Anatoly Sagalevitch comments on BP Oil crisis in the Gulf of Mexico

I wrote a post about two weeks ago after reading a story online that Anatoly Sagalevitch, a world renown Russian Oceanographer, had visited the Gulf of Mexico shortly after the Deepwater Horizon platform managed by BP had exploded and collapsed.  According to the article Dr. Sagalevitch had reportedly said that upon his visit to the site in his submersibles, that he in fact saw over 20 cracks on the seafloor leaking.  You can read my post at: http://zdeaconblue.wordpress.com/2010/06/14/if-this-is-true-bp-may-lead-the-united-states-into-depression/

As you may notice, the post title starts with, if this is true?  That particular question weighed on me for some time and I waited to see if the mainstream media would address this question.  They did not, so I decided to track down the answer myself.  Anyone who tells you it’s easy to track down anyone’s e-mail address on the web hasn’t tried to track down anyone they didn’t already know.  It took me three days of searching but finally I was able to get in contact with Dr. Sagalevitch and as him the very basic question, is this story true?  Dr. Sagalevitch’s response was very prompt and he told me he had not been to the Gulf of Mexico, in fact he was on vacation when the accident occurred and that he couldn’t have possibly surveyed the seafloor of the gulf as his submersibles, the Mir1 and Mir2 are actually deployed in Lake Baikal.  So the definitive answer to my post and the rumor flying around the internet is that no, Dr. Sagalevitch has not reported seeing dozens of cracks on the seafloor of the Gulf of Mexico leaking oil.

This information brings two points to bear for me.  First, how fast disinformation can fly around the internet, Dr. Sagalevitch remarked upon this as well.  Secondly, even without this information, we still don’t know what the actual conditions are at the seafloor or whether or not the relief wells will work.  Today we have been given a couple of interesting pieces of information including that the relief well drilling is proceeding as planned and the first tropical storm of the season has formed and is on track for the Gulf of Mexico.    We’ll talk in more detail in my next post about the potential consequences of a large tropical storm or hurricane in the gulf.  Hurricane formation in the gulf is greatly related to the temperature of the gulf and right now the gulf is very, very warm approximately eighty-six degrees Farenheit.  Look out friends the situation in the gulf may drastically change very soon and not for the better.

If this is true, BP may lead the United States into Depression

Hello friends, what I have for you tonight, if it is true, is nothing short of terrifying.  The following link that I provide: http://beforeitsnews.com/story/76/057/Scientists_Warn_Gulf_Of_Mexico_Sea_Floor_Fractured_Beyond_Repair.htmldescribes    reports  Anatoly Sagalevitch from the Russian Academy of Sciences as saying that the Gulf of Mexico leak is much worse than we have been told.  In fact the report suggests that the well is not able to be capped, leaving only two options.  Option 1 let the well run dry, which could take as much as 30 years, or seal it with a nuclear bomb.  During the Soviet era the Russians on five occasions used controlled underground nuclear explosions to cap wells.  As a matter of fact, in May the Russian newspaper, Komsomoloskaya Pravda, made this very suggestion.

This is a calamity of amazing proportions if it is true!  First off imagine the outcry of even suggesting detonating a nuclear weapon so close to the shore of the United States.  The political fight over that alone should be an amazing show.  If we do this detonation, what size wave will that throw against the gulf shore?  What type of contamination will the blast inflict upon the ecosystems of the Gulf of Mexico and how long will they take to recover?  On the economic front, should the blast be called for we can call an end to oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, is that Saudi Arabia I hear cheering?  Considering that the report says that oil is leaking from twenty-two separate sites along the sea floor I wonder how many barrels of oil per day are actually leaking out, the count has risen from the original 1000 barrels a day to the most current estimate of  up to 40,000 barrels a day.  This spill is already the third largest of all time and if this report is true, it will quickly become the largest oil spill in the history of mankind and the worst ecological disaster the Gulf of Mexico has ever seen.

The implications are far-reaching from the impact on shrimping, oyster and fishing industries including impacting the Blue Fin Tuna fleets of the northeastern US coast as the area impacted is the birthing and raising ground of these fish.  As we enter hurricane season who on the gulf isn’t terrified that a major storm will come through and throw massive amounts of crude onto the shore and into the sensitive wetlands of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida.

The economic implications of this report are beyond alarming.  If we are forced to nuke this well shut, then drilling in the gulf stops and we become much more highly dependent upon foreign oil.  Oil prices will rise quickly and we will see $4 a gallon gas soon, or will it be $5, or $6 a gallon gas?  When oil prices raced past $100 a barrel and domestic gas prices above $4 a gallon our expanding economy suddenly stopped and reversed itself sending us and our financial system on a crash course with depression.  We narrowly avoided that depression and somewhat stabilized our economy, but with the European financial issues we’ve seen serious volatility in our markets.  Nuke this well in the gulf and I fear that the next great depression is a certainty.

I’m sick of the political expediency of heroes

This week the families of the eleven men who died on the Transocean and BP oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico were invited to the Whitehouse to meet President Barack Obama. Why? There have been almost 5,500 American men and women killed in Iraq and Afghanistan since those conflicts began. Have their families been invited to the Whitehouse? No, of course not, we call them heroes on a weekly basis but we don’t go so far as inviting their families to the Whitehouse, apparently the eleven lives lost in the Gulf of Mexico are more important than our fallen soldiers.

