Disenfranchised Citizen

Yes, this many agendas...

It’s got to be hard to be a shrimper.

I know I certainly don’t envy anyone who makes their living by what they catch from Gulf waters, be they shrimpers or fishers or whoever, because things don’t seem to be getting much better. The catch, especially the shrimp catch is way off, with some shrimpers estimating their catch to be off by 80%. In one article I read, a company used to taking in ten thousand pounds of shrimp per day has taken in about 41,000 pounds all season.

And it isn’t just the shrimp.

Many have read reports of the killifish, and the cellular damage done to its reproductive functions and gills as a result of hydrocarbon poisoning. Many also are aware this small minnow like fish is near the bottom of the food chain and is considered a good indicator of the Gulf’s general health.

Even Ken Feinberg seemed to backtrack the other day on his estimation of a  recovered Gulf by 2013 when he said of the shrimp catch, “We are monitoring this, and we are sensitive to these concerns. We reserve the right to change the formula if anecdotal and empirical evidence justifies it.” And that’s about as close to an admission of error as one’s likely to get from Ken, not that he’ll actually change anything but I suppose admitting to a problem is the first step.

Oh and let’s see, what else? Ah yes, though the FDA has maintained the Gulf seafood is safe to eat, a new study has challenged this assumption, reporting the FDA’s qualifications on what constitutes safe are incredibly flawed.

So…bad catches, sick fish, FDA screw-ups…yep, it’s got to be hard to be a shrimper, a fisher, anyone working the Gulf waters these days…and besides the fact the oil’s still out there, you know what else isn’t helping, what’s making this whole Gulf Coast mess even worse?

Eighteen months later, the information is still inconsistent. We’ve been treated to eighteen months of profit margins, legal maneuverings and a whole range of answers and/or denials to every goddamned question…

Everyone has been forced to endure eighteen months of agendas.

The EPA, the FDA and the NOAA all appear to have an agenda designed to make it seem the Gulf is perfectly fine. British Petroleum’s agenda is all about savings and profit margin, all the time, and their stance too is that everything is okay in the Gulf. The Obama Administration has their own agendas, their own problems. For starters, they’re not seen as trustworthy, having initially ceded far too much control to British Petroleum in the capping of the well and the clean-up, and now, today, they are widely perceived as having forgotten the Gulf Coast even exists at all…

And all these agendas, they all bring us back to the seafood industry.

What exactly is a fisher supposed to make of all this? That person who is just trying to get their life back to normal, who wants to get back to work, but also doesn’t want to make anybody sick; what the fuck are they supposed to do? Who are they supposed to believe? Who are they supposed to trust? BP? The government? The FDA and NOAA? All these entities telling them everything is fine, or the increasingly negative academic studies, not to mention the fishers own years of experience in the Gulf waters, showing them that something appears to be wrong out there…

So hard to know for sure, and such an unenviable place to be.

And you know what really pisses me off?

It didn’t have to be this way, not at all.

If British Petroleum had stuck to their promises to make people whole. If Feinberg had stuck to his promises to take care of the people in the Gulf British Petroleum hadn’t gotten to, perhaps then the financial pressures could have been eased off on everybody. If the Obama Administration had done more than toss out a fucking speech and Barack had come down to Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida and done more than look concerned, pick up a tarball or eaten a damned shrimp…if Obama had worked, as a leader and kept the Gulf, and everything the Gulf means to this country in the foreground of American consciousness…maybe then these problems would seem more manageable today, to everybody.

If the only agenda in the Gulf had been to make sure people were taken care of and those responsible for this mess were held accountable…yes, if that had been the only agenda, then today in the Gulf we might at least have trust.

Instead, all we got are versions of what’s real: BP’s version, Obama’s version, the FDA’s version, the NRDC’s version, LSU’s, the shrimper’s, Halliburton’s and the GCCF’s version…just to name a few.

And that ain’t helping anybody.

Certainly not the public, and certainly not the people who continue to suffer as a result of BP’s catastraphuk.

So what now?

Wish I knew…all I hope for at this point is that Feinberg, for once, can be taken at his word, and he actually will take a long, hard look at the recovery estimates he based his methodology upon…because if you work harder to catch only 20% of the shrimp you normally get, the payment methodology needs to be changed.

