BY DELORES SAVAS – Is it time to write an obituary for the Gulf of Mexico? Not yet, although hospice is standing in the wings.

Boca Grande is alive and well for now. So tourists should not stay away. Come to the island and enjoy the shores while everything is how it should be. You may not be so fortunate in the future.

Many are wondering: Can the oil reach the island’s beaches? Domenica Ventura, director, Provitapax Marine Research Association independent volunteer researcher) and area resident said, “Major surface currents in the Gulf of Mexico are essentially the same distribution and direction in winter, although average velocities may differ (in summer).

The west Florida gyre (vortex) may split into two circulations; the northernmost to the west of Cape St. George, the southernmost forming off the Tampa area. Think of where the “dead zone” landed a couple years back off Tampa south of Englewood. However, the wind direction today as opposed to then, is a variable that cannot be predicted but is a potential factor.”

Right now residents in the Keys are apprehensive and watch the sea, while other Gulf shore residents are keeping a vigil, hoping that all will be well.

It seems like all involved in this spill have gone into overdrive to put the blame on others and to downplay the seriousness of what is exactly happening, and the amount of oil reportedly spewing out of the site has been questioned by experts. There seems to be no doubt the amount of leakage has also been downplayed as many are referring to this event as “the 911 oil spill.”

The New York Times reports, “The oil that can be seen from the surface is apparently just a fraction of the oil that has spilled into the Gulf of Mexico since April 20, according to an assessment by the Natural Institute for Undersea Science and Technology. Significant amounts of oil are spreading at various levels throughout the water column. Scientists looking at a video of the leak suggest that as many as 3.4 million gallons of oil could be leaking into the Gulf every day – 16 times more than the current 210,000-gallon-a-day estimate.” (csmonitor.com)

Now there is another major concern that experts claim is just as damaging to all sea life – the use by BP of oil spill dispersants. These dispersants are chemicals applied to the spilled oil to break down the oil into small droplets. However, some say this is creating a toxic soup in the Gulf capable of killing off many species of the sea. See motherjones.com.

Many countries have banned the chemicals that are being used. Reportedly 308,885 gallons of dispersant have been spread over the oil site.

Dr. James M. Cervino, visiting scientist for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute said, “The chemicals that are being disbursed on the sea surface remove oil in the form of clumping it up so that it can then be removed by bacteria; however, my concerns are that these chemicals pass toxins up the food chain into fish and shellfish.

“Corexit 9500, Corexit 9527, and Corexit 9580 have moderate toxicity to early stages of marine embryos, fish, crustaceans and mollusks. They say that lower water temperatures in lab investigations reveal much lower toxicity and lowered intake of the chemical dispersant.

“BUT the problem is that we’re going to be seeing an increase in higher sea surface temperatures, not a decrease in sea surface temperatures.

“The higher the food chain fish that will be severely affected, are the silver-sided fish that are heavily used as bait, not to mention a primary source of food for other large fish all the way up the food chain that humans consume.

“Oil is toxic at 11ppm while Corexit 9500 is toxic at only 2.61ppm; Corexit 9500 is four times as toxic as oil itself. This is the approach the oil companies are taking, which are the lesser of two evils, as both situations kill primary producing phytoplankton and zooplankton, which are at the VERY top of the food chain. Exposing these creatures locally could collapse the LOCAL food chains next week.

“I have not even discussed if this material makes it to the coastal zone, as the ecological disaster and persistence of these chemicals will destroy the wetlands and ecological niches for a long long time. If this ever happened in NYC, it would wipe out the 30 plus years that it took to clean these waters up and place them in the same polluted waters that were back in the ’50s and ’60s. Let’s hope this never happens here.”

Cervino is headed to the Florida Keys to conduct experiments on the side effects of these chemicals on coral and seagrasses.

Just recently 150 sea turtles have been found washed up or dying along the Gulf Coast. All scientists are concerned about the safety of all sea turtles as they are heading into their nesting season.

Other animals at risk in the open water, along the coast and wetlands are sharks, whales, dolphins, brown pelicans, oysters, shrimp and blue crab, menhaden and marsh-dwelling fish, beach-nesting and migratory shorebirds and migratory songbirds, warblers, orioles, buntings, flycatchers, swallows and others.

