A Dire View of the Gulf Oil Gusher

[The exceedingly gloomy analysis of the Gulf oil-gusher that ran here yesterday elicited many interesting comments.  Generally speaking, and much to our surprise, readers did not reject the author’s doomsday thesis out-of-hand. We are airing Erich Simon’s article for a second day in the hope that it will generate further, enlightening discussion.  The environmental health of the planet may hang in the balance, as many seem to understand.  As of this moment, however, no one can say for certain that the “fix,” a relief well due to be completed by August, will save the day for Mother Earth.  RA ]

With U.S. military Insiders (BP shills in tow) now close enough to peer over the Continental Shelf, down the sloping, innocuous, white sandy overlay into millions of years of sediment covering who-knows-what, they are still unable to see further into the miles of drill casings inside the ‘relief’ bores – unable to look into the fiery bowels of a sleeping enemy whose size and power once unleashed can turn humans into frozen statues. Meanwhile, the latest qualitative, operational drivel continues to escape both sides of BP’s mouth.

Here they are, the Masters of Deep-Earth Exhuming, standing mere feet across a line from their target, and nothing is slated until August under the auspices of a “delicate” operation. Is drilling into the side of a hundred million atomic bombs…delicate? After all, the reddish-black oil confluent pumping like smoke out of the sea floor bears a striking resemblance to Black Smokers, which are vents from volcanoes lurking beneath the ocean bottom, the deepest on record just adjacent to the Deepwater Horizon Disaster, in the Caribbean. Meanwhile, while the military/BP contingent sits around scratching its behind in frozen inaction and awe of forces beyond their comprehension, weather conditions are only to get worse, much worse, with hurricane season already moving in, and with the Deepwater Horizon Chernobyl continuing to gush toxic oil and gas from more and more fractures and at ever-increasing rates.  Why are they waiting until August? How about September, or October. Or never?

Will the oil gusher eventually overwhelm attempts to contain it?

Because nothing is known about the Gulf volcano buried under the serene, sandy quartz accumulations, the former peaks of the Appalachian mountains eroded and deposited atop the Deepwater Horizon energy cauldron over-filled and boiled over from their origins when the continents broke apart, long before our oldest maps and subterranean modeling.

And as to our recent understanding about what might be “down ‘there,” promulgated by the Deepwater Disaster itself, no critical information has been forthcoming. Even the most important of all questions has been masqueraded and shoved from view, replaced by mundane distractions like financial recompense and saving the turtles and beaches. Nothing has been released about the test results on the enemy, the invading oil (its antiquity, or composition), or types of chemicals or gases streaming out from the inter-continental floor, that would give some measure of the threat and character of the enemy… now that the Planet has crossed the socio-demographic Threshold Event to the coming end of civilization as we understand it… and in like manner, neither are the circumstances being revealed of the enemy’s escape, how much longer before this thing doesn’t only ‘trickle’ forth but bursts.

‘Top Kill’ Fiasco

All this suggests that like the ‘top kill’ fiasco… where the BP/military mockery failed so miserably to contain the Beast below that was so powerful that it exploded their best touted efforts right back right into their ‘two-timing’ faces and worse still, evidence suggests that all measure at containing the pressure at the ‘top kill’… the sea floor… caused the pressure to blow out of other places… out the sides of the (shredded) steel casings and liners… at points all along the 3 1/2 mile bore into whatever hell is now unseated. Speculation has it that the military actually opened the leak wider at the surface because the oil was popping outta so many cracks in the sea bed that to do otherwise would have invited the dreaded ‘geologic event’!

The public should prepare itself for similar failure come August, if indeed the military has any intention of attempting to drill the final feet of a “relief” well into an enemy that has proved itself beyond the harness of modern technology. The military is the military. The military lies.

No official has ever discussed any details about what is going on at (or beneath the sea floor) except for the (preposterous) mention to cement the surrounding, cracking sea bed early on (indicating an obvious breach of sea bed integrity across the deep terrain from the initial Mega-explosion). Since then any reference to the sea floor is off-limits… same as with the test results documenting whatever potpourri is gushing outta the sea bed at greater and greater rates… keeping the public in the dark about the speed at which the monster underneath is moving upward… breaking its chains of history.

