pencil, then tracing over them in pen and signing off on them. MMS officials, in other words, were growing fat by blindly signing off on the oil industry’s wishes. That sort of abuse must stop now. Many environmentalists had questioned Ken Salazar’s commitment to the environment before the Gulf oil spill. Now we see a target on his back: Mr. Salazar, how far you go in cleaning up MMS, overhauling it, and making it functional, is on YOU now. Are you an environmentalist or a servant of industry? Are you a conservator or are you just another politician. It’s your legacy and place in history, Mr. Salazar and President Obama. It’s up to you.
The Interior Department on Friday named a new interim director to head its shattered Minerals Management Service. The announcement comes a day after the director resigned amid scandal and criticism over the worst oil spill in the nation’s history.
Bob Abbey, currently director of the Bureau of Land Management, will take over an agency that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has split into three parts in an effort to cordon off the conflicting missions of promoting leasing of federal mineral rights, collecting royalties and overseeing safety and environmental issues.
The service has been rocked by a series of reports that highlighted its coziness with the oil industry, including employees accepting gifts, using drugs and having sexual liaisons with oil company officials.
COVINGTON, La. — BP’s chief executive cautioned Friday that it will be two more days before anyone knows if the latest fix attempt will stop the oil spewing into the sea, and President Barack Obama arrived on the Gulf Coast to tell residents they are not alone in dealing with it.
The spill has already become the worst in U.S. history, and there are no guarantees the so-called “top kill” being tried for the first time 5,000 feet underwater will work.
BP CEO Tony Hayward had projected a resolution as soon as Thursday afternoon, but an 18-hour delay in the injection of heavyweight mud meant to stop the oil scuttled those plans. Though engineers had stopped pumping the mud hours earlier, BP and Coast Guard officials assured the public Thursday morning that the process was going as planned.
Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said Friday the mud was able to push down the oil and gas coming up at great force from underground, but it had not overwhelmed the gusher or stopped the flow.
Obama, meanwhile, inspected a fouled beach and pledged that the government would “keep at it” until the spill that has become the worst in U.S. history is stopped and cleaned up. He also had a message for Gulf residents.
“I’m here to tell you that you are not alone, you will not be abandoned, you will not be left behind,” he said. “The media may get tired of the story, but we will not. We will be on your side and we will see this through.”
Friday’s trip was the president’s second to the coast since the BP-leased oil rig Deepwater Horizon exploded April 20, killing 11 workers and triggering the spill.
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Spill the Truth from Food & Water Watch
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HOUSTON — BP began a maneuver known as a top kill on a stricken well in the Gulf of Mexico on Wednesday afternoon, generating hope that the company might soon be able to plug a leak that has poured millions of gallons of oil into the water and fouled 100 miles of Louisiana coastline.
BP officials emphasized that success was not guaranteed, and that the top kill could fail at any moment. But engineers and geologists following the effort, in which heavy fluids are injected into the well, said the likelihood of success grew with each passing hour.
“The operation is proceeding as we planned it,” said Tony Hayward, BP’s chief executive, in a statement Wednesday evening. “We will be continuing for at least another 24 hours.”
Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer for exploration and production, said at a news conference Wednesday evening that it would be a day or more before it was clear whether the top kill had worked. “It’s too early to know if it’s going to be successful,” Mr. Suttles said.
He said that more than 7,000 barrels of drilling mud had been pumped at varying rates.
At the same news conference, Rear Admiral Mary E. Landry of the Coast Guard, the federal on-scene coordinator, said that she was encouraged but that she did not want to express optimism until the well was secured.
The outcome of the effort may become known about the time President Obama is scheduled to discuss new restrictions on offshore drilling at a news conference Thursday after receiving a report on drilling safety from Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.
Mr. Obama is expected to extend the informal moratorium that he declared after the BP spill began on new offshore drilling permits in the gulf and off the North Slope of Alaska until the cause of the accident is determined and stricter safety and environmental safeguards are in place.
Some fishermen hired by BP to mop up the gulf spill report nausea and breathing troubles after contact with oil and dispersant. A congressman calls for mobile health clinics to treat them.
ON BARATARIA BAY, LA. — In the Louisiana marsh, oil-coated pelicans flap their wings in a futile attempt to dry them. A shorebird repeatedly dunks its face in a puddle, unable to wash off. Lines of dead jellyfish float in the gulf, traces of oil visible in their clear “bells.”
These scenes, scientists say, are confirmation of what they had feared for a month. Now that oil from the Gulf of Mexico’s vast spill has come ashore — in some places, as thick as soft fudge — it is causing serious damage in one of the country’s great natural nurseries.