Oh, and to the BP spokesman who said the 80% drop-off in the shrimp catch is within the normal range of good and bad seasons, you are just one more bullshit microphone with another ethically conflicted agenda, and you should be tossed into the next oil sheen spotted on the Gulf’s surface above the Macondo wellhead.

So, to sum up…a corporation screwed up and did billions in financial damage to an entire region of the country, not to mention the emotional toll on people and the physical toll on the environment. The people have recourse to the law, but that is a process that could take decades. The government issues false platitudes and seems to disappear just when they are needed most, almost as if they are backing the corporations that did the damage rather than the people who got screwed.

And nobody goes to jail.

Hey, now that I think about it, sure sounds familiar, kinda like what those people in New York are so pissed off about.

Maybe its time to occupy British Petroleum.

Have a nice day.

Precisely...

A new study published online yesterday reports the Food and Drug Administration vastly underestimated the cancer risk from seafood when the agency allowed commercial fishing in the Gulf to resume.

Miriam Rotkin-Ellman and Gina Solomon of the Natural Resources Defense Council authored the study where they found that by using flawed assumptions and outdated risk assessment methods, the FDA allowed up to 10,000 times too much contamination and didn’t identify the risks to children and pregnant women posed by eating the contaminants.

Based on the study, the NRDC filed a petition asking the FDA to protect the public by setting a standard that limits PAH’s in seafood. PAH’s can cause cancer, birth defects, neurological delays and liver damage.

And, wouldn’t you know this ain’t the first time the government’s testing of seafood has been called into question.

Remember this one, last year?

“Citing what the law firm calls a state-of-the-art laboratory analysis, toxicologists, chemists and marine biologists retained by the firm of environmental attorney Stuart Smith contend that the government seafood testing program, which has focused on ensuring the seafood was free of the cancer-causing components of crude oil, has overlooked other harmful elements. And they say that their own testing — examining fewer samples but more comprehensively — shows high levels of hydrocarbons from the BP spill that are associated with liver damage.”

Or how about this one:

A survey of 547 coastal residents in the four Gulf states by the Natural Resources Defense Council found they had seafood consumption rates far higher than those being used by federal and state regulators to determine if contamination levels pose a risk to human health, “What we are saying is our survey identified large numbers of people who are eating more seafood than the FDA (federal Food and Drug Administration) assumes in its guidelines. My assumption is there are thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people who are not protected by the FDA guidelines.”

Which of course leads a reasonable person to wonder…who exactly is the FDA trying to protect?

Perhaps it’s British Petroleum…

By the FDA saying it’s safe to fish, the fishers who might have questioned the safety of the seafood and refused to bring potentially contaminated fish to market would seem to have left themselves open to having their claims denied by the GCCF, as Ken Feinberg points to the opened waters and says, you could have earned a living according to the FDA, you simply chose not to, and that is not BP’s fault.

Or maybe it’s the Obama Administration…

To most people paying attention to what was going on in the Gulf last summer, it seemed that what the Obama administration wanted more than anything else was for this whole oil spill thing to just go away, from the all the oil is gone pie chart to the US Coast Guard bending to the will of BP at every moment. Not a big leap to see the FDA pitching in to help, declaring the seafood safe, and attempting to move the problems of the Gulf a little further from the minds of most Americans.

Well, the FDA certainly isn’t trying to protect the public…

I mean, they either really suck at their job, or more likely, they have been putting the public second in importance for decades…sincerely, ever done a Google search on FDA scandal?

Yeah, it ain’t pretty…and the FDA?

They ain’t right…who knows who they were trying to protect…quite possible they don’t even know anymore, especially when Big Pharma didn’t have anything to do with the oil spill. Without the pharmaceutical industry calling the shots, or Monsanto…face it, the FDA is just lost.

Read the article and the report:

New Study Says FDA Underestimated Seafood Contamination Risk After BP Oil Spill

Have a nice day.

Move along...nothing to see here...

