Project Katrina

Here is something worth your time. Deep Sea News has put together a three part series on the science (which there isn’t a whole lot of) of oil dispersants. It is interesting on many different levels, not just because of the basic facts, but also because it explains why we know so little.

Dispersants must be applied successfully and have a high effectiveness once in ocean waters. This sounds easy, in principle—once you’ve perfected your Corexit formula in the lab, just spray it from a helicopter, and voila! Except there are a lot of factors which you also have to take into account: the composition of the oil spilled, sea energy, whether the oil has been subjected to weathering at all, exact type of dispersant used and the amount which you sprayed, and ocean temperature/salinity.

Thank goodness for all those lab tests over the years which figured all this stuff out, you say. Um, well actually it seems like even designing simulation experiments is difficult, and different tests can report different effectiveness scores for the same dispersant. It is difficult to accurately scale up lab tests in order to predict dispersant action on real spills. Older studies used methods and analyses which have since been discredited. Wave-tank tests can probably provide upper limits on dispersant effectiveness, but there are SEVENTEEN (!!) critical factors that require strict control for accurate results (Fingas 2002). Field tests in open ecosystems are even worse for measuring the fate of oil and controlling variables. In terms of measuring dispersant effectiveness, tank tests, field tests, and lab tests all disagree. Awesome.

Part 1: How Effective Are Dispersants On Real Oil Spills?

Part 2: How Toxic Are Dispersants?

Part 3: Do Dispersants Really Promote Degradation Of Oil?

Rachel Maddow is doing her show from New Orleans today. A few quotes from interviews she conducted:

James Perry, the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center:

You know, again, the people are extremely resilient, right? They’re here because they’re fighting to be here. Folks aren’t asking for a handout from government, but just a help up, right? And that’s all that folks are saying.

Tracie Washington, the Louisiana Justice Institute:

There’s been this cross-pollinization of people. People—I was a trial lawyer five years ago. I didn’t work with, you know, the grass eaters and, you know, people who eat tofu [....] I had a hippie-free life. Now they’re all in my office [....] And I love them to death.

Billy Sothern, author of “Down in New Orleans: Reflections from a Drowned City“:

The main thing that I see here in New Orleans is that all of these problems, whether it’s the crime problem, the housing problem, the schooling problem, this is the razor’s edge of problems that exist everywhere in America. And to the extent that they remain unresolved in New Orleans, I think that there’s very little hope that they’re going to be resolved elsewhere.

Garland Robinette of WWL radio:

I spent months in a place in Vietnam where you could barely walk and they could land a helicopter. And five days, president of the United States or nobody else could fly in water or food to people that were dying? And now BP with the oil spill—that took them a while to get going. And we’ve still got people worried about how they’re going to survive on the coast. It’s kind of like we’re not part of the United States.

Today the New York Times has a somewhat detailed look “behind the scenes” highlighting the tension between BP executives and government employees as they tried to cap  the well.

But interviews with BP engineers and technicians, contractors and Obama administration officials who, with the eyes of the world upon them, worked to stop the flow of oil, suggest that the process was also far more stressful, hair-raising and acrimonious than the public was aware of.

[....]

Looking back, administration officials said that they became concerned that BP could not handle the crisis and that at crucial junctures the company made serious errors of judgment. “There was an arc of loss of confidence,” said Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. “I was not comfortable they knew what they were doing.”

Those on the industry side saw it differently. “The only benefit I see is they actually challenged us to a level of detail and communication,” Mark Mazzella, BP’s top well-control expert, said of the government scientists who stepped in to supervise the effort. “They didn’t offer anything that changed anything we actually did.”

A decision by Energy Secretary Steven Chu to turn to BP’s competitors for advice was viewed as an insult by many at the company, said a technician who insisted on anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the matter.

I expect as time passes we’re going to see more and more of these type of stories and I expect it was much, much worse then this initial story indicates.

Often it is hard to notice nothing but the bad news coming out of New Orleans. But in fact there are some positive things happening on a pretty grand level as well.

As Katrina approaches its five-year anniversary, New Orleans has made enormous strides toward recovery. The city’s GDP is almost $9 billion higher today than it was in 2005, its population is about 80 percent of what it was before the storm, and city officials say the quality of public education has gone up significantly. But only one in three New Orleans residents polled by the Kaiser Family Foundation this year said their lives have returned to normal since Katrina, and 70 percent of them said they feel that the nation has forgotten the challenges they still face.

[....]

New Orleans’ already struggling economy was dealt a second and third blow by the recession and Gulf oil spill, but jobs in the city should be increasingly plentiful now that the city’s main industry—tourism—seems to be making a comeback. ABC News reports that visits to New Orleans jumped to 7.5 million in 2009–up from 3.7 million visitors in 2006– and raked in $4.2 billion dollars for the city. While the 70,000 tourism jobs in New Orleans is still well below the 85,000 jobs that existed before Katrina, this year the city reported its largest Mardi Gras celebration in 25 years.