Now before all you conservatives start cheering me on for sticking it to Obama, you might want to read a bit further. We are only bringing those folks to the Whitehouse because it looks good politically. Just like it looks good politically to declare half of the damn country as heroes. These days, if you are a fireman, police officer or soldier you are a hero, if you’re a teacher, a nurse or a Sean Hannity listener you’re not only a hero, you might even be a great American. Bullshit, plain and simple bullshit. Politicians and political commentators use these words to sound good, if they call these people patriots or heroes they sound humble and patriotic, they make you feel good by using these words because let’s face it, who among us doesn’t have a cop, a firefighter or a soldier in our lives?

Now let’s be clear, I have the utmost respect for the police, firemen, nurses, doctors, teachers and particularly soldiers. How can you not have respect and feel indebted to the people who risk their very lives so that we can have the life we have here in America. However that does not make each of them heroes and I do not want the word hero cheapened by political hacks or commentators, often hacks themselves so they shouldn’t feel left out. These people are to be respected and lauded, but I’m sorry, just because some kid from Mississippi didn’t have any other good options in life, enlisted in the army and ended up doing truck repair in Düsseldorf, Germany doesn’t make him a hero. It makes him smart and respectable and hopefully it will help him have a better life, but how do you even start to compare him to a fireman who rushed back into the twin towers on 911, or the soldier standing guard on a fire base tonight in Afghanistan or Iraq?

I’ll even go a step further and this is where a lot of you are really going to get angry at me, just because a soldier dies in a war zone, he’s not a hero. He died in the line of duty and again, that sacrifice is amazing and selfless, but that doesn’t make him or her a hero. There have been many deaths in the war zone from suicide, truck accidents, illness and soldiers who made stupid mistakes. Those deaths are no less poignant, no less tragic for their families, but they are not heroic in any sense of the word. The majority of deaths that have occurred in our two current wars have come from improvised explosive devices (IED). So even a battle casualty may not be heroic, a new kid, just in country driving back from the airport in a Humvee that gets hit with an IED is not a hero.

So what is a hero? A hero is someone, man, woman or child, who engages in a heroic act, who puts the survival of others before their own life, who goes above and beyond what is expected of a person in that role to do something truly special. Those fireman and police officers who charged into those towers on 911 were heros, the soldier who runs out into the middle of a fire fight and drags his buddy to safety is a hero. I am sure on a daily basis in Afghanistan and Iraq, that heroes are not in short demand, so please, I beg of you stop calling so many people heroes, save it for those 911 heroes, for those men and women in the wars who go above and beyond, for the Mother Teresa’s of the world. Don’t cheapen their actions by so carelessly wielding the word hero.

BP has a new solution and it’s fitting even for Haliburton!

So you may have heard there’s a teeny tiny little oil spill somewhere off the southern coast of the United States.  The details are all too well-known now; the oil rig explosion, the tragic loss of life, the sinking of the platform, the failed blowout restrictor and the loss of the wellhead.  All of this has left what appears to be a minimum of 5,000 barrels or 210,000 gallons of oil pumping into the gulf on a daily basis.

British Petroleum (BP), the company being primarily held responsible for the spill, has taken many steps in conjunction with the US government to alleviate the impact of the spill while simultaneously trying to stop it.  The worst case is that if no other measure can be found, we may have to wait another 60 plus days for a relief well to be drilled and be up and running.  In the meantime they have set up barriers to prevent landfall, scooped oil from the surface, corralled and burned oil at the surface, shot a chemical (that may be more toxic than the oil) into the flow to break it into smaller drops, unsuccessfully dropped a bell dome 5000 feet to ocean floor to contain the flow, and now finally have inserted a pipe deep inside the well head to suck and contain as much oil as possible.

Congress got involved, because of course nothing solves an ongoing crisis like congressional hearings.  During these hearings we were introduced to the merry band of companies at the core of this disaster, BP who had already been taking a public lashing, Transocean the company primarily responsible for the rig operation and then- – - Haliburton!  Haliburton’s role was to be responsible for cementing the deepwater drill hole, as well as the possible failure of equipment leased to British Petroleum.

What does Haliburton do right?  Here they are possibly on the hook for what may turn out to be the largest oil spill in US history.  They raped the military by providing allegedly substandard and overpriced services to our troops in the gulf, so how does a company with such spectacular alleged failures keep getting contracts.  I mean come on, who do they own, maybe a certain ex-vice president?  Of course they do, Dick Cheney served as the CEO and chairman of the board for Haliburton.  The same oil man who oversaw operation desert storm where we invaded a large oil country, ran a major American energy company (Haliburton), then returned to public office as VP to reinvade the same oil country, depose a horrid dictator and then eventually help open up oil contracts for American oil companies. 

As of this writing BP is alleging success with their latest attempt, their great mechanical fornication, insertion of their long hanging pipe into the opening to achieve a climactic end to the oil spill.  Ok so maybe it doesn’t really end it, just slows it down by putting  it into a post coital lethargy, but progress none-the-less.  But in this disaster we have heard BP’s line change frequently so stay tuned.  What more fitting solution could we have however then someone or something getting screwed when Haliburton is involved.