Re: Oil Rig explosion/Gulf Oil Spill There were three blowout preventers on this well. The problem was not the absence of safety devices, but their failure to work. We need to find out why they did not work and fix the problem.
Re: Oil Rig explosion/Gulf Oil Spill My brother-in-law works in the industry and came over to my house for Father's Day. That is exactly what he said, had the BOPs function as they should have, most of us would never even know this well existed. As far as the response, Louisian has an oilspill coordinator's office LOSCO I'm not sure if it has jurisdiction over this spill however. Hopefully we'll have some good news soon. EDIT: This article from the Wallstreet Journal gives a good account of how the "blame game" is progressing: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704879704575236553480511416.html BP is pointing to the failure of the BOPs as the cause of accident whereas Halliburton and Transocean are blaming BP's decision to displace some of the drilling mud with lighter seawater before setting a cement plug in the well. The article discusses that it is common practice to set the cement plug before removing the drilling mud as a means to keeep the pressure and gas in the well. Anyone have any idea why BP, assuming the article is accurate, would want to remove at least some of the mud before setting a cement plug?
Re: Oil Rig explosion/Gulf Oil Spill LOSCO has jurisdiction over the oil that has reached shore in Louisiana and the containment and cleanup efforts there. The offshore oil and rig remain a Coast Guard jurisdiction. But there is something fishy going on . . . Roland Guidry, the long-time Louisiana Oil Spill Coordinator, has been conspicuously absent from the news compared to his high visibility in much smaller spills. Everything that has been said officially has come from the Governors office or from DOTD, not from LOSCO which is the agency responsible. SInce the Jindal Administration took office, LOSCO has been moved from the governors office to DEQ and now to State Police. Its budget has been slashed by the governor, even though LOSCO is funded by the oil industry, not state money. The oil industry has some issues with this, since the governor effective robbed the LOSCO money that the oil companies pay to fund LOSCO's planning, response, and coordination efforts. They had a lot of experts leave the agency and the entire Oil Spill Research and Development Program at LSU that LOSCO funded had to be scrapped last year. That was about a million dollars a year that went to Louisiana Universities to conduct oil spill research. Now its administrator has been retired and those researchers have had to move on to other funding opportunities. The oil spill research program had a "spill of opportunity" component, where a researcher could propose a project quickly when a spill occurred and not have to go through the lengthy annual competitive process of proposal review. Had this been still in place money would have flowed quickly to monitoring and assessment teams. Right now these teams are still waiting for BP money to arrive to fund similar work now badly needed. And now it seems like Roland Guidry and LOSCO have been gagged by the governor. Perhaps he doesn't want press inquiry into these questions. There is something very fishy going on regarding LOSCO.
Re: Oil Rig explosion/Gulf Oil Spill that is fishy. at best. at a time when louisiana and the universities need funding and good higher income jobs (hell, any jobs), programs that are paid for with private money and not from state dollars are cut? and in an area that impacts louisiana so directly? not only fishy, but sounds damned irresponsible, to me. after the worst of this is over, i'd like to see some sort of investigation in to that and why those decisions were made.
Re: Oil Rig explosion/Gulf Oil Spill I'm curious to know how the governor's office has the jurisdiction to slash the budget from a private funding source.
Re: Oil Rig explosion/Gulf Oil Spill So does the oil industry. It's their money. But it goes through the Governors budget office. On the other hand, it's money that the state requires them to spend and they would rather not spend anything or even have to deal with a state oil spill coordinator at all. Its not an elected position, so he can't be influenced like an elected official can. Personally, I suspect Jindal may have been trying create a back-alley way to cut this expense from the oil companies in return for future campaign contributions from them. But a catastrophic spill has suddenly put a giant spotlight on all things oil spill related. I'm really surprised that the newspapers have not been all over this.
Re: Oil Rig explosion/Gulf Oil Spill If memory serves me correctly, LOSCO, was created in response (pardon the pun) to the Exxxon Valdez spill.
Re: Oil Rig explosion/Gulf Oil Spill local papers are probably too busy kissing jindal's ass, and the national media being add doesnt have time to look into things like that. i mean, real investigative reporting? surely you jest.
Re: Oil Rig explosion/Gulf Oil Spill I'm not. Newspaper staffs have been decimated and the reporters that still have jobs are often covering multiple beats in subjects they have no expertise in. At least, that's my experience up here. In the past few years, every long-standing arts and education reporters our staff had relationships with are either out of work, covering totally different beats, or moved out of reporting altogether if they're still employed at the paper. The two main arts reporters we're dealing with now have no background in visual arts whatsoever. One is a former restaurant owner/critic, the other's former beat was crime. The reporters who cover education likewise were moved from beats wildly different than higher education. All of these reporters cover multiple beats outside of the ones my college falls under. In many cases, this has worked out well of us...they're very glad to be educated about what we offer and are clear that they're here to learn from us, and very happy when we spoonfeed features to them. On the other hand, they have less time to really understand specific subjects and even less real estate in the paper to devote to us. I don't know if the Times Pic and the Advocate have gone through the same downsizing as the Baltimore Sun has, but given the state of newsprint today, it wouldn't surprise me if they were working under similar conditions. There are stories to be told, but not enough manpower to cover them...or enough willpower by the papers' corporate masters to devote the time to develop the stories and space to lay out the facts. I don't necessarily blame them. They need to make money, and good investigative reporting can be a time consuming prospect, and the longer it takes to develop a story, the less money the paper makes. Plus, the public has the attention span of a mosquito and want the dirt NOW, tabloid style...they don't want to waste time reading, nor do they want to wait patiently for the facts in an investigative piece to unfold over time, as good investigative print journalism can take months to develop. The only way any political malfeasance, IMO, will get uncovered is if it's done by the broadcast media...who will only lightly skim the surface of the story and spin the more salacious details. They'll get the story out all right. They'll just dumb down the details and get about half of the facts wrong. Man, you have no idea how happy I am...every day...that when push came to shove, I chose the PR and marketing side of my profession. I was disappointed when a news career didn't work out for me, but it was a blessing in the end.
Re: Oil Rig explosion/Gulf Oil Spill I think the powers that be already know the inevitable is going to happen, which is probably close to a worse case scenario involving it reaching inland. They're just not ready to let the public in on it, because it would destroy what little hope is left.