Oil sheen…

Lots of oil sheen and lots of testing of oil from those sheens…

And weeks later, the people of the Gulf Coast are no closer to determining just what the hell is happening down at the Macondo Well site, if anything…

And British Petroleum, the Coast Guard and the NOAA seem to be in no real hurry to find out either, and that’s a problem, a big problem. Just what in the past seventeen months do these three entities feel they have accomplished, feel they have done so well that the American public should extend them any sort of automatic credibility, especially if that credibility is to rely on their word alone?

I can’t think of anything.

The oil began to reappear in the middle of last August, and since then the public has been treated to denial after denial…from British Petroleum and the Coast Guard who originally said there was no oil to be found, until Bonny Schumaker, a pilot with Wings of Care, flew over and took film of the oil. Then the Coast Guard and BP said okay, there may be oil but it isn’t oil from the Macondo well, it’s from natural seeps, from a different reservoir. Then reporters from the Press Register took a boat out there, took some samples and had it tested…and found the oil is from the Macondo.

And the response now?

In a Sept. 15 email, NOAA’s Sherman suggested that samples collected by the newspaper might not actually be from BP’s well, which is designated MC252 and called the Macondo well, “Yes, the oil that you took was confirmed as MC252, but it does not necessarily mean it is in any way related to the (Deepwater Horizon) spill. Most of the oil throughout the region can be preliminarily identified as MC252 type,” the email read. Sherman went on to say that NOAA’s Scientific Support Coordinator had consulted with the LSU chemists and determined that the oil might not be from the BP well.

Overton said federal officials were wrong. He said he rechecked the newspaper’s oil samples using the more refined analysis recommended by BP’s scientists and federal officials, “They were suggesting I had jumped the gun when I said it matched (BP’s well),” Overton said last week. “They are incorrect. I have double-checked, and I am even more convinced after using the suggestions that BP made that this was the Macondo oil. I think it is 99.9 percent confirmed that it came from that reservoir, “It is a dead-ringer match . I was amazed that the ratios matched as good as they did.”

Overton said BP also provided him with samples from nearby oil sources, none of which matched the oil collected by the newspaper.

Oops.

British Petroleum said at the end of last week they have done inspections with an ROV and failed to find any leaks around the main or relief well and they are now suggesting it is simply residual oil being released from equipment on the sea floor. They say they are continuing to work with the Coast Guard and the NOAA to identify the exact flow rate, I mean, to identify new sheens and where they might be coming from.

And that’s the point. That’s no longer good enough. It’s widely accepted BP was bullshitting everybody last year with their flow rate estimates back when the Macondo well was still spewing oil and the Coast Guard? Well, who knows what the hell the Coast Guard was doing at the time.

Again…their word? Don’t waste my time, especially when they have a little something called a hydrocarbon sniffer:

“There are instruments that can be deployed to detect the hydrocarbons,” said Robert Bea, a petroleum engineer at the University of California and a member of the Deepwater Horizon Study Group, which includes more than 50 top scientists. “The oil companies use subsea-towed ’sniffers’ for this purpose.”

BP officials declined to answer whether the company would use a hydrocarbon sniffer, which can trace oil in the water column from the surface to the seafloor.

“This is crazy. I don’t understand why they are not doing that,” said Overton, who with his colleagues recently earned NOAA’s “Superior Accomplishment Award” for oil analysis done for the government during the oil spill.

Yes, crazy…

It is crazy that it’s been well over a month since the sheens started to appear, that petroleum engineers, the experts, are telling BP, the Coast Guard and the NOAA what needs to be done here, yet nobody is doing it while at the same time, British Petroleum has begun the process to begin drilling again in the Gulf of Mexico…or maybe it isn’t crazy at all, maybe this is the reason the sniffers aren’t being deployed. Maybe British Petroleum doesn’t want to know what’s going on down there and would rather just assume everything is fine, you know, kind of like when they decided to not bother running tests and just assume the original cementing job at the Deepwater Horizon was good, or when they just assumed they didn’t need the extra centralizers down in the well either…

Hell, they thought it’d be just fine then too and gosh, it sure was cheaper.

Enough already.

Read the articles:

LSU confirms oil from BP well; feds collect samples

Time to take oil sheen seriously (editorial)

Have a nice day.

It ain't easy being green...

The oil that washed ashore after tropical Storm Lee…fresh as ever!