Fishermen are also endangered as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has extended the boundaries of the closed fishing area in the Gulf. The closed area now represents 45,728 square miles, which is approximately 19 percent of the Gulf of Mexico federal waters. The newly closed area is more than 150 miles from the nearest port and primarily in deep water used by pelagic longline fisheries that target highly migratory species.

Will a call be made to hospice, like in many bedside vigils? Time will tell.

email: gaiasvigil@gmail.com

Special thanks to James Cervino

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gMDwSQxnNOslGs1meZXx3ssFqxKAD9FRJL6O4
By MATTHEW DALY (AP) – 1 hour ago May 22, 2010
WASHINGTON – Days after the Gulf Coast oil spill, the Obama administration pledged to keep its “boot on the throat” of BP to make sure the company did all it could to cap the gushing leak and clean up the spill.

But a month after the April 20 explosion, anger is growing about why BP PLC is still in charge of the response.

“I’m tired of being nice. I’m tired of working as a team,” said Billy Nungesser, president of Plaquemines Parish in Louisiana.

“The government should have stepped in and not just taken BP’s word,” declared Wayne Stone of Marathon, Fla., an avid diver who worries about the spill’s effect on the ecosystem.

That sense of frustration is shared by an increasing number of Gulf Coast residents, elected officials and environmental groups who have called for the government to simply take over.

In fact, the government is overseeing things. But the official responsible for that says he still understands the discontent.

“If anybody is frustrated with this response, I would tell them their symptoms are normal, because I’m frustrated, too,” said Coast Guard Commandant Thad Allen.
“Nobody likes to have a feeling that you can’t do something about a very big problem,” Allen told The Associated Press Friday.

Still, as simple as it may seem for the government to just take over, the law prevents it, Allen said.

After the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska, Congress dictated that oil companies be responsible for dealing with major accidents – including paying for all cleanup – with oversight by federal agencies. Spills on land are overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency, offshore spills by the Coast Guard.

“The basic notion is you hold the responsible party accountable, with regime oversight” from the government, Allen said. “BP has not been relieved of that responsibility, nor have they been relieved for penalties or for oversight.”

He and Coast Guard Adm. Mary Landry, the federal onsite coordinator, direct virtually everything BP does in response to the spill – and with a few exceptions have received full cooperation, Allen said.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs was even more emphatic.

“There’s nothing that we think can and should be done that isn’t being done. Nothing,” Gibbs said Friday during a lengthy, often testy exchange with reporters about the response to the oil disaster.

There are no powers of intervention that the federal government has available but has opted not to use, Gibbs said.

Asked if President Barack Obama had confidence in BP, Gibbs said only: “We are continuing to push BP to do everything that they can.”

The White House is expected to announce Saturday that former Florida Sen. Bob Graham and ex-EPA Administrator William K. Reilly will lead a presidential commission
investigating the oil spill. Graham is a Democrat. Reilly served as EPA administrator under President George H.W. Bush. The commission’s inquiry will range from the causes of the spill to the safety of offshore oil drilling.

BP spokesman Neil Chapman said the federal government has been “an integral part of the response” to the oil spill since shortly after the April 20 explosion.

“There are many federal agencies here in the Unified Command, and they’ve been part of that within days of the incident,” said Chapman, who works out of a joint response site in Louisiana, near the site of the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig.

Criticism of the cleanup response has spread beyond BP. On Friday, the Texas lab contracted to test samples of water contaminated by the spill defended itself against complaints that it has a conflict of interest because it does other work for BP.

TDI-Brooks International Inc., which points to its staffers’ experience handling samples from the Exxon Valdez disaster, said the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service helped audit the lab and approved its methods.

“A typical state laboratory does not have this experience or capacity,” TDI president James M. Brooks said.

The company’s client list includes federal and state agencies along with dozens of oil companies, among them BP, a connection first reported by The New York Times. TDI-Brooks said about half of the lab’s revenue comes from government work.

Test results on Deepwater Horizon samples will figure prominently in lawsuits and other judgments seeking to put a dollar value on the damage caused by the spill.

