How Badly Will the Crude Oil Damage Our Ecosystem?

The overwhelming and simplistic thoughts down here right are these;

How can the most powerful nation in the entire world, a nation that has sent men to the moon, built gadgets and gizmos of every description, a nation that has numerous prestigious universities and hundreds or thousands of brillaint minds.....be defeated by a 7" broken pipe?....so what happens when something more sinister comes along?

As for compensation; Mr. Obama said his administration will not rest until everyone affected is compensated. IN reality, Mr. Obama's children will have graduated college and there will have been 4 maybe 5 Presidential elections before this is ever completely settled. * The Exxon case in your state took 20 years plus..... the California oil spill took 15 years plus......

Meanwhile we fear our state and the GOM itself, will be in a condition of disrepair.

The questions i posed are still open for comment because we are now accepting the fact that our wetlands, marshes, nurseries and wildlife habitats are dead and dying. Everyone discussed the Gulf Loop going to Florida and tainting the beaches and the Keys.....but myself and others have always been more concerned about the Westerly Drift....a small but reasonably strong current that would carry this crude across the entire coastal marshland of Louisiana and again, all the way to Corpus Christi. Its in that current now.

Lets see what the rest of CR4 has to say about these questions.

Thank you.

nm

As has been mentioned there have been quite a number of spills of oil in peacetime.

The huge volumes of oil spills during wartime must have dwarfed these yet the Planet did not collapse nor the sky fall in.

Accidents happen, I'm certain the people involved did not envisage this, nor would they want it to happen either, even if just from a financial perspective.

Certainly we should pe careful in our processes, but lets not drum up exageration and fear the worst when these things occur.

Too often people seek out some way of making mileage out of others misfortune!

Numerous tankers were sunk during WWII. BUt they were mostly sunk in open ocean , not in the GOM where currents simply take the oil, around and around.

The world will not end on this note, but the 4,000 species of fish and other marine life that live in these marshes will face decimated numbers for years.

There is nothing in my questions that bear exaggeration. I am asking questions here because I do not exaggerate and I want some good answers. This oil spill has already altered the ecosystem of the GOM for years to come, maybe decades and if it goes to August and/or a hurricane runs through it....it'll be a century plus.....no exaggeration.

Pearl Harbour would show some fantastic example of oil spill and subsequent regeneration in encosed waters. Is it worth the time to look?

"This oil spill has already altered the ecosystem of the GOM for years to come, maybe decades and if it goes to August and/or a hurricane runs through it....it'll be a century plus.....no exaggeration." and yet previously in the same paragraph you said "There is nothing in my questions that bear exaggeration"

Your statement shows that you have no evidence but are suggesting a 100 year timeframe to restore to pre spill times, and yet you have no scientific or anecdotal evidence but upon which to base your predetermined view.

I much prefer facts presented acurately so that all situations are treated with honesty.

Tim

My error. I did not specify my sources.

Pearl Harbor and the GOM have two distinct sediment layers and very different tidal flows. Check the USGS charts.

This statement was made by biologists from one of the universities along the coast that does the SeaMap surveys. His response un-official was that the leaching and residual effects could be as long term as 100 years if the oil continues to spill into the nurseries and rookeries ( until August).

If you look at the geography of Louisiana you will see coastal and inland marsh systems. A hurricane with no more than a 15' tidal surge will push the oil into the inland marsh and THAT he said would create such a huge chemical "burn" over this area as to require several generations of marine life to reach pre- spill conditions.

Send a qucik note to the Prince William Sound Science Center. Ask them about long term recovery of their fisheries....and they have no marsh ...just rocks, sediment and sand.

Just because I am not citing and naming scientists, does not mean these statements were made up.

Look, I would be very glad for all of this to clear up by next year and make me and the other citizens along the coast look foolish. I'd be the first one to say i was acting like Chicken Little.

If you have not been to Louisiana and have never tramped through the marshes or sunk your boots deep in some methane laden "cajun quick sand"....you can not imagine how fragile this area is. It can recover from floods and hurricanes within 18 months or less as that is what nature intended it to do ......but heavy crude and dispersant?

I am still asking the questions.

Thank you for your reply and there is no disprespect meant for your thoughts on my comments.

nm

How can the most powerful nation in the entire world, a nation that has sent men to the moon, built gadgets and gizmos of every description, a nation that has numerous prestigious universities and hundreds or thousands of brillaint minds.....be defeated by a 7" broken pipe?

Money.

The Moon was explored because money was no object. Likewise, the oil would be retrieved from land or sea if money was no object. The only obstacle between stopping that leak and/or minimizing the damage is the lack of a money to made, or sufficient levels of money to be saved by doing so.