“Auburn University experts who studied tar samples at the request of coastal leaders said the latest wave of gooey orbs and chunks appeared relatively fresh, smelled strongly and were hardly changed chemically from the weathered oil that collected on Gulf beaches during the spill. The study concluded that mats of oil – not weathered tar, which is harder and contains fewer hydrocarbons – are still submerged on the seabed and could pose a long-term risk to coastal ecosystems.”

And whereas BP continues to do beach clean-up post tropical storm, they sure aren’t commenting on Auburn’s conclusions…which I suppose is understandable as they are busy these days, you know, in court, meeting with Judge Carl Barbier in the latest status conference, this time to argue against state punitive damages. Andrew Langer, attorney for British Petroleum contends that Barbier already ruled on these damages August 26th by saying OPA and federal maritime law governed in this case which would render state law null and void, but Corey Maze, the deputy attorney general from Alabama, argued otherwise by saying if states are unable to recover damages under state law, this strips the states of the power to protect themselves.

Barbier, seeming to side with the states, proposed the rocket launch theory, “We’re talking about state sovereignty,” Barbier said, addressing BP attorney Andrew Langan. “You can imagine scenarios … where someone launches a rocket from federal waters and it lands on someone’s property in Louisiana or Alabama and lands on someone’s roof and causes death. … You don’t think someone in Alabama or Louisiana could file a claim?”

The main question would appear to be that even though OPA and federal maritime law govern in this case, can states seek punitive damages to “fill in the gap,” this gap being potentially necessary because the federal government is under no legal obligation to give money recovered in fines under the Clean Water Act to the Gulf region. A Senate bill with bipartisan support that will give 80% of fines collected to the region is making its way through committee, but in these days of the Tea Party, who can trust Congress to do what’s right for the people? Judge Barbier gave each of the parties a week to submit legal briefs on the matter and presumably, Barbier will rule on this at the next status conference which is set for October 21st, with the actual trial set to begin in February…

If that trial is even necessary:

What?

Yes: Analysis: BP oil spill report may prompt $30 billion pay-out

Findings of the second major investigation by the U.S. government into the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, may press BP into putting over $30 billion on the table to quickly settle its outstanding legal headaches. The report, released on Wednesday, was even more damning of BP’s behavior than the Presidential panel’s findings, which were issued in January and February. Both reports also highlighted mistakes made by BP’s contractors, driller Transocean and cement specialist Halliburton. The investigations have not left London-based BP eager to face the Department of Justice or civil claimants in court.

“We would like everything settled as soon as we can, otherwise you have lingering reputation issues and investor uncertainty,” one insider said after the latest report.

At issue is whether BP will be ruled grossly negligent which will dramatically increase their per barrel fines under the Clean Water Act and after the report by the Joint Investigation Team of the Federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement and the Coast Guard this is something that looks increasingly likely.

Stuart Smith writes a solid analysis of this legal end and the advantages BP might have by offering a settlement instead of actually going to trial, which of course revolves primarily around money. A settlement, instead of a long drawn out trial could allow BP to finally clean up their corporate image by putting this whole episode behind them, and if they were to go to trial and lose, be found grossly negligent and in addition ordered to pay punitive damages, the cost could far exceed a $30 billion dollar offer. British Petroleum obviously wouldn’t want to face a loss like that. Their company remains in financial trouble enough and that kind of judgement, well…that kind of judgement would be like a rocket launch from a Louisiana courthouse straight into BP’s corporate headquarters.

Or maybe, tar balls continuing to wash up on their shores.

Have a nice day.

Woah...BP did it...almost got that one past me...

…that this whole Deepwater Horizon thing, the oil spill? Yeah, I think British Petroleum’s to blame.

Could be due to the testimony of their own employees:

“BP petrophysicist Galina Skripnikova in a closed-door deposition two months ago told attorneys involved in the oil spill litigation that there appeared to be a zone of gas more than 300 feet above where BP told its contractors and regulators with the then-Minerals Management Service the shallowest zone was located. The depth of the oil and gas is a critical parameter in drilling because it determines how much cement a company needs to pump to adequately seal a well. Federal regulations require the top of the cement to be 500 feet above the shallowest zone holding hydrocarbons, meaning BP’s cement job was potentially well below where it should have been.”

