BP Gulf Crisis: Anderson Cooper and Billy Nungesser discuss success at using simple vacuum to clean heavy oil. Meanwhile, spill threat changes.

The following exchange is from a 'rush' transcript from the June 7 AC-360 show on CNN. Most of the first part of the conversation is between show host Anderson Cooper and Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser, with Douglas Brinkley joining in toward the end. Plaquemines Parish (county), in suburban New Orleans, Louisiana, has been hit hard by the oil spill.

The last part of the discussion I've excerpted is between Anderson and CNN anchor Tom Foreman, who summarizes new evidence that there's a second large underwater oil plume. BP has been denying the existence of the underwater plumes.

Of course you can choose to watch the podcast of the show. But for readers overseas who still don't understand why Americans are so very angry at BP, here's just one part of the transcript, which I've put in more readable form:

[...]

BILLY NUNGESSER: But we've ordered skimmers. We've got vacuum trucks.

ANDERSON COOPER: And you actually went out -- you know, that's been the big thing, what to do with these [oil filled] marshes, and you've been saying all along, 'Look, putting down absorbent pads isn't enough.' You actually went out this weekend with vacuums?

BILLY: We took a truck that vacuums out --

ANDERSON: Like port-a-potties?

BILLY; Right; put a truck on a barge, drove it out to the island [marsh] and sucked up several miles of that black [heavy oil] guck.

ANDERSON: You actually took a truck that's used like port-a-johns --

BILLY: Went out there and showed it works. Hopefully tomorrow we'll get approval from BP to put more suction equipment out there. We've made a proposal for the Kevin Costner-type machines as well as some other machines.

[See this Bloomberg report for more information on the KC machine.]

ANDERSON: We went out there today and saw oil all over -- [Billy?] saw it firsthand.

BILLY: We didn't see one skimmer.

ANDERSON: That's unacceptable.

BILLY: We've still got a lot of work to do.

[...]

The kind of vacuum that Billy was talking about is an ordinary industrial 'wet vacuum.' All the while BP has been stonewalling the most simple requests for the most simple measures and equipment to deal with the oil spill.

It took Billy Nungesser and other Louisiana officials appearing nightly on AC-30 for weeks, voicing their complaints, to get any noteworthy action from BP with regard to cleaning up the oil spill. But by now the spill has become far more difficult to deal with than in earlier weeks. From RTT News, June 7:

British Petroleum and Obama Administration officials responding to the ongoing gush of oil into the Gulf of Mexico are facing a new challenge as an oil slick 50 miles off the coast begins to break up.

Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, the top federal official overseeing the response, said Monday that the oil slick appears to be disaggregating itself.

"We're no longer dealing with a large, monolithic spill," he said at a White House briefing. "We're dealing with an aggregation of hundreds or thousands of patches of oil that are going a lot of different directions."

He added, "We've had to adapt and we need to adapt to be able to meet that threat."

Allen said the Coast Guard is shifting some of its skimming assets, boats equipped to scoop up the oil from the surface, from Louisiana to Alabama in an effort to deal with the patches of oil while they remain roughly 50 miles from the shore.

"This is an adaptation to the changing characteristics of the spill, which is no longer a single spill but a massive collection of smaller spills moving forward," he said. "What is becoming critical, in the near future we'll be able to get skimming capability offshore and be able to work those small patches."

The good news, Allen said, is that such smaller patches are allowing for the expanded use of "vessels of opportunity" - local fishing and work boats whose crews have been trained and equipped to assist in the skimming operations.

"Between Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, right now we have about 1,500 vessels of opportunities where we've certified the crews and put them out there," he said. "What we now have is an opportunity to match vessels of opportunity with skimmers."

"We have over 100 large vessels that are skimming offshore in and around the surface area above the well," he said. "What we want to do is take this down to a slightly lower level -- smaller skimmers and smaller vessels that can work in the harbors and the bays up to 50 miles offshore."

However, the newly separated oil patches make it more difficult for the Coast Guard to deploy booms to prevent the oil from coming ashore, on top of weather conditions that can defeat their efforts.

"Boom is not a silver bullet against oil," he said. "I think we have to deal with the reality that no matter how much boom we have out there, that this aggregation of this slick is going to cause oil to come ashore from time to time."

He added, "The question for us and the challenge for us is get quicker and agile where smaller units can get to back-bay shallow areas, and work offshore to find smaller patches of oil and deal with them as quickly as we can moving forward." [...]

Okay; here are more excerpts from the 'raw' transcript; the transcript website has more of the show's interviews regarding the oil spill, including the interview with Edward James Olmos and survivor(s) of the BP oil rig explosion:
[...]

There's a group called america's wetland.

00:03:31 And people are wondering, when will bp give money to the wetlands?

00:03:34 We're looking for $1 billion, not six berms from the fourth largest company in the world.

00:03:40 $1 Billion to refix the wetlands that are being destroyed by the oil.

00:03:44 And when you heard president obama today, how could he not erupt like that?

00:03:51 Because the more you learn the facts about this company just cutting corners on environmental safety and allowing this to happen, your impatience can't be there anymore, but you are starting to see bp even this many days later getting a little bit into stride and doing some of the symbolic and important things like you just heard in the gulf south.

In terms of bp, if they lifted this liability cap, there's some who say, look, this is not a good idea because it's going to make it difficult for oil companies, give them incentive to leave.

But in terms of this bill, getting bp to, under law, pay more than $75 billion to be a huge thing.

Absolutely.

00:04:30 It should be done.

00:04:34 The president's doing a right thing.

00:04:37 This is going to cost a lot more than $75 million.

00:04:40 Today was a big move.

[Skip part of transcript featured above]

00:05:26 More with billy and doug in just a moment.

00:05:30 We've got to take a quick break.

00:05:31 The live chat and up and running at ac360.com.

00:05:34 >>> Also, my day with edward james olmos out on the water.

00:05:36 His opinion.

00:05:37 Also new evidence to show you about those underwater plumes, the one that bp doubted for weeks.

[Ad Break]
00:09:52 >>> We're back talking about bp accountability, the white house and the breaking news tonight.

00:09:55 The administration fully supporting legislation removing that $75 million cap on liability payments for oil spills.

00:09:59 Joining me again, billy nungesser here with me and douglas brinkley in austin.

00:10:02 Billy, you met with bob dudley today, basically the new face of bp trying to confront this spill.

00:10:06 And you said to him that you needed more skimmers out there on the water.

00:10:09 And you put in basically a lot of requests to them.

00:10:12 >> We told them -- we put a lot of requests in for the suction equipment.

00:10:16 We showed it works.

00:10:18 The skimmers, we saw none out there today.

00:10:20 He saw the miles and miles of oil.

00:10:23 The thick stuff.

00:10:26 He saw the stuff that was in patches, tar balls, all over the water.

00:10:30 And we looked around, and there were no skimmers.

00:10:33 So we ordered 100 skimmers, and we turned in the request to put those skimmers on shrimp boats and let them go out and start attacking this oil.

00:10:41 >> You also said there's not enough resources being deployed to pick up these birds, pick up these animals covered in oil.

00:10:51 >> We've asked bp to make the contractor they hired, train 20 of our boat captains tomorrow.

00:10:58 >> So they have a contractor who they're paying, and only that contractor -- >> absolutely.

00:11:03 >> -- Can go out with wildlife people to pick them up.

00:11:06 >> Exactly.

00:11:07 We need to give them a course.

00:11:08 We had, last night, one of the boat captains brought in two pelicans, held them in his arms, while his wife drove him down there to turn these pelicans in.

00:11:15 He said, billy, I couldn't leave them out there.

00:11:17 They were dying.

00:11:18 The boats we saw coming back with pelicans in dog cages today, they put their hands up and said, billy, get us some help.

00:11:24 We're leaving birds out there that we should be bringing in.

00:11:26 We shouldn't let them wait till tomorrow.

00:11:28 They won't live.

00:11:29 So we've got to have more people out rescuing these animals.

00:11:31 >> It's pretty basic training, too.

00:11:33 I mean, I've seen them go out there withs and stuff.

00:11:36 They're basically grabbing birds.

00:11:38 >> Most of them can't fly, can't get away.

00:11:40 The ones we're talking about, if you don't get them in right away, they're going to die.

00:11:43 So we'd rather have someone untrained take that bird and give it a chance of living than say we can't do it because we have professionals doing it, that's absurd.

00:11:49 >> Doug, this bizarre situation, this entire disaster, I've never been in one in which a private company is essentially, I mean, government says they're the ones calling the shots.

00:11:56 A private company is sort of the -- I don't know, the sieve through which all this has to go.

00:12:01 So if you want to get more people out on the water rescuing birds, you can't just do it because there's a contractor who's being paid by bp.

00:12:08 That's what's been so frustrating, and I think the president's starting to change that paradigm.

00:12:14 He's making it very clear that the united states is in charge of this, that bp's going to do what we tell them to do, that they're going to pay.

00:12:21 And I think it's been -- the reason is that the president keeps getting information, and everywhere he works, whether it's from congressman markey, information coming in, or whether it's reports in "the wall street journal" or "new york times," this company seems to have lied numerous times to their safety record was a disaster coming into this.

00:12:42 And the obama administration, rightfully, did a couple of quick things that they probably haven't got enough credit for, the moratorium.

00:12:48 You cannot start doing well digging while this is going to be gushing for the next three or four months.

00:12:57 And number two, be cleaning house at MMS.

00:13:00 Now once he sent eric holder down to new orleans and the president made his third visit, you're starting to feel now that the administration is ready to really go after bp here.

00:13:10 They're getting enough information to realize what this company has done to that region.

00:13:16 And, again, it's not about getting a little bit of things.

00:13:20 People begging to bp for something.

00:13:24 This company should be paying $1 billion to refurbish louisiana's wetlands in the coming years.

00:13:28 And we don't need to sue them.

00:13:29 It doesn't have to wait for courts.

00:13:30 The "exxon valdez" took about a decade or 15 years.

00:13:32 That louisiana wetlands can't wait for that.

00:13:35 If this company wants to spend money on commercials, nobody's going to pay attention.

00:13:37 $1 Billion, people will feel that the company is feeling sorry for what they've done to this region.

00:13:59 >> Obviously, the moratorium on offshore drilling is very controversial down here.

00:14:03 A lot of people very concerned.

00:14:05 The governor wrote a letter to the president, concerned of the impact it's going to have on jobs.