Of course there are still problems, like 50,000 homes still in ruins, but we shouldn’t forget the strides that have been made in the past five years, awkward as they might have been.

In a deal negotiated last month, BP officials promised President Obama the company would pay $5 billion annually over the next four years into an escrow account for damages. Ken Feinberg, who was appointed to administer oil spill claims out of the escrow fund, has said he “hasn’t been able to start writing claims checks” because BP PLC has failed to deposit any money into the $20 billion fund it promised to create:

Feinberg, who was appointed to administer oil spill claims out of the fund, said he doesn’t have the authority to force BP to deposit the money, but his hands are tied until it does. “I don’t want the checks to bounce,” he said.

The day after the escrow account’s establishment in June, BP CEO Tony Hayward told Congress that BP is “unwavering in our commitment to fulfill all our responsibilities” and the company “won’t stop spending until the job is done.”

For months a team of reporters from The Times-Picayune, PBS, and Pro Publica having been researching the numerous police shootings after Hurricane Katrina. Their findings are devastating to say the least:

In the chaotic days after Hurricane Katrina, an order circulated among New Orleans police authorizing officers to shoot looters, according to present and former members of the department. It’s not clear how broadly the order was communicated.

Some officers who heard it say they refused to carry it out. Others say they understood it as a fundamental change in the standards on deadly force, which allow police to fire only to protect themselves or others from what appears to be an imminent physical threat.

The accounts of orders to “shoot looters,” “take back the city,” or “do what you have to do” are fragmentary.

The findings of their reporting have also been turned into an hour-long Frontline special called Law & Disorder It is now running on PBS or can be viewed online here.

To say I question anything and everything a government agency or funded research facility says about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill gusher, but I sure hope this is accurate:

Petroleum-eating bacteria—which had dined for eons on oil seeping naturally through the seafloor—proliferated in the cloud of oil that drifted underwater for months after the April 20 accident. They not only outcompeted fellow microbes, they each ramped up their own internal metabolic machinery to digest the oil as efficiently as possible.

The result was a nature-made cleanup crew capable of reducing that reduced the amount of oil amounts in the undersea “plume” by half about every three days, according to research published online Tuesday by the journal Science.

The findings, by a team of scientists led by Terry C. Hazen of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, help explain one of the biggest mysteries a mystery of the disaster: Where has all the oil gone?

I pretty much slept through my high school and college science classes, so I really should comment, but there are so many things about this story that just don’t add up. But again, I really hope I am wrong.

As we near the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina the massive levee, canal, and pumping system built to protect the city is still not completed. Since the project is behind schedule, over budget, and a few years ago a contractor was caught using newspaper as filler, the residents are not so trustworthy. The New York Times has a run down:

The scale of the nearly $15 billion project, which is not due to be completed until the beginning of next year’s hurricane season, brings to mind an earlier age when the nation built huge works like the Brooklyn Bridge, the Hoover Dam and the Interstate highway system.

The city’s reinforced defenses are already stronger than they were before Katrina. But even after 2011, experts argue, they will still provide less protection than New Orleans needs to avoid serious flooding in massive storms.

For a region devastated by a storm and by a loss of faith in the government’s ability to safeguard it, the new system is a test of more than the prowess of the Army Corps of Engineers. Some residents say they may never fully get over the failure of the Katrina response. “Do I trust them?” asked Beverly Crais, a Jefferson Parish resident. “No. How can I trust somebody who makes that big of an error?”

According to the Federal Government the Deepwater Horizon well gushed up to 2.6 million gallons a day.  That is the equivalent of more than 19 Exxon Valdezes. Of course, for months BP insisted it was only 5,000 barrels a day (less than one tenth the actual amount). Well the new government estimate means BP is liable for a $17.6 billion fine—$4,300 for each barrel of oil, less the 800,000 barrels directly siphoned from the wellhead.

At its height, BP’s leaking well gushed 62,000 barrels of oil a day, the federal government said Monday in a revision of its figures that reveals how far off initial estimates turned out to be. The government and BP initially offered estimates of the leak at 1,000 and 5,000 of barrels a day shortly after it began in late April, eventually reaching an estimate of between 35,000 and 60,000 barrels a day after several revisions. The new estimate Monday by federal scientists means 4.9 million barrels of oil likely were released by the well before it was temporarily capped last month. BP hopes to complete an operation this week that will permanently seal the ill-fated well.

With those type of dollars in play is it any wonder BP was low-balling the size and scope of the spill.