Or maybe it was due to the report released yesterday by the Joint Investigative Team of the Federal Bureau of Ocean Management, Regulation and Enforcement and the US Coast Guard which states:

“BP’s failure to fully assess the risks associated with a number of operational decisions leading up to the blowout was a contributing cause of the Macondo blowout,” and “BP’s cost- or time-saving decisions without considering contingencies and mitigation were contributing causes of the Macondo blowout.” The report notes that “at the time of the blowout, operations at Macondo were significantly behind schedule” and more than $58 million over budget.”

In any case…what concerns this writer most is whether or not British Petroleum’s actions will fall into the categories of “gross negligence” and “willful misconduct.” Simply put, the basic fine under the Clean Water Act is $1100 dollars per barrel spilled, but if the company doing the spilling is found to be “grossly negligent” that fine jumps to $4300 dollars per barrel and at a government estimate of 4.9 billion barrels, that’s a big difference in price.

And considering the joint report, it would certainly appear what many have suspected all along, British Petroleum, in a rush for profits, put at risk the safety of its own workers, the entire environment of the Gulf and all those who live along it and beyond.

But did BP’s decisions reach the level of being grossly negligent?

According to the New York Times:

“The report concluded that BP, as the well’s owner, was ultimately responsible for the accident.”

BP was ultimately responsible, that’s pretty damning, especially when one considers one of the best ways to dispute a claim of gross negligence is to spread the blame around as much as possible…which is why it is of little surprise British Petroleum’s response to the report is the following:

“BP agrees with the report’s core conclusion — consistent with every other official investigation — that the Deepwater Horizon accident was the result of multiple causes, involving multiple parties, including Transocean and Halliburton,” the company said. It added that it had taken steps to improve its safety practices and strengthen oversight of its contractors.”

Improving its safety practices…

Because Prudhoe Bay and Texas City weren’t enough of an indication something was very wrong…nope, needed the Deepwater Horizon for them to finally get it, or say they got it, again…

Make them pay.

They’re still picking up tar balls on Gulf Coast beaches, what…17 months later?

Have a nice day.

Come back to the Gulf...you're welcome.

The aftermath of Tropical Storm Lee continues to demonstrate to people like the Coast Guard, British Petroleum, Ken Feinberg and various members of the Obama administration just what happened to all the missing oil…apparently it’s still below the surface of the water, waiting for the opportunities presented by hurricanes and tropical storms to come up on the beach and say, “Hey guys!”

“”In some locations, the mats fell apart and tar balls blew up the beach and into the back marsh,” Norman (Land Manager for the Wisner Donation Trust) said. “The surge also uncovered oil snare and pieces of equipment that got buried during the BP oil spill response, including all these stakes that were used to hang the snare in the water to catch oil.” Norman said a BP representative was inspecting the beach on Wednesday, even as she and her staff were assessing the oil and equipment.”

Norman also had some unkind words for the work of the British Petroleum’s oil spill response, which included the building of barriers to keep oil out of the wetlands, barriers which were never removed and are now creating some difficulty.

“”They had built a huge land bridge and three sheet metal dams to close breaches and prevent oily water from moving inland,” Norman said. “We asked when they installed them to remove them when they were no longer needed. When the storm came in, all of a sudden, we’ve got brand new breaches in areas where it never breached before. They’ve completely altered the hydrology along the beach,” she said.

At several spots where contractors did use heavy equipment to dig out tar mats last year, the unconsolidated sand used to fill the holes has washed out and been lost to the beach, Norman said. Norman said the uncovering of the new tar mats and tar balls should come as no surprise. The trust has been complaining to BP and Coast Guard officials for months about oil remaining just beneath the surface of the beach sand and just offshore.”

British Petroleum…the gift that keeps on giving. In fact, they’re doing everything they can.

Read the article:

Tropical Storm Lee surge reveals tar mats on Fourchon Beach

Have a nice day.

The lawyer says:

It ain’t what you know, it’s what you can prove…

The toxicologist says:

Lawyers don’t know a whole hell of a lot about toxicology…

“Nicholas Forte has spent the last year with an array of health issues. Headaches. Migraines. Nausea. Breathing problems so severe they would land him in the hospital.