00:14:11 What are you hearing from fishermen in terms of payment?

00:14:16 They said they've sent out a second round of these $5,000 checks.

00:14:20 There seems to be a disconnect of what I've been hearing from fishermen who, say, I can make $5,000 in a good shrimping day, it's now been two months and, you know -- >> bp has said they'll get that second check this week or next week.

00:14:34 And then they will have claims people on the ground to make everybody whole before the next monthly check is due.

00:14:40 And we've got to hold their feet to the fire.

00:14:44 And as he was saying a minute ago, the president did say in the last visit that he doesn't care who the contractor is.

00:14:52 If we've got equipment that can go to working, he wants it in the water working.

00:14:54 And so I think that's why we're turning all this -- we're finding equipment all over that we didn't know was available.

00:14:58 We're putting it in.

00:14:59 We want bp to pay for it.

00:15:03 We don't care who it works for.

00:15:04 We want it getting oil out of the marsh.

00:15:08 >> Billy nungesser.

00:15:10 Billy has oil-covered boots.

00:15:11 You've been out on the water all day, haven't you?

00:15:12 >> Yes, sir.

00:15:13 >> Appreciate it.

00:15:13 Talk to you again tomorrow night.
[Begin discussion with tom Foreman]

00:15:14 >>> The oil coming ashore, the oil droplets suspended in water, traveling these vast undersea plumes.

00:15:21 Now, until recently, bp wanted to see evidence that they even existed.

00:15:26 They denied that they existed.

00:15:27 Tonight the evidence is coming in.

00:15:30 And tom foreman has it.

00:15:31 Tom?

00:15:31 >> Hey, anderson.

00:15:32 A university of south florida researcher now says he has smoking-gun proof a chemical match between these plumes and the bp spill.

00:15:40 After extensive testing all around the gulf, taking about 130 water samples with these robots, all the way from the top down to two miles below, those researchers say this middle part of the water here, in some places, is filled with microscopic drops of oil.

00:15:54 Can't see them, but they can be chemically detected.

00:15:58 And as those robots passed through, they picked up this signature.

00:16:05 These droplets are believed to be the remnants of the oil that bp pounded with dispersants.

00:16:07 So yes, many, many barrels of oil were dispersed.

00:16:10 But they did not go away.

00:16:11 And bp now says it's looking into this information, anderson.

00:16:16 >> So where are these plumes, and how big are they?

00:16:21 >> Well, that's a good question, anderson.

00:16:25 The simple truth is, when they first found them here, let me move this one aside, the first was last month.

00:16:31 They found it generally in this area.

00:16:34 Now they found another one over in this area.

00:16:39 It's kind of hard for them to put a handle on exactly how big they are because these things, as I say, can only be detected chemically.

00:16:59 One of the concerns is this, the loop current.

00:17:05 You see it running right through here?

00:17:07 This little current right here, one of the concerns is that it will pick this up and carry it all the way up here into the east coast.

00:17:14 Both the surface spill and the subsurface spill.

00:17:16 But there's also some deepwater currents here.

00:17:17 And there's a concern about that because that could carry it this way, particularly those deep clouds of oil over here into this.

00:17:21 Remember, they're invisible clouds.

00:17:23 You can't see them.

00:17:24 But all these microfine droplets, these are all undersea, very deepsea coral colonies, anderson.

00:17:30 So a lot of concern about that.

00:17:33 >> [ANDERSON] Let me inject a note of skepticism.

00:17:37 If we're talking about oil drops so fine you can't even see them, how much danger do they pose?

00:17:41 >> Researchers, anderson, say this really is a case of uncharted water.

00:17:43 They've never dealt with anything quite like this.

00:17:44 In the worst case, what you're talking about is something where these clouds kill off microscopic organisms that feed crabs and they feed shrimp, and that filters up into grouper and amber jack and all the way into the sea birds up above.

00:17:50 So the whole food chain gets affected in the worst-case scenario.

00:17:52 In the best case, bacteria keeps eating these fine droplets until they are gone, maybe not so much damage.

00:17:58 But with no real handle with how much oil is in this cloudlike state, because we've never had a street read from bp on exactly how much oil is coming out, the danger level is anyone's guess.

00:18:11 >> All right.

00:18:12 Tom, appreciate it.

00:18:13 As always.

00:18:14 Should point out, we invited bp executives to come on the program again tonight.

00:18:19 They, of course, said no.

[...]

The oil spill at Buzzard's Bay

Below is a comment left at the Times-Picayne, the New Orleans paper that's doing a great job of reporting on Louisiana issues and efforts connected with the BP Oil Spill crisis. This is the first time I've heard of Buzzard's Bay:

Posted by Renewable1

June 07, 2010, 3:29PM

President Barack Obama has said, "BP is responsible for this leak. BP will be paying the bill,."The question is which bill is the president talking about? Is it all the bills to the federal government and the residential home owners property damage bills?

The residents of the gulf need to find out how they will get paid for residential property damage!

We have got ask if this is true then should all the residents of Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts receive their residential property damages from the oil spill in 2003 and if not why? The residents of Buzzards Bay have been waiting years for compensation!

On April 27, 2003, eight years ago the Bouchard Barge B-120 hit an obstacle in Buzzards Bay, creating a 12-foot rupture in its hull and discharging an estimated 100,000 gallons of No. 6 oil. The oil is known to have affected an estimated 90 miles of shoreline, killed 450 numerous bird species, and recreational use of the bay, such as shell fishing and boating.

Raghuram G. Rajan: economic fault lines generating more bubbles

In Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy, which a Bloomberg columnist reviews (see below), Rajan connects many dots. The most interesting connection, to me, is the one between poorly educated Americans and the U.S. government's "Let them Eat Credit" method of pacifying those whose jobs don't pay enough to allow them to keep up with the Joneses. Of course when the bubble bursts you're left with a lot of spoiled, angry Americans. Wasn't that the Greek experience also? Just asking.

June 8 (Bloomberg)

Chicago’s Rajan, Crisis Cassandra, Sees More Bubbles Ahead by James Pressley

Logic can be hazardous to an economist’s reputation, as Raghuram G. Rajan discovered when he predicted the credit crisis two years before it hit.

Far from welcoming the warning, peers savaged the University of Chicago professor for contradicting their sanguine views.

“I felt like an early Christian who had wandered into a convention of half-starved lions,” Rajan writes in “Fault Lines,” a timely look at how the crisis was anchored in a flawed financial order.

It’s fun to play Pin the Meltdown on the greedy bankers, meddling governments and lying homebuyers. Yet these individuals, for all their shortcomings, were only responding to three sets of fault lines, Rajan argues: domestic political pressures, trade imbalances and incompatible financial systems. These fractures continue to threaten the world economy, and “we risk going from bubble to bubble,” he says.

“Progressives in the United States blame the bankers, while conservatives blame the government and the Federal Reserve,” he writes. “The worrying reality is that both are to blame, but neither may have been fully cognizant of the fault lines guiding their actions.”

Rajan knows how to “connect the dots,” as he puts it. That’s how he got into trouble during the 2005 gathering of central bankers at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where he argued that financial innovation had made the system more risky, not less. The assertion was heresy at a time when Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan was enthusing about how modern markets were dispersing risk and policing themselves. Too bad. Rajan had found a flaw.

‘Market Could Freeze’

Banks weren’t merely passing risk along by selling mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations to investors, he said. They were holding many of those securities on their own books, exposing them to losses -- and undermining confidence in one another -- if the market sank.

“The inter-bank market could freeze up, and one could well have a full-blown financial crisis,” he said.

Though that is in essence what happened two years later, an audience including Lawrence Summers picked the paper apart. Summers, who now heads the National Economic Council at the White House, derided Rajan’s “slightly lead-eyed premise.”

In “Fault Lines,” Rajan traces some unexpected trends, including college drop-out rates and unemployment benefits. His argument, crudely compressed, goes like this:

The supply of university-educated American workers hasn’t kept pace with demand sparked by technological advances. The shortfall has fed a widening income gap, with pay stagnating or falling for the some seven out of 10 Americans who lack a degree, he says.

Eating Credit

How do politicians in the land of the free respond? They speed “the flow of easy credit to those left behind,” Rajan says in chapter one, “Let Them Eat Credit.” And so it was that Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush both pressed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to ramp up lending to low-income families.

This is, of course, the conservative take on the crisis, and Rajan knows progressive economists like Joseph Stiglitz won’t buy it. No one in Washington forced Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. to gorge on commercial property. Nor did the government order American International Group Inc. to issue a blizzard of credit-default swaps. Seeking a middle ground, Rajan faults government and banks alike. [...]

Don't miss the rest of Pressley's review of Rajan's book.


The political calculus has been complicated by jobless recoveries. Until 1990, postwar recoveries were rapid, Rajan says; lost jobs were typically recovered eight months after the trough of a recession. Yet it took 23 months to recover lost jobs in 1991 and 38 months in 2001, he writes. The U.S. is ill prepared for these lags because unemployment benefits typically lapse after six months.

Do Something!

That puts pressure on politicians and the Fed to do something. Faced with a jobless recovery, the Greenspan Fed pushed rates down to 1 percent by June 2003. One upshot:

“The Fed was now effectively adding stimulus to a world economy that was growing strongly, with jobs being created elsewhere but not in the United States,” Rajan writes. Which brings us to another fault line.

Export-driven countries such as Germany, Japan and China depend on foreign consumers. Their supply “washes around the world looking for countries that have the weakest policies or the least discipline, tempting them to spend until they simply cannot afford it and succumb to crisis,” Rajan says. The U.S. thus became the world’s “reliable stimulator of first resort.”

Suggested Fixes

Rajan’s writing is clear and direct, even when he litters the text with numbered points. Yet when it comes to his suggestions for fixing the system, he can be frustratingly incremental and vague.

He does offer some sound ideas about how to strip banks of “perverse incentives” and make them easier to wind down. Yet he largely argues for keeping the current system intact and thus runs the risk, as he says, of “being dismissed as a conservative, an unregenerate apologist or, worse, a toady of banking interests that favor the status quo.”

Let the shouting begin.

“Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy” is from Princeton (260 pages, $26.95, 18.95 pounds). To buy this book in North America, click here.

(James Pressley writes for Muse, the arts and leisure section of Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer on the story: James Pressley in Brussels at jpressley@bloomberg.net.

"It seems that Afghanistan is condemned to an open-ended civil war."