The 'hundreds or thousands of brilliant minds' will, given enough time, no doubt be able to come up with a solution, but unfortunately they are making the attempt in real time. Most of the 'gadgets and gizmos' you refer to were not developed while a live TV audience watched as a major catastrophe unfolded on their split screens. It is not clear that they will find a solution before August when the 'bottom kill' secondary well is expected to finish. Maybe it's just me, but I'm not really surprised that they are having so much trouble. When I confront a problem I don't usually expect that my first (or second or third) solution will work. No matter how smart you are (in my case not very) trial and error is part of the process.

So I think much of the anger being directed at the scientists and engineers working on the solution is misplaced. Their failure so far doesn't mean they aren't trying, or that they aren't competent. It means this is a really difficult problem to solve. I don't think the Coast Guard is to blame for not having their own fleet of submarines available. They can't just go buy some. That's congress's job. Remember that many folks in this nation have been for several decades on a campaign to:

• get the government off our backs
• stop wasteful government spending
• roll back environmental regulations
  

THIS R&D WORK SHOULD HAVE BEEN DONE BEFORE THE WELL WAS DRILLED. Clearly BP didn't do their homework, probably because they knew nobody would check it. They submitted their emergency response information with their drilling application, complete with details on how to rescue the local walrus and sea lion populations (my understanding is that they are very rare and perhaps on the verge of extinction in these gulf waters), and it was approved by the Bush/Cheney flacks who ran the MMS.

So I am not willing to blame the roughnecks, or the engineers, or the scientists who are trying to stop the flow. I blame the management of BP, Halliburton, and Transocean who turned a blind eye to the potential problems. I blame the federal government who obligingly got out of their way. And I blame the voters who twice elected two oilmen to the highest offices in the land. What could possibly go wrong?

Maybe if we just get really mad at the current administration, and elect a congress full of drill-baby-drill Tea Party types, we can get the hands-off, smaller, more 'efficient' government that we all need and crave. Maybe if we all stamp our feet really hard at exactly the same time (I'm sure FOX will help us synchronize our watches) the problem will go away.

PS: We could have sent a man to the moon several years earlier if getting him home was not an issue.

PS: We could have sent a man to the moon several years earlier if getting him home was not an issue.

That is so true. You just made me laugh enough to spill that last fresh gulf , fried shrimp........luckily we still have some hush puppies left!

Some TV experts have mentioned using tankers to siphon the oil. I'm certainly no seaman, but I wonder what could be done with barges. The oil is relatively immobile (or slow-moving), so why not park an extensive facility on a barge that'll filter the oil from the water? If it takes a year or two, so be it. If it's worthwhile to put a platform over a pool of oil and suck it up over a five-year period, then BP can damn well spend the same time and money sucking oil from water if you ask me.

Likewise for the idea of making barrier islands for the barrier islands, sand berms to intercept the slick. The Corps of Engineers has been slow to approve the plan, and I hesitate to second-guess another engineer working well outside of my area of expertise. But it sounds like the wetlands are the most valuable/vulnerable natural resource.

Now if you have a polluted swamp, would burning help hasten its recovery: build a berm/dam around the area, pump it "dry", then burn off the oil and poisoned vegetation? If enough toxins are removed, the vegetation should replenish the area "quickly." Is it even worth considering?

I suggest the DREDGE the mouth of the Mississippi where all the soil and junk washes down from up north.

Use the materails dredged to spray a cover the silt over the reed beds and bird nesting sites even along the marshes where oil washes in.

I would say 3 to 5 years of real bad damage and then as the oil breaks down more less damage and the return of some marine life and birds health.

Although birds can be really storng to rebound once there is a food source.

Nature has mechanisms to recover from such things. Once the destruction is complete, sediments will accumulate over the oil layer and encapsulate it. Life will then re-establish on top of the sediments. This may take 10-100 years. Life will be very different (destroyed) for many years...

The only way to minimize the impact is to put all efforts to remove the oil floating in the gulf and to stop the leak ASAP! All I saw on TV was a few skimmers removing one or two barrel of oil a day. This is insufficient! you need to commission large tankers and suck all these slicks off the surface of the sea. Then use land based separation plants and tanks to store the water and oil mixture. You don't have time to do it at sea! Even the large slicks claimed to be floating at dept could be pumped that way.

The well is (probably) releasing 5K-20K barrels a day. You should be pumping at least that much if you want to minimize the impact on the shore line.

I see the same Double Riggers working with the booms. i am glad they are making approx. $3K a day. I would like to see a pumper every now and then scooping some of what they catch though.

It seems we are having a news black out . News crews are not being allowed in some areas for safety sake? Hell, they let them embed with Marines on recon in Iraq.

My questions are not being picked up so I guess its just not a good topic. However, I would like someone with a chemical background to answer the question about "gaseous" fumes from the crude and if the dispersant makes it worse.No hype or guesses but it would be nice if someone OUTSIDE the government or BP arena would let me (us) know.

Alaskan folks still to this day say the dispersant was worse than the oil.

Thank you for your reply.

nm