Deputy Interior Secretary David Hayes, who traveled to the Gulf the day after the explosion and has coordinated Interior’s response to the spill, rejected the notion that BP is telling the federal government what to do.

“They are lashed in,” Hayes said of BP. “They need approval for everything they do.”
If BP is lashed to the government, the tether goes both ways. A large part of what the government knows about the oil spill comes from BP.

The oil company helps staff the command center in Robert, La., which publishes daily reports on efforts to contain, disperse and skim oil.

Some of the information flowing into the command center comes from undersea robots run by BP or ships ultimately being paid by BP. When the center reported Friday that nearly 9 million gallons of an oil-water mixture had been skimmed from the ocean surface, those statistics came from barges and other vessels funded by BP.

Allen, the incident commander, said the main problem for federal responders is the unique nature of the spill – 5,000 feet below the surface with no human access.

“This is really closer to Apollo 13 than Exxon Valdez,” he said, referring to a near-disastrous Moon mission 40 years ago.

“Access to this well-site is through technology that is owned in the private sector,” Allen said, referring to remotely operated vehicles and sensors owned by BP.

Even so, the company has largely done what officials have asked, Allen said. Most recently, it responded to an EPA directive to find a less toxic chemical dispersant to break up the oil underwater.

In two instances – finding samples from the bottom of the ocean to test dispersants and distributing booms to block the oil – BP did not respond as quickly as officials had hoped, Allen said. In both cases they ultimately complied.
“Personally, whenever I have problem I call (BP CEO) Tony Hayward” on his cell phone, Allen said.

Associated Press writers Frederic J. Frommer and Ben Feller in Washington, Janet McConnaughey in New Orleans, Matt Sedensky in Marathon, Fla., Ray Henry in Atlanta and Holbrook Mohr in Jackson, Miss., and Michelle Roberts in San Antonio contributed to this story.

Thanks to Richard Charter as ever!

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gIXWYBTpLtSayJtg41LKXpxSxVPAD9FRDUHG0

By GREG BLUESTEIN (AP) – 6 hours ago–May 22, 2010
ROBERT, La. – BP now says it will likely be at least Tuesday before engineers can shoot heavy mud into a blown-out well spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Three ultra-deepwater rigs and other equipment are at the site where the Deepwater Horizon oil platform exploded April 20. They’re preparing for a delicate procedure called a “top kill” that BP hopes will stop the flow of oil from the well.

Crews will pump in heavy drilling mud, which is a thick, viscous fluid that’s twice the density of water. That should stop the oil, and then they’ll use cement to keep more from gushing out.

BP’s Doug Suttles says this hasn’t been tried at 5,000 feet underwater before, so engineers want to make sure everything is just right.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.
GRAND ISLE, Louisiana (AP) – Officials closed the public beach here Friday as thick gobs of oil resembling melted chocolate washed up, a very visible reminder of the blown-out well that has been spewing crude into the Gulf of Mexico for a month.

Up to now, only tar balls and a light sheen had come ashore. But oil was starting to hit the beach at this island resort community in various forms – light sheens, orange-colored splotches and heavier brown sheets – said Chris Roberts, a local official who surveyed the area Friday morning.

At least 6 million gallons (22 million liters) have gushed into the Gulf since the explosion, more than half of what the Exxon Valdez tanker spilled in Alaska in 1989. A growing number of scientists believe it’s more.

BP PLC was leasing the Deepwater Horizon rig when it exploded April 20, killing 11 workers and triggering the massive spill. The company conceded Thursday what some scientists have been saying for weeks: More oil is flowing from the leak than BP and the Coast Guard had previously estimated.

Brown and vivid orange globs and sheets of foul-smelling oil the consistency of latex paint have also begun coating the reeds and grasses of Louisiana’s wetlands, home to rare birds, mammals and a rich variety of marine life.

A deep, stagnant ooze sat in the middle of a particularly devastated marsh off the Louisiana coast where Emily Guidry Schatzel of the National Wildlife Federation was examining stained reeds.