On June 4 a three-day peace jirga (conference), orchestrated by Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai, wrapped up with all 1,600 delegates from around the country and from all walks of life completely agreeing with his plan to seek reconciliation and reintegration with the Taliban. In a rich irony al Jazeera turned to Robert Grenier for an opinion on the show of solidarity.

Grenier, who'd spent most of his long career at the CIA abroad, was also one of the CIA's most experienced officers in southwest Asia at the time of the 9/11 attack. From 1999 to 2002 he was the CIA station chief in Islamabad and helped plan the brilliant covert operations that supported the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.

To show that no good deed goes unpunished he was then brought to CIA headquarters and promoted to head the newly-formed Iraq Issues Group, where he helped plan the brilliant covert operations in support of the invasion of Iraq.

He was then kicked even higher upstairs until he landed, in 2005, as chief of the National Counterterrorism Center. A year later he was gone from the CIA: pushed out by a personality conflict or because his approach didn't fit with the Bush administration's views on counterterrorism, or fired by CIA head Porter Goss because of leaks on his watch about waterboarding and secret interrogation sites, or because he quit when he couldn't take working in the Emerald City anymore, take your pick.

What everyone can agree on today, I think, are these observations from the Washington Post in February 2006:

Grenier's departure comes at a time when the agency is bleeding top talent, robbing the CIA of institutional memory and damaging morale among case officers and analysts.

Since Porter J. Goss became director in September 2004, well over a dozen senior officials -- several of whom were promoted under Goss -- have resigned, have retired early or have requested reassignment. Grenier was the third person to be head of counterterrorism since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Like Grenier, most of those leaving the agency had spent their career in the clandestine service and had years of experience in the Middle East and, more specifically, with al Qaeda.

Now Robert Grenier brings all his experience to bear in his analysis of Karzai's attempt to make peace with the Taliban:

... In many ways, this conference was a reflection in miniature of the fundamental flaws of the present Afghan government: Though perhaps broadly representative, its roughly 1,600 participants were selected by the regime.

They did not include any genuine representatives of the insurgent groups to whom they were supposed to appeal.

Indeed, the gathering was denounced and physically attacked by the Taliban, and branded a "useless exercise" by the insurgent Hizb-i-Islami.

To the casual observer, the peace jirga might have seemed a genuinely consultative search for a means of achieving peace with the insurgents.

Some 28 committees were established to make proposals, which they then submitted to the chairman, Burhanuddin Rabani.

The results of those deliberations seemed strikingly familiar, however, and broadly reflective of policies touted by Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, for some time: Guarantees of amnesty and safety, as well as job-related incentives for former Taliban foot-soldiers willing to lay down their arms; the release of insurgents held in US and Afghan prisons, presumably to accept the same deal offered to their former Taliban comrades; the removal of certain Taliban leaders from the UN blacklist and arrangements for their "asylum" in a Muslim country where peace negotiations could be held.

At the same time, at least some delegates lobbied strongly against sacrificing recent gains in democracy and women's rights as part of any appeal to the Taliban.

Indeed, many of the jirga participants had the distinct impression that the conclusions reached by the gathering had in fact been fore-ordained.

Disregarding democracy

Regardless of the results of the peace jirga or how they were arrived at, however, it seems unlikely that its decisions will lead to peace anytime soon.

"Now the path is clear, the path that has been shown and chosen by you, we will go on that step-by-step and this path will, inshallah, take us to our destination," intoned Karzai to the delegates as they prepared to depart.

Reconciliation cannot be imposed unilaterally, however, and an uncomfortable fact remains: There is no partner willing to walk down the designated path with Karzai.

Their missile strikes and attempted suicide attack on the jirga site only served to underscore the Taliban's long-standing message: The Karzai government is an illegitimate, foreign-imposed entity meant to serve foreign interests, with which the Taliban will deal only after the foreign forces supporting it have left.

If and when the departure of US, NATO and other foreign forces is achieved, however, it is hard to imagine that the Taliban would deal with a fundamentally weakened Kabul regime through negotiations: One suspects the Taliban has other, rather harsher measures in mind.

Indeed, assuming that attempts to weaken or marginalise the Taliban leadership by luring away its fighters will enjoy little more success than such efforts have in the past, it is impossible to imagine what a negotiated solution between the Kabul government and Taliban would look like, or what sort of coherent national political structure it could produce.

The clerically-dominated Taliban has never shown much regard for even traditional tribal Afghan democratic norms - to say nothing of elections.

Indeed, one of the consistent complaints against Mullah Omar back when his movement controlled most of Afghanistan was that he even ignored the deliberations of his own Shura.

Even if the Afghan constitution were modified to permit greater local autonomy in areas controlled by the Taliban, is it conceivable that the Taliban would act as another political party, willingly allowing itself to be voluntarily accepted or rejected by the people? What would determine the scope of Taliban control or influence other than force of arms?

It seems most unlikely that Mullah Omar, as commander of the faithful, would subordinate himself to any law other than God's, as interpreted through the Taliban's own bleak and obscurantist norms.

A 'divided house'

The current trajectory of events in Afghanistan is already tending toward a de-facto "soft" partition of the country.

Given the gulf between the governing norms of the Taliban and those of the Kabul regime -- or of the ethnic minorities who are its most natural constituency -- it is hard to see what sort of agreed common governing structure could be arrived at to establish peace and some sort of political coherency in the country.

It is similarly hard to see how and why the Taliban, after all it is a national and not an internationalist movement, would deny safe haven to al-Qaeda and other foreign militants, especially given the important support they have provided against what many see as foreign occupying forces.

Without a clear and verifiable break between the Taliban and al-Qaeda, however, it is unlikely that the US will entirely abandon the field in Afghanistan and acquiesce in the al-Qaeda haven which motivated its armed intervention in the first place.

Abraham Lincoln once said that "a house divided against itself cannot stand". The US had to fight a bitter civil war to overcome the profound internal divisions to which he referred.

Likewise, the peace jirga notwithstanding, it seems that Afghanistan is condemned, when all is said and done, to an open-ended civil war.

The precise form that this civil war will take, and the longer-term role of foreign military forces in Afghanistan once the counter-insurgency effort in Afghanistan's Pashtun areas has failed, both remain to be seen. ...

Forced resignations of Saleh and Atmar a fresh disaster for U.S. mission in Afghanistan

September UPDATE - CORRECTION
My apology to readers for not making the correction earlier; I forgot all about this post until now. From an interview Saleh gave a few days after his resignation, which I think I linked to in later post, Saleh was not fired or even forced to resign. Karzai was probably under pressure from the Obama administration to force him out in order to placate Pakistan's military, and he had become unhappy with Saleh's continued accusations that Pakistan's military was complicit in the Taliban attacks in Afghanistan. But Karzai knew what would happen as soon as he fired Saleh: scores of irreplacable Afghan intelligence officers would resign in protest. Given the very thin bench in the NDS, Karzai's government couldn't afford to lose that number of veteran officers. For that reason Saleh had stayed on, against his better judgment.

It was only when Karzai's fear of being assassinated by the CIA escalated to the point where he was no longer open to reason that Saleh finally threw in the towel and turned in his resignation. Predictably, he was followed out the door by at least 40 of the NDS's finest, who also resigned -- although that news did not surface in the press until just a few weeks ago.

Saleh said recently that he had 'tens of reasons' for resigning so he might not have hung on much longer in any event, but Karzai's anger about the attack on the jirga (see below) was the perfect time for Saleh to tender his resignation.

As to why several press outlets such as the Washington Post continue to mention in their reports, every time the subject comes up, that Saleh was sacked -- maybe the U.S. Department of State knows the answer.
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"The passing of Saleh, who has publicly accused the Pakistani intelligence service of being responsible for numerous Taliban attacks inside the country, is likely to delight Pakistan, which had promised better relations if he was removed."

I am shocked by Amrullah Saleh's ouster from Karzai's government, although I should have seen it coming. Karzai has completely capitulated to Pakistan's military regime.

Afghan interior minister and spy chief resign over jirga security breaches
Double resignation seen as 'disaster' for international efforts to improve country's security and reform police force

Jon Boone in Kabul
Sunday 6 June 2010 22.44 BST
Guardian

Two of the most internationally respected members of Hamid Karzai's government resigned today over security breaches at last week's "peace jirga" that allowed the gathering of 1,600 national leaders to come under Taliban rocket attack.

The resignation of Hanif Atmar, the British university educated interior minister, and spy chief Amrullah Saleh will be regarded as a huge setback for foreign-backed efforts to improve security and to reform the corrupt, barely literate and largely untrained police force.

A western security expert who has worked closely with both men said the double resignation was a "disaster" and ensured that the international mission in Afghanistan "was now doomed further".

He said: "These are two of the most important people in the security sector who were finally getting a better reputation for their organs and clearing up corruption within them. If they are replaced by corrupt cronies then we might as well all pack up and go home now."

The resignations also prompted speculation in Kabul that Karzai had seized the opportunity to get rid of two men he had lost trust in, despite the strong support they had from foreign embassies. Saleh was especially valued as a seasoned intelligence officer who, even before being appointed to head the National Directorate of Security (NDS), had forged close links with the CIA and MI6 when he was a key aide to Ahmed Shah Massoud, the legendary anti-Taliban resistance leader.

"The significance of their removal is very profound and speaks volumes about the growing paranoia in the palace about the loyalties of those who have been central to the Karzai administration for the last several years," said Candace Rondeaux, senior Afghanistan analyst at the International Crisis Group.

Foreign diplomats and palace insiders all say the relationship between Karzai and the two men has been stormy for some time, with the Afghan president subjecting them to ferocious tongue lashings, prompting Atmar to offer his resignation earlier this year.

Saleh told friends that he had been considering resignation after feeling he had lost Karzai's support.

"This was the final slap in the face for the international community," said one former senior Afghan diplomat. "It was their way of telling the Americans they can no longer protect Amrullah and it was their way of telling the British that they could longer protect Atmar."

The passing of Saleh, who has publicly accused the Pakistani intelligence service of being responsible for numerous Taliban attacks inside the country, is likely to delight Pakistan, which had promised better relations if he was removed.

But a palace official insisted that the resignations simply reflected a "major security breach and lack of preparation" at an event called to discuss plans for a peace process with the Taliban. "If the rockets had landed a few metres in a different direction then we would have had 1,600 people dead in the tent," the official said.