“We have no idea what it is,” the 22-year-old Battle Creek resident told Michigan Messenger. “Then it escalated to seizures.” And while the seizures landed him in the hospital — at one point stopping his heart and his breathing — doctors are at a loss to understand why. Tests indicate none of the expected patterns for epilepsy.

Finding out why the formerly healthy young man had suddenly fallen ill drove him and his family to listen to Riki Ott, an environmental toxicologist who has been tracking the health impacts of oil spills on human beings since her home was impacted by the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska. Ott was in Battle Creek Wednesday night at the invitation of local activists. And when Forte asked Ott about his symptoms, she nodded an affirmative.

“We see that in 16-year olds in the Gulf,” she said. And Forte was not the only person she may have given much-needed answers to. Nearly 50 people gathered to talk about headaches, nausea, burning eyes, memory loss and rashes. There were young and old, African-Americans and whites, rural residents and city dwellers, all with one thing in common — they live by the Kalamazoo River and were exposed to last year’s Enbridge Energy Partners Lakehead Pipeline 6B.”

Ken Feinberg says, “Jesus, you didn’t actually watch all that did you? No? Thank God…oh, and she hasn’t proved a thing. Just check the methodology.”

Have a nice day.

Nothing to see here...

Is it arrogance?

What possesses people in charge of a corporation to dispel rumors of a newly leaking wellhead by simply saying the wellhead is no longer leaking without providing video proof?

Especially when that company is responsible for unleashing the worst environmental disaster in this country. Especially when that company has been less than honest in the past…especially when financial self-interest was at stake.

From Robert Cavner, in an article about BP’s past and the new sheen:

“They got away with the “well integrity test,” which actually became the permanent shut in of the well, and they successfully P&A’d MC252 in November 2010. You might also recall that BP did this while avoiding actually capturing (measuring) the total flow from the well. Because the total flow was never measured, BP has contended that the flow from the well was far less than any other independent expert has estimated, a key tactic in defending themselves from liability claims.”

So, BP runs a ROV camera down at the well site and then reassures the public they’ve looked at the pictures and can say for certain the well remains sealed.

Yet they don’t show the public the pictures?

Now, I don’t write the latter because I believe BP is necessarily lying, or attempting more obfuscation. I write this because it really pisses me off British Petroleum thinks their words can be taken as fact. Right, might as well put David Vitter in charge of the NOPD’s Vice department… And what makes BP think they still have integrity, can do as they like without providing proof? What gives them that nerve?

Last I checked, none of them have done a day in jail.

Have a nice day.

The truth is so...the truth, well, it can just be so...messy.

Ed. Note: Times Picayune now reporting investigators from both BP and the Coast Guard have gone out to the well site and found nothing. BP plans to send a ROV down to the seafloor tonight to determine if the well is leaking. Also, tests on the oil sheen spotted by Press-Register reporters has come back as a match to the oil that spilled last year. So, according to USCG and BP, no oil today, but the oil yesterday is a match to the Macondo…I feel better?

Reporters from the Alabama Press Register were out on the water near the Macondo Well site to investigate reports, floating around for over a week now, about new oil sheens on the Gulf’s surface:

“The Press-Register reporters located the area where the oil was rising to the surface by going to a point directly over the Macondo well and then moving in the direction of the prevailing surface current. The first blobs of oil seen on the surface were detected about a half-mile from the well. The frequency of the sightings increased gradually over the next half-mile.

In the Olympic swimming pool-sized area where the oil was rising most frequently, new sheens were erupting every few seconds on all sides of the 36-foot boat.

Marcus Kennedy, who piloted his fishing boat, the Kwazar, 115 miles from Dauphin Island to the well site, said he was stunned by the heavy petroleum scent in the air. A nearby data buoy recorded winds of less than 2 mph at the time”

Now, reports differ on where this oil is coming from:

BP, of course, denies this has anything to do with the Macondo Well.

Phillip Johnson, a professor at the University of Alabama feels the oil is most likely residual, just oil leaking from the 5000 feet of riser pipe left on the sea floor or oil that had been trapped in various debris from the sunk platform that’s now worked its way free.