Ralph Morgenweck of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said countless animals could be feeling the effects of the spill, though workers have found only a handful hurt or injured.
The BP executive in charge of fighting the spill, Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles, said he understands the public is frustrated with the response. He told the CBS “Early Show” on Friday that in the worst case scenario, the gusher could continue until early August, when a new well being drilled to cap the flow permanently could be finished.

But Suttles said he believes the rich Gulf environment will recover, in part because it is a large body of water and has withstood other oil spills.
“I’m optimistic, I’m very optimistic that the Gulf will fully recover,” Suttles said on CBS.

A live video feed of the underwater gusher, posted online after lawmakers exerted pressure on BP, shows what appears to be a large plume of oil and gas still spewing into the water next to the stopper-and-tube combination that BP inserted to carry some of the crude to the surface. The House of Representatives committee website where the video was posted promptly crashed because so many people were trying to view it.

BP spokesman Mark Proegler told The Associated Press that the mile-long tube inserted into a leaking pipe over the weekend is capturing 210,000 gallons (800,000 liters) of oil a day – the total amount the company and the Coast Guard have estimated is gushing into the sea – but some is still escaping. He would not say how much.

Washington, meanwhile, has turned up the pressure on BP.

The Obama administration asked the company to be more open with the public by sharing such information as measurements of the leak and the trajectory of the spill. BP has been accused of covering up the magnitude of the disaster.

Also, the Environmental Protection Agency directed BP to employ a less toxic form of the chemical dispersants it has been using to break up the oil and keep it from reaching the surface.

BP is marshaling equipment for an attempt as early as Sunday at a “top kill,” which involves pumping heavy mud into the top of the blown-out well to try to plug the gusher.

If it doesn’t work, the backup plans include a “junk shot” – shooting golf balls, shredded tires, knotted rope and other material into the well to clog it up.
“We’re now looking at a scenario where response plans include lighting the ocean on fire, pouring potent chemicals into the water, and using trash and human hair to stop the flow of oil,” said Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, in a letter to President Barack Obama calling for a formal moratorium on new offshore drilling permits. “If this is the backup plan, we need to rethink taking the risk in the first place.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.sunherald.com/2010/05/22/2201349/currents-keep-gulf-oil-spill-farther.html

by Matt Sedensky

KEY WEST, Fla. — A powerful current forecast to bring oil from the massive Gulf of Mexico spill to the Florida Keys has shifted, though fears remain that the slick will inevitably hit the state.

At a public meeting Saturday, officials tried to allay residents’ fears, saying the so-called “loop current” expected to send the oil to Florida had moved west. That could delay the arrival of tar balls and other forms of oil to the Keys.

“Are we out of the woods? No. The loop current does eventually come into the Florida Straits and this way,” said Sean Morton, superintendent of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, which is overseen by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The loop current is a ribbon of warm water that begins in the Gulf of Mexico and wraps around Florida. Like the oil, the loop’s position is constantly changing based on winds and currents, meaning predictions on its trajectory are also ever-fluctuating.

Capt. Pat DeQuattro, commander of the Coast Guard station in Key West, said NOAA projections do not forecast the oil arriving in the Keys before Monday. “There is no imminent threat to the Keys at this point,” he said.

Even a small amount of oil spreading to the Keys could be catastrophic for sea life, mangroves and the already weakened coral reefs, not to mention an economy that revolves around tourism and commercial fishing. That keeps residents on edge, including Mila deMier, a 37-year-old real estate agent in Key West.

“I do not believe it,” she said of officials’ optimism about the spill’s effect on the Keys. “We are being lied to.”

“Poorly executed, the top kill could blow the top of the blowout preventer and dramatically increase the oil spill’s volume.”
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-oil-spill-houston-20100522,0,3428621.story
Los Angeles Times
At BP’s Houston offices, hundreds of scientists are at work on the Gulf of Mexico spill. They have an unlimited budget, an international team of the sharpest minds in modern engineering – and they have no time.

By Jim Tankersley, Tribune Washington Bureau
May 22, 2010

Reporting from Houston

More than a week into their quest to stop the oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico from a damaged BP well, several dozen of the brightest minds in the engineering world gathered to watch a 100-ton failure unfold in slow motion.
The engineers packed into a repurposed research center dubbed the Hive, which houses a dozen video screens and, most days, about as many scientists.