The Karzai aide also said that Atmar and Saleh explained themselves to a cabinet security committee today but their account was found to be "divergent from reality".

Today the interior ministry gave more details of how the attackers managed to penetrate a security perimeter manned by 12,000 security guards. A spokesman said two of the attackers disguised themselves as a couple, with one wearing a burqa.

A grenade launcher and an AK-47 rifle were wrapped in cloth and made to look like a swaddled child, the ministry said.

BP Gulf Oil Crisis: But sir, that's admitting system failure

Senator LeMieux: Obama not doing enough for Florida

By BILL KACZOR and MELISSA NELSON
Associated Press
PENSACOLA BEACH, Fla. (June 6, 2010) -- U.S. Sen. George LeMieux criticized President Barack Obama's handling of the Gulf oil spill Saturday, saying he hasn't done enough to help Florida and the other affected states or their residents.[...]

"I don't want to just see my president come down here and be here for a couple hours and then go back off to Chicago or go back off to Washington, D.C.," the Florida Republican said while visiting Pensacola Beach.

"I want him on the ground helping us work on the ground, managing through solutions, pushing people for answers."[...]

When it comes to the point where a country's president has to be personally overseeing every aspect of a disaster relief effort, that's saying the country's disaster relief system is broken or greatly inadequate.

BP Gulf Oil Crisis: Slowly, the truth comes out

"Before BP oil spill, Big Oil-led study urged feds to cut safety testing"

Mark Clayton, Christian Science Monitor, June 2, 2010

Blowout preventers – crucial safety devices in offshore drilling that are supposed to preclude undersea oil gushers like the one in the Gulf of Mexico – have failed 62 times during testing in Gulf waters over three years.

A 2009 reliability study of blow-out preventers deployed in the Gulf of Mexico also found that four of those breakdowns were "safety critical failures," meaning the equipment malfunction was serious enough to have allowed "an uncontrolled release" of crude oil from the well bore.

The study, which has not before been reported in the press, is an example of the coziness between government regulators and the oil industry that has been much criticized since the Gulf oil spill, some say. Funded mainly by oil companies but with participation by the US Minerals Management Service (MMS), the study examines whether it is possible to scale back the frequency of safety testing required on blowout preventers. Such testing "is costly," the study notes. "Thus, a study to evaluate the relationship between testing and its impact on safety and environmental performance was warranted."

Its conclusions? Less testing. The study recommended that pressure testing of most blowout preventer systems occur a minimum of every 35 days rather than every 14 days. That would save the industry about $193 million a year, according to the study's prospectus. However, for the least-reliable component of blowout preventers – the hydraulic and electrical control systems – the study recommended keeping "function tests" at their current weekly rate.

The reduction in testing was never adopted, but the study highlights federal reliance on industry recommendations and intensifies suspicions that industry interests have been trumping US safety regulations.

"You're letting the people being regulated get too close to the regulators," says a blowout preventer expert who is familiar with the study and asked not to be named. "Is this study an example? I wouldn't argue with that. Is it too cozy? Right on."
[...]

BP Gulf Oil Crisis: The cleanup effort wasn't hopeless, you ass

Richard Wolff, The Daily Beast, June 4, 2010

Obama Knew the Spill Was Hopeless

Critics have bashed President Obama for being slow to seize the political initiative in combating the BP oil spill in the Gulf Coast, now widely believed to be the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. The White House has battled back, releasing a timeline of events showing that Obama was briefed -- and deploying the Coast Guard -- within 24 hours of the Deepwater Horizon blowout.

What has not been previously disclosed: The president was not only briefed on the real-time events of the spill, but also on just how bad it would be -- and how hard it would be to plug the hole.

Carol Browner, director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy, told Obama at one of the earliest briefings in late April that the blowout would likely lead to an unprecedented environmental disaster, senior White House aides told The Daily Beast. Browner warned that capping a well at such depths had never been done before, and that they ought to expect an oil spill that would continue until a relief well was drilled in August, the aide said.

That early briefing on the scope of the spill -- and enormous technical challenges involved in fixing it -- might help explain the sense of fatalism that has infused Obama's team from the start.

Little that has happened since has changed their mindset. Now six weeks later, the president’s top advisers expect the oil spill -- and the negative stories -- to continue through August.

The fact that Team Obama was warned of the extent of the disaster so early on suggests that White House officials were aware of the environmental challenge long before they decided to demonstrate concern via presidential visits to the Gulf.
[...]
Given the lack of technical capabilities on the sea floor, there’s not much the White House can do to plug the hole. And there are limited options for effectively preventing the oil from reaching large stretches of coastline. Instead, Obama’s team is focusing on the options at their immediate disposal -- methods of news management and presidential communication.[...]

There were many cleanup options that were not pursued and the few taken up came only after leaders such as Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal spent weeks pushing for their implementation.

Caste in Pakistan and what it explains about violence in the country

Last night John Batchelor worried aloud during his "Afpak" roundtable that dehumanized descriptions of Pakistan's Ahmadi (Ahmadiyya) minority sect being expressed by other Pakistanis are a common sign of a buildup to genocide.

Dehumanized descriptions of people are as old as war, tribal rivalries, and prejudice. And there's no question that an increase in such talk has been a precursor to genocide and democide, and that such talk has been invoked by governments as a justification for both. Robert Mugabe's description of Zimbabwe's urban poor as "cockroaches" is an example of the latter, as John mentioned last night.

But in the case of Pakistan, dehumanizing language is almost universally invoked by Pakistanis to refer to other Pakistanis of a lower caste. Pakistanis have dehumanized each other to a degree that's hard for Americans to grasp because in the USA dehumanizing language has been greatly sublimated as a justification for war and prejudice.

Saddam Hussein, after he invaded Kuwait, was not described by President G. W. Bush as a cockroach that needed to be exterminated; instead, he was described as evil and in other terms that suggested he was satanic, which is another way of saying 'not human.'

In Pakistan and many other parts of the old world, even in this era things are still more basic, more in touch with the rawer aspects of human nature. I recall a heated exchange a few years ago between Libya's president and the Saudi king during an official dialogue, during which they started calling each other donkeys; the mike was shut off before they really got wound up.

So while rigid enforcement of caste in Pakistan didn't create dehumanizing language, it definitely exacerbated it -- and took it far beyond prejudicial language or choice insults.

In Pakistan, as I explained in Alden Pyle in Pakistan, Part 1, caste prejudice is a very serious, very dangerous matter. It's an invitation to harassment, gang rape, beatings, and even murder for those Pakistanis who deputize themselves as defenders of caste purity. And in all but the most horrific caste-related crimes, the ones that make national headlines, the government at all levels turns a blind eye to the vigilante justice.

To give you an insight into the double standard, there is a famous Pakistani non-Muslim, a Zoroastrian, who routinely expresses opinions in the Pakistani press that are offensive to conservative Pakistani Muslims. But he gets a pass because he's high caste. On the other hand Pakistan's President (a Muslim) is roundly and vocally despised by many (Muslim) Pakistanis because he married above his caste.

Is there a direct connection between the violence in Pakistani society and the dehumanizing aspect of caste consciousness? Yes; it's not the only connection but it's a significant one.

There's a widespread misconception in Washington that Pakistani-conducted terrorist acts in Indian Kashmir, and the insurgency Pakistanis helped mount against the Russians in Afghanistan, created a violent 'streak' in many Pakistanis.

This view has led to the concern that Pakistan's militants are now turning their violence on Pakistan society in ways that were never done before, and which could lead to all-out civil war. John Batchelor expressed this concern last night.

The terrorist bombings inside Pakistan over the past few years, including the two recent attacks on members of the Ahmadi sect, are misleading as an indicator of whether the society is becoming more violent.

You'd be amazed at how many people can be massacred in a few minutes by five men wielding machetes or gasoline and matches. Pakistan is no more violent today than it was a decade or half century ago. It is an extremely violent society and always has been. All that's changed is that plastic explosives and AK-47s make for more spectacular scenes of carnage.

Murderous violence carried out by 'ordinary' Pakistanis -- those not trained as soldiers or militants -- is made easier because many of the victims are seen as subhuman: above the level of a beast of burden but not fully human. That's what the most rigid form of caste consciousness does: it creates a mental category of subhuman.

So it's not exactly murder in the minds of those steeped in the view -- murder being something done to humans; it's seen as butchering. That's how they can go through life with an untroubled conscience after massacring unarmed people who're their countrymen.

Next question: Even if the society is no more violent than in decades past, can modern weaponry make it easier for civil war to occur on a grand scale in the country?

I'd guess that's a conceivable concern since Pakistan's top generals took a page from Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps and signified to the society's elite (including Ayatollah Khamanei, the commander of the country's armed forces) that they didn't run things anymore.

Iran's mullahs had always snapped their fingers, as did Pakistan's ruling families, and the militaries jumped through a hoop. Then one day Fido just sat there when told to fetch. Benazir Bhutto had to learn that lesson the hard way -- as did the CIA and MI6 in 2009, when they thought the power of Iran's mullahs combined with street theater and Twitter would be enough to topple Ahmadinejad.

Following that line of reasoning, if civil war on a grand scale is to come to Pakistan, I think it would have to arise from a major split in the country's armed forces, not from hordes of non-state actors wearing suicide vests. I don't think such a split exists at this time.

As to the recent attacks on the Ahmadi mosques (which can't be called mosques in Pakistan because that would be blasphemy). A lot of planning, effort, and money went into mounting the attacks. There has always been considerable prejudice in Pakistan against the Ahmadis but just because these were the first such attacks on the Ahmadis in Pakistan I would not leap to the conclusion that they represent an escalation in sectarian violence.

Instead, I'd look at the location of the Ahmadi mosques. One is in Lahore's old quarter. Lahore is the capital of Punjab province and Pakistan's second largest city. Lahore and environs are seeing hot competition for prime real estate. One of the mosques that was struck is located in Model Town, one of Lahore's most expensive residential suburbs.

Then I'd inquire into local disputes between businesspeople, real estate speculators, business interests among the city's most powerful politicians, etc. And, given today's news, I would try to inquire whether the Ahmadis have been keeping up adequate baksheesh to the local police and politicians.

Today's, news about the confession of a captured terrorist in the attacks raises the question about whether some police officials were involved with the attacks. That makes the very risky attempted rescue of a captured terrorist all the more interesting.