Ed Overton, an oil chemist, feels more investigation is needed, to find out what is going on, “There is no way to say for sure whether the well is leaking, based on what is on the surface,” he said. “Of course it is suspicious.”

The Coast Guard has determined the leakage is from natural seeps and permitted pollution releases at other drilling sites, but did not elaborate how this was determined, and said no boats had been out near the well location.

Robert Bea, professor emeritus at UC-Berkeley, after looking at photographs of the sheen said, “I think the primary source with high probability is associated with the Macondo well…perhaps connections that developed between the well annulus (outside the casing), the reservoir sands about 17,000 feet below the seafloor, and the natural seep fault features” could provide a pathway for oil to move from deep underground to the seafloor, Bea said.

Lot of opinions, lot of oil, lots of possible narratives…

What’s needed is the truth.

Perhaps along with that GCCF audit, US Attorney General Eric Holder might find an independent investigator to get ahead of this story now, find out what, if anything is going on in the Gulf, throw a wrench in the spin cycle and beat that dryer to hell.  When the Deepwater Horizon went down 16 months ago, the information appeared immediately slanted to fit a damage control agenda, truth be damned…so much so the Justice Department is now investigating BP for faulty oil spill estimates.

Not that we are headed for a repeat, but it might be nice this time, to start any sort of response to these sheens from the basis of truth.

Where are the sheens coming from? Is it likely there will be more? Is it coming from the Macondo Well?

Is there something wrong with the seal, with the sea floor?

Hopefully not.

But I’d sure like to know…regardless of whatever anyone who might stand to lose public relations battles or profit thinks about it.

“Last week, in response to Internet postings by lawyers and environmental groups describing a leak, BP issued a blanket denial, stating, “None of this is true.””

A blanket denial from British Petroleum, with little to no explanation.

Even if they are right, a blanket denial is not good enough, not this time.

Read the article:

Deepwater trouble on the horizon: oil discovered floating near source of Gulf of Mexico spill (Photo gallery, video)

Have a nice day.

is more than just what you can get the public to believe...

Ed Note: The USCG now taking a fresh look at pictures of the oil they previously denied was there.

Look, I’m not trying to play the role of conspiracy buff here, but if there is one thing any of us who follow the oil spill news knows, it is:

1. Truth takes a second place to narrative.

2. Order of response: deny everything, and if caught denying, then deny it again.

I think back to the arguments about flow rates, the toxicity of Corexit and whether it was still being used, about how much wildlife was being killed, the keeping of photographers and news people out of the spill zone, BP’s purchasing of scientists at universities, all the issues of transparency with the GCCF, the killing of cameras at the well head…etc…

It’s about the control of information, and with this control, the narrative can be manipulated in favor of BP, Feinberg, the government or whoever…whoever is paying the most to control said narrative.

So, keeping all that in mind, we come back to the question that Stuart Smith continues to investigate, what is going on at the Macondo Well? Is it leaking again? Is the sea floor rupturing?

Frankly, I sure as hell hope not, course my hopes are centered on the people and the environment of the region. I would imagine that BP really hopes not too, course…we know what their main concern is… Correct, the safety and welfare of adorable puppies and kittens worldwide, and especially in the Gulf. So, BP denies there is oil coming from the Macondo well site. BP denies they hired any boats to skim for oil. The Coast Guard (about as independent from BP as Feinberg) also denies the same things and so we can go back home now, get some rest, forget about it…

Yet, then we read:

BP’s Denial Upended: Gulf Flyover Surveillance Reveals Large Amount of Surface Oil at Deepwater Horizon Site

And then, the next day we read:

More Questions for BP: Why Is There a Massive Oil Production Vessel at the Deepwater Horizon Site?

And also:

Why hasn’t all the oil gone?

And one starts to wonder…

Are we fighting another narrative war, all over again?

Because BP and the Coast Guard denying any oil is leaking from the site of the Deepwater Horizon is a familiar one, it’s what they maintained days after the oil rig exploded and sank, days before the oil began to flow, days before their narrative was exposed as a facade.

Hopefully, that won’t be the case…again.

Have a nice day.