Beside a bustling freeway, in a drab Houston office park bedecked with nearly every name in Big Oil, BP had launched a 21st century version of “Apollo 13.”

On this evening, an overflow crowd stared for three hours at one screen as a ghostly four-story dome sank nearly a mile into the water.

The lowering of the dome encapsulated the round-the-clock effort to end what is rapidly becoming the worst oil spill in U.S. history. Brimming with engineering firepower, the effort was painstakingly slow to execute.

It ultimately failed to stanch the daily flow of thousands of barrels of light, sweet Louisiana crude into the gulf.

Hundreds of engineers from universities, rival oil companies and the federal government immediately went back to work, in shifts lasting 13 hours or more.

“Anyone who we think could make a difference, we brought in,” said Kent Wells, BP’s senior vice president for exploration and production.

Then came the “dream team” that President Obama had ordered his Nobel-winning energy secretary, Steven Chu, to assemble: out-of-the-box thinkers including a nuclear physicist, a pioneer on Mars drilling techniques, an MIT professor whose research interests include “going faster on my snowboard,” an expert on the hydrogen bomb, and a controversial astrophysicist who was later booted over a past essay defending homophobia.

Those involved say they are crafting and deploying in a matter of days what under normal circumstances would take a year or more.

And yet a limitless budget and all that brainpower have failed to fix the pipe 5,000 feet below the sea surface that has leaked oil for more than a month, spewing at least 6 million gallons, possibly far more.

That may be about to change.

As early as Sunday, BP engineers will launch their “top kill,” their most ambitious attempt to overpower the oil flow and seal the 13,000-foot-deep well. The operation will be the culmination of weeks of sleuthing and calculation, daylong practice runs and nonstop contingency planning.

Once again, engineers will watch nervously in Houston, acutely aware of the hazards that have encumbered their mission: the crushing pressure of ocean depths so great that divers cannot survive, of a spewing well that could blow all its restraints.

Perhaps most intense of all, the pressure of a nation that is watching and wondering: What’s taking so long?

On the walls of BP’s Houston campus, glossy pictures of Gulf of Mexico offshore platforms hang like family portraits along hallways carpeted in flecks of green and yellow, the colors of BP’s corporate emblem.

When the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, leased by BP, exploded on the night of April 20 and sank 36 hours later, killing 11 men, workers swarmed the third floor of the building that houses the company’s permanent crisis center. They strung wires wrapped in yellow police tape from ceilings to tables filled with fleets of laptops.

Initially a small space designed to respond to disasters such as hurricanes, the crisis center soon overtook the entire floor and parts of several others. BP filled it with 500 workers, mostly men, assigned to containing and shutting off the oil from the Mississippi Canyon 252 well.

They wear casual-Friday uniforms: polo shirts, oxfords with the collars open, and various shades of khaki and dark slacks. The Coast Guard officers wear blue jumpsuits. Some BP workers don blue vests, with their job titles handily stitched in white letters on the back. No one wears a tie.
At BP’s Houston offices, hundreds of scientists are at work on the Gulf of Mexico spill. They have an unlimited budget, an international team of the sharpest minds in modern engineering – and they have no time.

Elsewhere on the floor, two massage therapists stand in scrubs beside specialized chairs, ready to rub kinks from the backs and necks of weary workers. There’s a kitchen that would look small in a two-bedroom apartment. By midafternoon, it’s stacked with cookies and Rice Krispies treats.

New arrivals start with a safety briefing, including how to evacuate in the event of a fire. They park in a garage that posts instructions for safe navigation of a few flights of concrete steps: Hold handrail. One step at a time. Walk, don’t run. Do not use a cellphone.

The warnings foreshadow the meticulous caution inside the building, where the guiding principle is borrowed from the medical profession: “First, do no harm.”
The early visitors included Lt. Kirtland Linegar and Lt. Christopher O’Neil, a pair of stocky Coast Guard engineers. O’Neil once helped rebuild a Coast Guard base flattened by Hurricane Katrina. Linegar started his career as an engineer on an aging drug-enforcement ship in the Caribbean that routinely left port with two of its four engines broken; Linegar and his crewmates would fix them en route.