I'd do all that first before I'd assume that religious intolerance or an escalation in sectarian violence was the motive for the attacks.

For readers who are new to the subject of caste in Pakistan I'll again provide the link to a report by Shahbano Aliani, a member of Pakistan's (tiny) Communist Party. The Communists are one of the few groups in the country that are willing to speak publicly about the issue of caste. Because of the code of silence about the topic many Americans, including members of Congress, are unaware that there is caste among Pakistan's Muslims.

The report, titled Caste in Pakistan: The Elephant in the Room, only scratches the surface, but I think it's the best introduction to the topic for the general reader in the West.

The first time I presented the link, in the Alden Pyle in Pakistan post, I stressed that caste in Pakistan shouldn't be confused with 'class' or social station. There is a tendency in Pakistan and among caste apologists to present caste as merely a class or vocational phenomenon. This incident, taken from Shahbano Aliani's report, is not a mere class situation:

A pregnant woman from a remote rural village in Tharparkar goes to a private hospital in Hyderabad. The medical staff refuse to attend to her, saying they do not want to pollute their instruments and dirty their hands.

Low caste in Pakistan does not only mean 'bottom of the social order.' It also means subhuman. And when caste distinctions are rigidly enforced low-caste people are treated as if they're subhuman. Yes, there are laws forbidding this in Pakistan and no, the laws are not enforced in any meaningful fashion.

BP spends $50 million on TV ads in attempt to placate furious Americans -- but are Americans flogging a lame horse?

Anderson Cooper reported the $50 million figure on his June 3 AC-360 show (CNN, 10 PM EDT.) He also reported that BP had hired "scores" of former White House staffers and Congress members to lobby for BP, and that the company had taken out full-page newspaper ads, which can run into tens of thousands of dollars for just one ad, to promote its spin on the Gulf disaster.

(See the AC-360 website for the podcast of the June 3 report. See also the CNN website at the Gulf Oil Disaster Report page for continuing coverage of the disaster.)

Anderson spoke in the singular -- $50 million paid to an American ad agency for a TV ad -- but from a Los Angles Times report earlier in the day titled Gulf Oil Spill: BP airs apologetic TV spots) it could be that the price tag covers both the fee paid to the still-unnamed ad agency and air time in more than one TV market.

In any event the spectacle of BP blowing millions on self-promotion while many Gulf businesses are still waiting for compensation from BP is an outrage that will not be lost on the American people.

And the BP ad will now have to compete with heart-rending images of marine wildlife covered in BP oil and struggling for breath. CNN news released footage of several such images on their June 3 evening broadcast, which are also featured on the AC-360podcast.

If it seems to Americans that BP has an uncanny ability to say and do the wrong thing in their handling of the disaster -- the American public is finally getting first-hand experience with how peoples in the developing world are treated by BP (and many other giant transnational corporations). BP isn't handling things badly from their point of view. They're treating unruly Natives as angry children to be mollified while business as usual goes on between the company and the Native governments.

So far, the American government has given BP plenty of evidence to suggest that the company's well-thumbed playbook in the developing world is working in the USA. Despite showy (and counterproductive) moves in recent days; e.g., announcing a criminal probe of BP, the Obama administration has acted with the speed of molasses to deal with the oil spill in federal waters, preferring to let BP continue to manage the response to the pollution.

Why? One guess: phalanxes of BP attorneys would argue that liability shifts to the U.S. government if BP is shoved out of the way.

(For readers outside the U.S. who're wondering why the affected U.S. coastal states haven't done more to stop the oil pollution from reaching their shores -- because the oil spill floats through federally-controlled waters before it reaches state-controlled shore waters. The place to have stopped the oil spill from hitting the barrier islands and shores was in federal waters.)

What BP also sees is an administration greatly distracted by attempts to shield President Obama from blame and a do-nothing foreign office.

State could be putting bone crushing pressure on the British government to prod BP to take stronger measures to address the pollution. But the State Department is trying to juggle the Gulf disaster with the U.S. effort in Afghanistan, the American position in NATO, and U.S. attempts to maintain coordinated pressure Iran's government -- all of which means a soft-pedal approach to Whitehall. The priorities would reshuffle if the oil pollution destroys a large segment of the American economy but by then it would be too late.

Is there any way to get better results from BP at this time? American anti-BP activists are naively focusing their ire on Tony Hayward, the company's CEO. They might try shifting their focus to BP Chairman of the Board, Carl-Henric Svanberg.

Mr Svanberg, a Swedish citizen, came to BP without any experience overseeing an oil company. His previous position was CEO of Ericsson, a telecom that's one of Sweden's largest companies. Before that he headed another Swedish concern, Assa Abloy. The company manufactures locks. Before that, according to Wikipedia, he served on "a number of different boards," including a Swedish investment company controlled by billionaire Melker Schörling.

So what possessed the board of directors to choose a chairman who was spectacularly unqualified to guide the company through the risky new age of deep-water drilling in far-flung places around the globe?

I'd have to study Mr Svanberg's speeches and learn more about BP before I'd venture an educated guess. But taking a blindfolded shot in the dark: it might bethat he's a big backer of the global warming thesis and that this fits with BP's "Beyond Petroleum" meme. He could also be an ace at cost-cutting and 'streamlining' operations -- two areas that tend to short expensive research on worst-case disaster scenarios.

As to whether applying serious pressure to BP is really worth it at this stage of the disaster, this is the bottom line: BP has never had to deal with a disaster of this scope and complexity. I'm not sure they're qualified under any circumstances, and their learning process should not be at America's expense.

There's only entity I know of that could quickly muster an adequate response to the mind-bending logistics of dealing with the pollution part of the oil disaster, and that's the U.S. military.

Here we come to a snag. The White House and State Department are fearful of the high regard that Americans have for the U.S. military in this era -- a regard that does not extend to the Congress or White House.

The fear predates Obama's administration. By 2008 it was open knowledge in Washington that State was trying to clip the Pentagon's wings and downplay the accomplishments of the military. The effort extended to the Haiti relief effort this year, I might add.

State tried at first to mask the incredibly fast and efficient response of the military (including the Coast Guard) in Haiti and told the truth only under pressure. Even then, accurate descriptions of the military's work in Haiti didn't get far outside State's press briefings, military websites, and milblogs.

It's up to the American public, Congress, and the Obama administration. We can continue to flog a lame horse, or turn over responsibility for the oil spill cleanup to the one American organization with a proven track record at overseeing logistics on a grand scale.

Washington, Rawalpindi, and India

The weeks running up to the U.S.-India strategic dialogue in Washington (June 2-3) saw feverish activity on the part of the Obama administration. A gaggle of officials was dispatched to Pakistan on May 19 to deliver a vague but sternly worded letter from President Obama. Translated from diplo-speak it read, 'You better not blow anybody up while we're meeting with the Indians.'

The letter was not mentioned in the joint statement by CIA head Leon Panetta and National security adviser James L. Jones in their summary of the visit. The statement said that Gen. Jones "expressed appreciation" for Pakistan's "excellent cooperation" in determining ties the Obama administration says it has uncovered between the alleged bomber, Faisal Shahzad, and Pakistan-based militant groups:

The carefully worded communique referred indirectly to U.S. concern that a successful attack would severely undermine the countries' bilateral relationship and to Pakistan's insistence that it not be held responsible for actors over which it has no control. ...

But an unnamed Pakistani diplomatic source let the cat out of the bag. Pakistan's The Nation reported on May 28:

ISLAMABAD – Building up more pressure on Pakistan for early operation in North Waziristan, the US has threatened to operate itself against Taliban inside the Pakistani territories in case Islamabad dillydallies on doing more in this regard.

US President Barack Hussain Obama has conveyed this message directly to his Pakistani counterpart Asif Ali Zardari in his letter delivered last week by high ranking visiting American officials including CIA Chief Leon Panetta and US National Security Advisor Gen James Jones, highly placed diplomatic sources told The Nation here.

According to the sources, President Zardari has not yet replied in writing to a two-page letter that General James Jones delivered to him last week. In the first place, President Zardari during his meeting with these officials is said to have given no indication of how Pakistan would respond to the message. [...]

So it's an exciting time here in Washington with the strategic dialogue underway, as everybody glances at their watch every 15 minutes and jumps a foot whenever a car backfires.

I'll have more news on the strategic dialogue later in the week, but right now I have to struggle into my flak jacket for a lunch appointment across town.

BP Gulf oil disaster: Analysts skeptical of latest BP plan to contain gusher

Reuters reports:

BP moving ahead with containment cap to corral Gulf leakBy Kristen Hays
5:14 PM EDT

HOUSTON, June 1 (Reuters) - BP Plc (BP.L) (BP.N) started sawing extraneous pipes on Tuesday at the seabed site of its latest attempt to corral oil leaking from a ruptured well in the Gulf of Mexico.

Moving past its failed "top kill" attempt to plug the leak, BP focused on containment rather than stopping the flow.

"We're not talking about capping the well anymore. We're talking about containing the well," Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen said at a news conference on Tuesday.

BP is counting on a pair of relief wells being drilled to intercept and plug the leak far beneath the seabed.

But the relief wells, each begun in May, will not be finished until early to mid-August -- forcing the company to keep seeking a stopgap.

This week BP aims to place a containment cap with a grommet seal at the bottom on top of a lower marine riser package, or LMRP, that sits atop a failed blowout preventer at the seabed.

If the cap and seal work as hoped, leaking oil and gas will be channeled through a pipe that connects the cap to a drillship a mile (1.6 km) above the seafloor.

In addition, BP is planning to back up the containment cap operation by using seabed equipment installed for the failed top kill to pull oil and gas from the well and channel it to a different vessel at the water's surface.

BP expects that system to be ready by mid-June.

The company also is planning a containment system that can be interrupted if a hurricane blows through the Gulf. The 2010 Atlantic hurricane season began on Tuesday, and forecasters expect it to be active.

That would involve a riser that hangs 300 feet (90 metres) below the water's surface, and can connect to a hose attached to the containment cap.

If a storm approaches, the hose can be disconnected so the drillship can move out of the way, BP spokesman Jon Pack said.

The company has consistently said it expects up to a fifth of the leaking oil to escape the cap and seal.

SAW AND SHEAR

Pack said that a diamond saw held by one of several underwater robots at the seabed on Tuesday was removing pipes next to a larger, broken pipe -- called a riser -- from which up to 19,000 barrels (800,000 gallons/3 million litres) of oil are leaking into the Gulf daily for the sixth consecutive week.

