Are they still gonna scoff and laugh when they chant drill baby drill?

Jay Bookman has an update on the oil spill in the gulf: 

The news out of the Gulf just gets more and more grim.

Efforts to halt the flow of oil anytime soon have failed; the remaining options have an effective timeframe measured in months. And experts are warning that the flow estimate — already quintupled from 1,000 barrels a day to 5,000 barrels a day — may have to be quintupled again, to 25,000 barrels. If so, they say, the spill already compares in scale to the historic 1969 disaster in Santa Barbara, Calif., and the Exxon Valdez in 1989.

And by every indication, it’s going to get a lot lot worse.

From the Wall Street Journal:

BP PLC, the oil giant that leased the rig whose sinking last week caused the disaster, has failed in efforts using unmanned submarines to activate a shutoff device on the undersea well.

A stopgap solution BP is planning—covering the well with containers and pumping the oil out—will take weeks to roll out and is untested at the one-mile depth of this well, however…..

Industry scientists say the permanent solution is to close the entire well. To do that, they must drill another hole—through 13,000 feet of rock a mile under the ocean’s floor—that will intercept the leaking well. They can then pump in cement to try to plug the leaks.

This operation will take up to three months and is highly complex; the drills must precisely hit the leaking well—which is just seven inches wide. When a well off the coast of Australia blew out last year, it took five attempts over 10 weeks to hit the old well and shut it down.

Twenty-five-thousands barrels of raw oil a day, every day, for another month or two or three…

It’s just hard to grasp the magnitude of what’s happening.

From Environment News Service:

The oil spill, now 100 miles long by 48 miles wide, is being pushed onshore by the prevailing southeast winds and is expected to hit the Louisiana’s Chandeleur Islands on Saturday.

The state bird of Louisiana, the brown pelican, removed from the U.S. Endangered Species list only late last year, nests on the Louisiana coastal islands of Breton National Wildlife Refuge, which encompasses the Chandeleur Islands. Their breeding season just began and many pairs are already incubating eggs.

The weather forecast calls for “persistent southeast winds through the weekend which will push surface oil towards shore and hamper surface recovery efforts until a forecast shift on Monday.” And here’s the latest map from NOAA, tracking the spread of the spill from April 27 with projections through tomorrow, May 2.

But the enormously sad truth is, the day-to-day weather reports may not matter much. Nor does the map. A spill on this apparent scale has the potential over time to devastate the entire Gulf coast — beaches, fisheries, human livelihoods, bird species — from Mexico to the west coast of Florida. We may be well into hurricane season by the time they get the leak capped, which could compound the damage in ways hard to imagine.

What a nightmare.

Posted via email from Jim Nichols