Numerous Geysers

According to BP CEO, Tony Hayward, “you can’t see down inside the broken well bore…”, giving him carte blanche to stonewall the subject of what’s going on below the sea bed. And this anachronism in an era where technology can discern just about anything, certainly geologic substrata? The initial sea bed pictures showed four or five Geysers comparable to the size of the initial well bore explosion but those have been removed from public domain. Further evidence of the cracking sea floor (described by all geologic reference as “weak bedrock”) is closed for discussion, even in the highest court of We The People, those nightly replays on the CSPAN television broadcasts… those theatrical, public pandering, Congressional, Deepwater Horizon investigation inquiries and testimonials.

Why isn’t the military intersecting the broken well a (generous) distance below the sea floor (like a half mile, or a mile, or even two miles… far atop the Monster Reservoir instead of at its doorstep?) and injecting mud and cement the rest of the way down to bring expeditious and quick end to this freak of nature? More than enough distance below the failed ‘top kill’ if the military were being truthful when they claimed how they could “kill the spill” at the level of the sea floor? It certainly should be no problem then to intercept and halt the flow of gas and oil a half of a mile lower… unless ‘top kill’ was never a viable alternative, but only a public appeasement cover story, and unless the pressure is so freakish that there is no stopping it at a half mile down, or one and a half miles down… or all of the way down….

Why Drill to 18,000 Feet?

Stopping the oil gusher (not “spill”, not “leak”)… GUSHER… at the sea floor with a ‘top kill’ was never the military intention, in fact quite the opposite… they made the hole bigger, venting out even more oil… (the Gulf is turning BLACK) because if they would have capped the GUSHER at the sea floor, assuming they had something large enough to do the job… a blowout preventer about the size of the New Orleans Superdome… then the 3 1/2 miles of well casing and liner all the way down below would have simply blown apart… more than from the initial blast, forcing underground off-shoot currents of oil that would have shot out in all directions up through weak bedrock and pushing their individual ways through the sea floor where they would have fountained black geysers all across for miles around, tearing the terrain to pieces and turning the Gulf black right in front of a horrified public. And judging by the four or five other geysers already at play (who knows how many now?) from the initial mishap… there are reports of another oil “leak”, seven miles from the source.

This is why the US military is going to go all the way down the entire 18,000+ feet (3 1/2 miles below the ocean floor)… ALL THE WAY TO THE DOORSTEP OF THE RESERVOIR ITSELF. And for such a suicidal option to even be attempted can only mean one thing.

They are going to attempt to drill into the point of maximum pressure, close by where the August 20 explosion blew up in the first place. They are (or so they claim) going to attempt to drill into a 7-9 inch “plate sized” well casing (actually, the company ran out of steel casing they used “liner” down there…) that is funneling an unfathomable, unquantified, pressurized “anomaly” (this is the word used to describe the Gulf Monster by BP CEO, Tony Hayward, in fact… his only word to describe exactly what it is that went bang)… this “anomaly” is a gaseous, pressurized, focal point perimeter to Pandora’s Box.

Niagara Falls Through a 9” Pipe

Why? Isn’t it entirely likely… probable in fact… that at that particular puncture point into the reservoir balloon that the rock environment supporting the liner… channeling something akin to the likes of Niagara Falls through a 9 inch pipe… that that liner is already exploded (remember, according to BP CEO, Tony Hayward, nobody knows what is down there because nobody can even see down past the obliterated well head…) and so supercharged with volatility (geothermal flux) that nothing is capable of injection… no mud, no cement, no slurry, no nothing… but quite the opposite, isn’t that only opening a new avenue for ejection? Another explosion?

There simply is no reliable casing with which to make contact. At best there is a collapse of rock from the first explosion of unknown size and proportion rotating pressures that are so extreme it is flaring gases miles above in ways that the industry has never before witnessed. No drilling effort has any chance of success in succumbing this unknown situation. Not a modicum.