At times, the sawing could be seen on BP's live seabed wecbam feed.

The riser bent and broke as Transocean's (RIG.N) Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded and sank in April, killing 11 workers.

Once the smaller pipes are gone, the robots will use huge shears to slice off the riser.

Then the saw will shave jagged bits to create an even opening for the cap.

Pack said oil and gas would "very definitely" spew from the opening during the operation. U.S. scientists said the move could temporarily increase the flow by 20 percent.

White House adviser Carol Browner called the possibility that the flow will temporarily increase "deeply, deeply troubling."

BP said the cap is expected to be deployed later this week.

The cap is similar in theory to a much larger containment dome that BP tried to place over the the end of the broken riser in early May. Cold seawater filled the dome and mixed with natural gas at high pressure, forming a type of ice that blocked oil from flowing upward.

Pack said the smaller containment cap is designed to keep seawater out and avoid that problem.

Analysts are skeptical of the cap plan.

Given previous failures, "this new prospect does not give us any real confidence that it will succeed," analysts from British firm Arbuthnot Research said in a note to clients. (Additional reporting by Anna Driver and Tom Bergin)

U.S. attorney general opens criminal probe of Gulf BP oil spill

The Washington Post reports:

U.S. attorney general opens criminal probe of Gulf oil spill
By Theresa Vargas
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 1, 2010; 5:32 PM EDT

NEW ORLEANS -- Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced Tuesday that his office is using "the full weight" of its investigative power to pursue criminal and civil investigations into the oil spill that has devastated the Gulf Coast.

"The Department of Justice will ensure that the American people do not foot the bill for this disaster and that our laws are enforced to the fullest extent possible," he said.

Earlier in the day, President Obama vowed a "full and vigorous accounting" of the causes of the disaster, telling the leaders of a new commission that they should pursue the trail of blame without limits.

"They have my full support to follow the facts wherever they may lead, without fear or favor," Obama said in the Rose Garden Tuesday after meeting with the co-chairmen of the commission, former Florida senator and governor Bob Graham and former EPA administrator William Reilly.

Holder's announcement came at an afternoon news conference in New Orleans, the same day the attorney general met with local law enforcement officials and surveyed part of the impacted area.

"What we saw this morning was oil for miles and miles and miles, oil that we know has already affected plants and animal life along the coast and has impacted the lives and livelihoods of all too many in this region," he said. "This must not be forgotten."

He also noted that eleven lives were lost the day the rig exploded. Among the statutes his office is examining: the Clean Water Act, the Oil Solution Act and the Migratory Bird and Endangered Species Act.

"As we move forward we will be guided by some relatively simple principals," Holder said. "We will ensue that every cent, every cent of taxpayer money will be repaid and that damages to the environment and wildlife will be reimbursed. We will make certain that those responsible clean up the mess that they have made... And we will prosecute to the fullest extent of the law, anyone who has violated the law."

Justice Department lawyers were sent to the gulf weeks ago to monitor the spill, and Holder said investigation has been ongoing, but he would not say who had come under focus.

"We are not in a position yet where I think we have in our own minds who should be ultimately held liable," Holder said. He added that they are taking steps to ensure the investigation does not interfere with the clean up effort, which is being spearheaded by BP. "It is in BP's interest," he said, "to keep doing what they're doing, in fact even doubling" the effort.

In Washington, Obama said he will soon appoint five other members to the commission he created to investigate the spill.

"We have an obligation to investigate what went wrong" leading to the April 20 blowout of the deep-sea oil well, Obama said. If current laws are insufficient to prevent such catastrophes, "the laws must change," he said.

"If oversight was inadequate to enforce these laws, oversight has to be reformed. If our laws were broken, leading to this death and destruction, my solemn pledge is that we will bring those responsible to justice on behalf of the victims of this catastrophe and the people of the Gulf region."

BP Gulf Disaster: Oil spill arrives on Alabama barrier island, heads toward state's coastline

Alabama, June 1 (Reuters)

The U.S. Gulf Coast state of Alabama closed its oyster beds on Tuesday and discouraged swimming on its barrier island resort of Dauphin Island due to the presence of oil, state authorities said.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had forecast that winds could drive oil from the huge Gulf of Mexico spill onto the Alabama coast this week.

"Oil has been identified on a portion of Dauphin Island beaches and in waters immediately offshore," the state's Department of Public Health said in a statement, calling the measures precautionary. (Reporting by Kelli Dugan, Editing by Pascal Fletcher)

BP Gulf Disaster CYA

"BP's newly appointed Swedish chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg, center, poses for photographs with their current chairman Peter Sutherland, left, and CEO Tony Hayward, in London, Thursday June 25, 2009. BP's two-year hunt to fill one of Britain's most prestigious corporate jobs ended today with the appointment of Carl-Henric Svanberg as chairman. Svanberg, who is currently chief executive of the Swedish telecoms company Ericsson, will take over from Peter Sutherland in January." (AP Text; Photo/Matt Dun )
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This post picks up where the first one I posted today left off. I'll begin with excerpts from a May 31 opinion piece for the Texas Civil Rights Review written by Greg Moses of Houston IndyMedia and New Orleans IndyMedia; Elizabeth Cook of New Orleans IndyMedia contributed to the piece:

If Americans want to visualize victory over the oil spill invasion that threatens our beloved Gulf of Mexico, then we should call for a federalized war of skimmers and booms.

We should not be timid about it. We should visualize a series of booms in concentric rings that contain the spill, with skimmers at work within each ring, sucking up the oil. Industry websites claim that extracted oil can then be mixed with chemicals and reused for fuel. ...

As I mentioned in the earlier post, a drawback to the booms is that they don't work in strong currents. So while the proposed idea can work in some areas of the spill, it can't work in all. To continue:

The effort might also be helped by supertankers “that come in empty, with the huge valves and huge pumps that they have to suck the oil off the surface of the sea so it stops drifting into the wetlands”, says former president of Shell Oil John Hofmeister in a recent interview with the BBC. ...

One of the weirdest stories I've come across since I started following the BP disaster is that the U.S. Department of State somehow got involved in passing judgment on submitted suggestions from experts from around the world on how to contain the spill and stop the leaks.

The submissions piled up at State. If I recall they were sitting on 25 submissions -- although don't quote me on that number. The point is that State doesn't have the capacity to make such determinations. So no wonder experts such as Hofmiester had to approach the news media if they wanted to get across a suggestion. A story I recounted in the earlier post suggests that many real authorities haven't been able to get through to officials with their suggestions.

Moving right along:

As part of this winnable war, dispersants must be stopped.

Our winning hope for this war is nicely exemplified by the Coast Guard Cutter Walnut, which just left Hawaii for her 6,000-mile journey to the Gulf.

“The Walnut is 225-feet long, has a crew of about 50 people, and boasts state-of-the-art communications equipment and oil skimming capabilities,” reports Minna Sugimoto for Hawaii News Now. “Designed after the Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989, the Walnut comes equipped with a boom and pump oil collection system.”

"The skimmer sucks the oil in and pumps it into a bladder," says Jeffrey Randall, U.S. Coast Guard commanding officer. "That bladder is then filled up, transferred to another vessel that takes it away."

“Coast Guard officials say the crew goes through annual spill response training, but this will be the first time it'll actually put oil in the equipment,” Sugimoto reports. ...

Huh. That's interesting. The report doesn't say why it took more than a month for the Walnut to be deployed.

As early as April 29 the Los Angeles Times was reporting the Navy’s mobilization of booms and skimmers and the “opening (of) two of its bases in Mississippi and Florida as staging areas.” WLOX- Biloxi reporter Steve Phillips filed an eyewitness account of the activity from the Gulfport Seabee base. ...

Yes but Florida and Mississipi haven't seen any oil yet. It's Louisiana, which is closest to the gusher, that's been directly in the line of fire for weeks.

Vice Adm. Kevin McCoy is commander of the US Navy’s Naval Sea Systems Command's (NAVSEA) which includes the Supervisor of Salvage and Diving (SUPSALV). Within these commands we find initial offerings of equipment, expertise, and training that will be required to defend the Gulf of Mexico against the oil spill invasion.

"A team of NAVSEA professionals are working around the clock to protect the sensitive coast lined with oil booms and perform open-ocean skimming at the source,” says Vice Adm. McCoy at a web page posted by the Naval News Service (NNS).

“NAVSEA's Chief Engineer for Underwater Salvage (Capt. Patrick Keenan) has been an integral member of BP's Engineering Command Cell that has assembled the best and brightest minds from around the world to try to stop the leak," said Vice Adm. McCoy.

"With a single phone call from the U.S. Coast Guard, 66,000 feet of open ocean boom and nine self-contained skimming systems, and the professionals to install and operate them, were dispatched (representing the initial shipment). That's your Navy -- a 24-hour Navy, incredibly ready and trained to respond to a wide variety of national taskings," boasts Vice Adm. McCoy. ...

If you read the earlier post, I think you'll see why I prefer not to comment on the above verbiage, beyond noting it would be news to Louisiana officials that the 24-hour Navy has been working to stop the oil spill from reaching their shores.

While the Coast Guard and Navy probably do not have enough booms and skimmers on hand to supply the war for the salvation of the Gulf Coast, they do appear to have sufficient knowledge to gather and organize the inventories and people needed. Surely there are enough booms and skimmers in the world that can be air-transported quickly and organized effectively. ...

I agree, and they've had a month to acquire and organize those inventories and people, and to deploy them to protect Louisiana's barrier islands and coastline -- more than 100 miles of which have already been polluted by the oil.

I'll skip the next part of the report, which discusses accusations that the dispersant used by BP is toxic. A couple of the articles I link to in the earlier post address that issue, which BP is hotly contesting. The author argues that with enough booms and skimmers shouldn't be necessary to use dispersant, then he goes on to observe:

When on Sunday’s “State of the Nation” program, CNN’s Candy Crowley asked Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen to describe the military response to the Gulf oil spill, the answer she got was a textbook case of incoherence.

Within the space of 141 words the Chair of the Joint Chiefs zig-zagged between “a support role” that simply responded to BP requests on the one hand to “doing everything we can. . . with every capability that we have” on the other. His confusing ambivalence was perhaps best expressed in the sentence: “And as best I've been able to understand, the technical lead for this in our country really is the industry.”