In Houston, O’Neil and Linegar found other engineers already deep into several plans to fight the blowout.

Two dozen times they tried and failed to revive the blowout preventer, a massive apparatus of rams and valves designed to pinch off the well pipe in case of an unexpected surge of petroleum. Throughout the process, a small-scale model of the device sat on a table in one of the rooms. It seemed every time someone touched it, something fell off.

Early in May, the team moved to Option 2: the containment dome.

The dome dropped toward the seafloor for hours on the evening of May 7, as O’Neil and Linegar watched with 50-odd fellow engineers. Finally, the dome reached the spill source. Oil spilled out of the dome’s door. Robot cameras showed what appeared to be shadows on the dome’s underside – “until you realized,” O’Neil said, “that the way the light was, shadows shouldn’t be there.”

When the cameras shifted, the engineers could see sooty black beehives under the dome – icy gas formations of methane that buoyed the structure and left it useless. Near 1 a.m., officials called off the mission. Engineers who had worked 20 straight hours went home, discouraged.

They returned to the command center by 6 a.m. Three hours later, the team had settled on half a dozen fresh ideas.

Because money is no object, engineers order parts as soon as they dream up a new plan. “If we build a $100,000 piece of equipment and we don’t use it, it’s not the end of the world,” Wells said.

There’s no shortage of government help, either. Customs and immigration officials have helped expedite import of parts that didn’t exist in the United States – and the arrival of scientists from other countries.

Chu’s team settled into a diagnostic role, using supercomputers, gamma-ray imagers and other cutting-edge tools to help BP engineers answer fundamental and vexing questions about the pressure levels in the pipe and how much force it could handle.

They helped BP build “decision trees” – “Choose Your Own Adventure” books of the scientific process, where engineers plan responses for every contingency they can imagine. In the day-to-day operation of the command center, Chu’s team members are always whispering in BP’s ear: Did you think of this? What will you do if it happens?

The government engineers say they’re energized by the challenge. “These are the kind of problems I love,” Chu said, adding later: “It’s really roll-up-your-sleeves, detailed stuff.”

Diagnostics aren’t the only big problem for the engineers in Houston, though. There’s the maddening task of managing boat traffic above the leak, so ships can stay nearly still to manage their robot workers underwater.

There’s the frustration of watching deep-water robots plod through even the simplest tasks, such as tightening bolts.

“It’s a different world,” said team leader Tom Hunter, the director of Sandia National Laboratories, who has worked on shallow-water oil rigs and set up containment systems for underground nuclear weapons tests. “The thing that I notice mostly is the things you think would be simple, a mile beneath the surface.”

But evidence of the difficulty flashes every day on video screens in the Hive: clouds of black crude billowing unabated from the pipe.

“It’s like trying to do an operation on the moon,” said Thomas Bickel, deputy chief engineer at Sandia and a member of Chu’s team. “It’s the same complexity. It’s the same difficulty. And you don’t have the luxury of being in an academic environment where you can work on it for three years. Everybody’s very aware of that pressure.”

Lately, engineers have rehearsed the “top kill,” which will pump drilling fluid, or a rubbery mixture dubbed the “junk shot,” or both, into the well. They have made dry runs on a blowout preventer elsewhere in Houston. In the command center, they’ve been “killing it on paper,” Linegar said, going step by step through the process, game-planning for every possible problem. The stakes are high: Poorly executed, the top kill could blow the top of the blowout preventer and dramatically increase the oil spill’s volume.

If there’s irony in a company and a government taking such pains to avoid missteps – after not having a detailed response plan in the first place – the engineers have no time to focus on it.

They’re so busy, in fact, that hardly anyone gathered in the Hive one night last weekend as the team notched its biggest success, inserting a catheter-like tube into the leak and piping some of the oil to a holding ship on the surface.

When engineers reported at 6 a.m. the next day, there were no big celebrations.
They still had a leak to plug.

jtankersley@latimes.com

special thanks to  Richard Charter