While it may be true that the deep-water attempt to stop the oil spill belongs primarily to industry engineers (although, along with Dr. John, we may protest why this has to be the case) there is ample evidence that the military is perfectly qualified to take command of pollution control. ...

Now I'll turn to a May 23, 2010: report from CNN:

Venice, Louisiana (CNN) -- Frustrated Louisiana officials Sunday demanded the federal government approve their plans to dredge up walls of sand to protect delicate inland estuaries from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

"Either the Coast Guard has to side with its American citizens and protect its communities, or it has to side with a major world corporation named BP and betray American citizens in that process," St. Bernard Parish ['parish' is Louisiana talk for 'district'] President Craig Taffaro told reporters.

With oil sloshing ashore along the state's barrier islands and seeping into marshes around the mouth of the Mississippi River, state and parish leaders want to use dredges to close channels between the Gulf and the coastal estuaries.

They said those plans have been held up by the Army Corps of Engineers and the agencies in charge of the spill response, including the Coast Guard and BP, the company responsible for the spill.

Coast Guard Rear Adm. Mary Landry, the federal on-scene coordinator for the response effort, told reporters the barrier island project was still under review. Environmental and wildlife officials "are weighing in on the impact to endangered and threatened species and other impacts this large-scale project could have," she said.

But Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser pointed to pictures of an oil-covered pelican nesting ground and asked reporters, "Is it affected now?"

Thousands of barrels of oil a day have been spewing into the Gulf since late April, when the BP-contracted drilling rig Deepwater Horizon blew up and sank about 45 miles off Louisiana. Beyond the state's barrier islands lie a filigree of marshlands, bayous and islands that are rich in wildlife and fisheries that represent the source of about a third of the U.S. seafood industry.

Tim Kerner, mayor of the town of Jean Lafitte, said the dredging plan is "the only plan that'll possibly work" to save those estuaries.

"It's the plan that will save the wildlife, save the marine life and also the way of life for the town of Jean Lafitte and all the coastal communities," Kerner said.

Nungesser, Taffaro and other representatives of the state's coastal parishes toured the threatened region with Gov. Bobby Jindal on Sunday.

Jindal said his state needs "a greater sense of urgency" from those in charge of the cleanup, or for them to delegate authority to regional officials. He said the state is already doing preparatory work for dredging and could begin operations immediately on receiving approval.

"Ten days later, you'll see land being built. You'll literally see sand being built along these critical passes," he said.

Mayors and parish presidents were critical of both the government and BP's handling of the cleanup, recounting stories of misdirected protective booms or skimmers that sat on trucks ashore. And a visibly angry Taffaro said the delays threatened his parish's ecosystem and the livelihoods of his people.

"I don't have a crystal ball," he said. "But if I were a betting man, I would be betting that the plan is to let us die, then come back and do $75 million worth of cleanup and close the book."

He said some officials had even suggested setting oil-soaked marshes ablaze, a step he called "not an option for us."

"That kills our hurricane protection. It wipes out our species, our ecosystem and everything we've been fighting to protect," he said.

For ongoing coverage of the disaster, see the CNN website. More than any other news media outlet, CNN has been on top of the story.

Bobby Jindal and the struggle to save Louisiana from BP Oil Disaster

Photograph by Win McNamee/Getty Images

"Let there be no mistake, we are in a fight to protect our way of life." - Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal

May 31, 2010, (U.K.) Guardian:

...Experts say the unprecedented depth of the spill, combined with the use of chemicals that broke the oil down before it reached the surface, pose an unknown threat. [1]

"It's difficult to marshal resources to do a thorough job of charting what the impacts are," Jeffrey Short, an environmental chemist who worked on the effects of the Exxon Valdez spill, told Nature magazine. "It's especially difficult when weird things happen to catch the scientific community by surprise. That's clearly the case here."

Louisiana, the nearest state to the leaking well, some 42 miles offshore, has been the most impacted. The state's governor, Bobby Jindal, said more than 100 miles of its 400-mile coast had so far been polluted.

State officials have reported sheets of oil soiling wetlands and seeping into marine and bird nurseries, leaving a stain of sticky crude on cane that binds the marshes together. Billy Nungesser, president of Plaquemines parish, said he had seen dying cane and "no life" in parts of Pass-a-Loutre wildlife refuge. ...

May 31, 2010, Market Watch:

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Monday expanded the area of the Gulf of Mexico that is closed to fishing due to a giant oil spill, as states along the Gulf Coast braced for the impact on jobs and their economies.

The federal government has closed all commercial and recreational fishing across nearly 62,000 square miles, or nearly 26% of federal waters in the Gulf, up from about 60,600 square miles closed on Friday, NOAA said.

In Louisiana, which is closest to the spill, officials have shut down many areas off the state's coast to fishing and shrimp and oyster harvesting, although some areas remain open.

While Louisiana officials focused on convincing a concerned American public that Gulf Coast seafood is safe to eat, Florida officials were working to entice people to visit their state, which hasn't been physically affected by the spill.

Louisiana officials on Saturday asked BP for $457 million for a long-term seafood-safety plan, and for an additional $300 million to provide emergency financial assistance for people working in the commercial and recreational fishing industries who have been hurt by the oil spill, the officials said. Louisiana's seafood industries generate about $4 billion a year, the state officials said.

"The future of this industry is in peril," Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Secretary Robert Barham and other officials wrote in a letter to BP Chief Executive Officer Tony Hayward. ...

"We at the end of the day can't wait. We have to help ourselves"

A drama has been unfolding in Louisiana to save the state's barrier islands, fishing industry, and way of life for those who have fished Louisiana's waters for generations. Governor Bobby Jindal has been leading the charge; he's been ably backed by thousands of volunteers and a host of state officials.

Nobody involved needs to be persuaded of the seriousness of the situation, which in addition to the threat from the oil spill has included stonewalling and/or foot-dragging by federal officials, Coast Guard, Army Corps of Engineers, and BP.

On May 4 the New Orleans newspaper Times-Picayune, which played such a vital role in reporting on Hurricane Katrina's impact on Nola (New Orleans), reported on the marshaling of efforts by local officials, who knew by that time that they couldn't expect much outside help at that crucial stage -- and that they were facing an uphill battle because of powerful oil industry interests. So before I focus on Jindal's efforts I'll quote from the TP report by way of introducing you to some of the cast, which features Democrats and Republicans working in close concert:

Gov. Bobby Jindal praised the efforts of local leaders including St. Tammany Parish President Kevin Davis and New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu to protect Lake Pontchartrain and adjacent areas from possible contamination by the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

U.S. Sen. David Vitter joined Jindal, Davis and Landrieu at a press conference at a spill response command center set up at Fort Pike in eastern New Orleans, across the Rigolets from St. Tammany Parish.

Jindal credited local officials for taking the initiative to put protection plans in place. Davis oversaw the positioning of protective booms near the Rigolets and Chef Pass beginning Saturday, anticipating possible encroachment of the oil spill from the gulf into Lake Borgne and toward Lake Pontchartrain.

Local and state leaders know best what's at stake for the region, and they are formulating effective plans to keep the area save, the governor said.

"We need the Coast Guard to approve these plans," he said. "We need BP to fund these plans.

"We're not waiting for the cavalry. We're going to do everything we can to protect our coast."

BP reported today the first sighting of the oil slick as far as the Chandeleur Islands, the closest position yet to eastern New Orleans and St. Tammany Parish, Jindal said.

Landrieu, who was inaugurated Monday as mayor of New Orleans, said Davis contacted him last week, while he was still serving as Louisiana's lieutenant governor, to ask him to authorize the use of Fort Pike as an incident command center.

"We at the end of the day can't wait," Landrieu said. "We have to help ourselves."

Bobby Jindal, the one-man army

From Jesse Zwick's May 31, 2010 article for The New Republic, Post-Spill Praise For Bobby Jindal

[...] Constantly jumping in and out of National Guard helicopters and drawing up plans for additional "burrito levees" and "boudin bags" needed to stop the oil slick from flowing further into his state's marshes, Jindal has quickly mastered the details of the issue.

At a press conference in New Orleans in mid-May, the Washington Post reported that "he gave updates on the size of tar balls washing up in Port Fourchon (up to eight inches), the number of sandbags to be air-dropped (1,200) and state money spent to date ($3.7 million). He also provided a weather forecast ('The winds continue to come out of the southeast, 10 to 15 knots')."

All that knowledge has forced Jindal to admit that his state is facing a huge crisis — one that merits an equally huge state and federal response. This big government position hasn't exactly endeared him to his GOP colleagues (who think he's in league with an alarmist camp of environmental groups that want to villainize Big Oil) or to Democrats (who think his impassioned calls for a greater government response smack of hypocrisy), but Jindal has displayed the kind of smarts and ideological flexibility that we should applaud in our leaders, no matter the party.

The first thing Jindal did right was acknowledge the scope of the catastrophe. This might not seem deserving of praise — until one looks at how other Republicans have reacted. Nervous about a populist backlash against offshore drilling, or even growing momentum for a climate bill — and contemptuous of environmental science in general — many Republicans have downplayed the disaster.

For example, Jindal's gulf state GOP colleague, [Mississippi Governor] Haley Barbour, was quick to urge tourists not to cancel their trips to Mississippi's beach towns, comparing the deluge of crude to the sheen of gasoline from a motor boat.

"We don't wash our face in it, but it doesn't stop us from jumping off the boat to ski," he told the AP.

And Barbour's not alone in taking such a blasé stance. "Haley has actually taken the smarter approach, from a national perspective," a GOP operative explained to Politico yesterday. "He has taken the long view, that this shouldn't kill an important source of energy."

Rather than maintain such political orthodoxy, Jindal has been wise to stand up for his state and talk about the spill for what it is: "This oil threatens not only our coast and our wetlands; this oil fundamentally threatens our way of life here in south Louisiana." [...]

Staring down the barrel of catastrophe

The true "long view" is that the BP oil disaster is threatening the world's 29th largest economy, which is what the Gulf region is.

As for offshore oil drilling, Jindal has always been a strong proponent and I assume he remains so. One doesn't need to be a member of the Green Party to take aim at gross negligence on the part of BP and what is arguably collusion between the oil giant and the federal government. At the least the feds wimped out in their dealings with BP.

Zwick's article is a little behind events when it talks about the disagreement between Thad Allen and Jindal regarding the sand berms but before I plunge into that part of the story, readers who're trying to play catch-up with the oil disaster need to realize that the debate about the berms is a major issue. Here's why:

The 'barrier islands' dotting the Gulf coast are the only defense against the worst from hurricane winds once they hit land, and the entire Gulf coast region is hurricane alley. The islands and their vegetation brake the winds, draining off some of their fury before they make major landfall.

For various reasons, which add up to bad land management across decades, the islands, some of them so tiny they just qualify as 'marshes,' have been severely degraded. That means damage to the coastal areas from even less than catastrophic hurricanes has become worse as time has gone on. Just the mobilization effort in anticipation of the hurricanes is very expensive not to mention the cleanup from hurricane damage.

Meanwhile, a huge fishing industry grew in the Gulf coastal areas, and the Cajun-Creole cultures in southern Louisiana are greatly dependent on it. They took a bad hit from Hurricane Katrina in 2005 but they came back; as one fisherman said, "That was just wind and rain." Now, with the BP oil disaster, they're looking at the possibility that their way of life is coming to an end.

At the same time Gulf oyster and shrimp fishing became an industry U.S. oil refineries perched themselves along the Gulf shore. Add tourism to this, and that's why the region is the 29th largest economy in the world.

Governor Jindal is not only standing up for an American state but also for an entire region that is an important part of the world economy. He's also standing up for the unique culture in Louisiana, which is an important part of the American heritage.

So, those humble little pieces of land near the US coast are crucial and that's why Jindal and other Louisiana officials are knocking themselves out to save them.

Of booms and parishes

Before I return to sand berms, a few terms of art for readers who plan to follow the drama:

1) Boom: "A floating device used to contain oil on a body of water. Once the boom has been inflated, it is towed downwind of the oil slick and formed into a U-shape; under the influence of wind, the oil becomes trapped within the boom."

The oil can then be skimmed or sucked from within the boom. I don't know the exact material used in the booms; probably heavy plastic or somesuch. They look like giant sausages strung together when they're inflated.

Why sand berms, then, if the artificial booms work? They need calm waters or they get washed away. That's what happened when Alabama Governor Bob Riley tried to use them, in conjunction with gates, to keep oil out of Mobile Bay. The strong current washed them away. As to why he didn't think of that before trying the experiment -- from a May 28 New York Times piece on how the governors of five coastal states have been dealing with the oil spill threat:

...Casi Callaway, the executive director of Mobile Baykeeper, an environmental group, said she could have told him that would happen - if she and others with coastal expertise had been consulted. But they have had a difficult time getting through to the decision makers, she said.

My question is whether the sand berms hold up in hurricane-force winds. I guess Jindal will have to deal with that problem if he comes to it. Right now it's a race against time -- a race against the looming hurricane season, which started a day or so ago, and the spreading oil spill.

2) Bayou (French or Choctaw Indian word): "A body of water typically found in flat, low-lying areas, and can either refer to an extremely slow-moving stream or river (often with a poorly defined shoreline), or to a marshy lake or wetland. Bayous are commonly found in the Gulf Coast region of the southern United States, particularly the Mississippi River region, with the state of Louisiana being famous for them."

3) Parish: You'll come across the term frequently in news from Louisiana. Basically a parish is a county in Louisiana, of which the state has 64; the old name was retained as a tradition. Louisiana is a melding of French and Spanish colonies, which were Roman Catholic. From the Wikipedia article on the parishes:

Local government was based upon parishes, as the local ecclesiastical division (French: paroisse or Spanish: parroquia). Following the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the Territorial Legislative Council divided the Territory of Orleans (the predecessor of Louisiana state) into twelve counties. The borders of these counties were poorly defined, but they roughly coincided with the colonial parishes, and hence used the same names.

See the article for more detail on the parishes and their various forms of modern-day administration.

4) Hesco baskets: At this point I refuse to get that far into the weeds of oil spill cleanup equipment so I have no idea what they are. Ditto for burrito levees and boudin bags.

5) There's a huge body of information on the internet about barrier islands and their importance but for a primer Wikipedia's article is a good start.

Jindal vs Allen

Now to return to Zwick's report. Note that the tussle between Jindal and Allen is also a window on the federal government's dealings with the states.

The administration's point man for the crisis, Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Thad W. Allen, argues that they're fulfilling all the demands outlined within the plan agreed upon by the gulf state governors, and that they'll get to Jindal's additional requests next.

Allen also takes issue with Jindal's claim that his sand-island scheme could begin working within 10 days of approval, arguing that construction would take closer to nine months. Then there's the legitimate question of whether it'd even work: "For the cost involved, the chances of being successful at doing any good … are minuscule," speculated Jerome Milgram, a professor at MIT.

The Louisiana Governor's office has a different take. From the May 28 press release:

... “We spent much of our time with [President Obama] today discussing the importance of our sand-boom [berm] plan in the fight to protect our coast against the millions of gallons of oil that continue to hit our shores.

Just yesterday, we visited the state-directed dredge at East Grande Terre near Grand Isle that we refocused to create sand-boom under our plan. On our own, we already took the dredging permit the state had control over and switched the project over to build sand booms as part of our coastal protection plan.

This state-directed project at East Grande Terre is about a 2.5-mile project where work on our sand boom plan began last week. The Coast Guard told us yesterday – after weeks of reviewing our plan that they approved a single segment of just two miles to see if the sand-boom works. This is another example of too little too late.

“We expressed this frustration to the President and he agreed that work on the first segment must begin immediately and that within two to three days they would review whether the sand boom will stop oil and make a decision about whether or not they will force BP to pay for the other five segments of the plan the Army Corps of Engineers already approved.

“We know sand boom works, we have seen it work in Thunder Bayou and Elmer’s Island, but if the federal government needs to see it work, they need to do that quickly. We don’t want the federal government creating excuses for BP. This is BP’s oil spill. They are the responsible party but we need the federal government to hold them accountable and make them responsible. We are fighting to help protect our coast under this sand-boom plan, and as of today more than 107 miles of our coast have already been impacted by oil.

We know this oil will continue to hit our coast again and again. We have to put multiple protection measures in place. We continue to ask federal officials to approve our entire sand-boom plan from the northern Chandeleurs to the Isle Dernieres chain. Our entire coast is important. ...

As to the environmental risk that the sand berms might pose to the marshes, Gov. Jindal has the answer for that too. From Bill Capo's May 27 report for Louisiana's WWL-TV:

... Jindal also took to the air to see how the dredged barriers being put out to protect the state are faring. The state began the project even before getting the go-ahead from the Coast Guard Thursday.

The dredged area is two to three miles off the coast. The machines suck up the sand in that area and pump it onto the beach.

“It dredges sand off the floor of the Gulf, that gets piped in here, and the graters work from the center of the island off in both directions,” explained Jindal. “They’ll build it up to five to six feet high and two and a half to three miles wide.”

They’re restoring 127 acres of beach and building it up to six feet high. During the trip Jindal learned that the first segment of his 24-segment, long sought dredging plan had been approved.

“It’s better than still waiting for an answer,” said Jindal of the news. “If we had gotten approval when we first asked for it, we could have built ten miles by now.”

Jindal had an answer for those who say the barrier islands would keep needed water from getting to the marshes.

“We’re not proposing to build a continuous barrier,” he said. “We know that’s not practical. So we would allow the normal tidal currents to move in; what that allows the Corps, the Coast Guard and BP to do then is to focus their booming and their skimming and resources on a few cuts in a few passes.”

The dredging on Grand Terre started last year as a coastal restoration project but it has been turned into a project to protect the beach from the spill’s effects and Jindal hopes that Obama can see the benefit first hand on his visit Friday.

“By law BP is the responsible party for this disaster but we need the government to make sure they actually are a responsible party and fulfill their obligations.”

By helicopter Jindal inspected the multiple layers of defense being used to protect against the oil, including land bridges by the National Guard to stop the pollution, large sand bags, lines of boom and barriers of Hesco baskets. ...

The Jindal-Nungesser tag team

According to a report by Arian Campo-Flores for the May 27 edition of Newsweek, it's actually Billy Nungesser, the President of Plaquemines Parish, who came up with the sand berm idea:

...In recent weeks, Nungesser and Jindal have been relentlessly pushing a new plan: to fortify barrier islands with dredged sand so that the oil has a harder time making it into the marshes. The $350 million project —which Nungesser is credited with coming up with — has intuitive appeal, and indeed, restoring those protective buffers has long been a priority for environmentalists.

Yet some scientists have raised questions about the scope of the plan. For instance, Gregory Stone, director of the Coastal Studies Institute at Louisiana State University, says it’s unadvisable “to embark on a project of this magnitude without having at least some semblance of what might actually result.”

The Army Corps of Engineers apparently has reservations as well, since so far, it has refused to grant the necessary emergency permit. Yet Nungesser and Jindal insist that their idea could save some of the marshes. And, they argue, if the federal government doesn’t like their proposal, then it should come up with an alternative—something much more aggressive than simply laying down boom.

In the past week, Nungesser and Jindal have stepped up their rhetoric against BP and the federal government, especially the Coast Guard. “We have been frustrated with the disjointed effort to date that has too often meant too little too late to stop the oil from hitting our coast,” Jindal said at a press conference on May 24.

Nungesser, for his part, has made a daily sport of lashing out at Admiral Thad Allen of the Coast Guard, calling him “an embarrassment” and “a cartoon character.” (Today, the Coast Guard approved portions of the sand-berm plan).

On Wednesday, the pair were at it again. Joined by James Carville and Mary Matalin, Jindal and Nungesser toured South Pass at the mouth of the Mississippi, heading an entourage of boats carrying wildlife officials and media.

As a storm rumbled in the distance, a few shrimpers glided past. Jindal’s and Nungesser’s boat pulled up to patches of roseau cane that were stained dark brown by oil at their base.

“Everything was dead in the marsh,” Nungesser told me afterward. “I get tears in my eyes, because when you’d pull into that marsh previously, fish would jump and scurry.” Now, “ain’t a bird, ain’t a bug, nothing.”

Worse yet, there was no sign of activity to clean up the muck or defend against the invading slick. “There was nobody out there doing anything,” said Nungesser. “It was disgusting.”

1) See this May 31 article at Times-Picayune about the dispersants and underwater plume sightings; also see the blog by Samantha Joye, one of the UGA Marine Department scientists inspecting the underwater plume, who is quoted in the article:
http://gulfblog.uga.edu/