Never mind that 99% of myopic America… hapless, grazing Sheeple already raped and pillaged by their very own Wall Street/US Government cabal… continue to go about their daily routines under the guise that these wells (“relief” or otherwise) are slated for production (with hat tip by the establishment and occasional horn blow to prod them outta the way) when in fact these wells are NEVER going to be deployed into production… they are going to (try and) be capped, sealed and buried as far from public view as possible… BP’s so-called “ANOMALY”… it begs the question, WHY?… and the even bigger question, WHAT HAPPENS IF THE RELIEF WELL FAILS… MORE PROBABLE THAN NOT given how little is known about the entire panorama, not the least of which is the short work that this “anomaly” made of the “ultimate industry fail safe”, the Blowout Preventer (BOP), which was not the victim of shoddy manufacture per the ongoing propaganda play act, but rather the victim of an encounter with such extreme force that nothing manmade could ever have withstood such an event! Never.

Three Types of BOPs

There are three different kinds of blowout preventers: pipe rams, blind rams and shear rams. The Deepwater Horizon was outfitted with all three. It was the strongest, most redundant blowout preventer every manufactured. It was deepwater incarnate. That is why there was no back-up, they didn’t need it. And it would not have mattered in the least.

The pressure of first contact into the reservoir was so incredibly extreme… one tiny drill bit that blew open a shock wave that cannoned through 3 1/2 miles of rock and another mile of water… blowing to bits every thing along the way, which is why there is nothing to drill into for relief or anything else… pulverizing the liner, casing and every one of the “ultimate industry fail safes”… until it reached the ocean surface, where it blew to bits the largest oil rig ever brought to bear, and after sending it skyward in an explosion of such magnitude that it was visible from outer space sent it straight to the bottom of the ocean… so how does a repeat performance by drilling a second pinhole through the skin of the “anomaly”, but from a different angle, going to accomplish anything other than catastrophe?

Why? For turtles, pelicans, oysters and beaches. Hardly. That’s a distraction to what’s really at stake… the unfolding ‘geologic event’.

Hayward’s Admission

This fact comes directly from the mouth of BP CEO, Tony Hayward, in his recent testimony in front of the latest Congressional, all-show-and-no-go inquiry just last week when he iterated about how there are forces (out in Nature) that are far and above the capabilities of the oil industry’s ultimate fail safes and that this incident compels an end to all oil drilling pending redesign at the industry level of the Blowout Preventer on an order of complete overhaul. This is serious stuff indeed!

And no doubt the groundwork for BP’s defense… not to mention their coy and detached demeanor… and lackadaisical approach to clean-up efforts in the Gulf that by all quiet agreement will remain a toxic cesspool until the end of time… because this circumstance falls into the category of Providence and Act Of God… how big an act remains a military secret, until such time as it isn’t and right now there is not much intention to ending something that can never be ended… only contained and managed to buy time.

The deepwater drilling moratorium and cordoning by military blockade is to prevent any further discovery of the deteriorating sea bed situation and the incipient ‘Geologic Event’. Similarly, the failure to move troops or National Guard into the Gulf area for ‘clean-up’ is not just because the Gulf is a lost cause… but because of the pressure cooker of public rage that is going to confront any ‘invasion’ by men in uniform carrying guns as final clarification of keeping them in their places.

Blown to Shreds

With the military drilling the relief wells to the bottom of the drill bore… to the very end… the actual source, the entire steel well casing and liner further down being obliterated, blown-to-shreds from the force of trapped gas… the entire well is most likely blown all to hell all the way up and down its entire length by a reservoir that is continuing to pump ever greater amounts of gaseous black and red. Tony Hayward mumbled under his breath in his latest testimony about how the reservoir itself was “small… only 50 million barrels” (to which one Senator, after some quick math, suggested taking no further action, because at the present rate of rupture come August most of the oil would be leaked out anyhow).

Here again, while Tony Hayward knows nothing of what’s under the sea floor by his own admission he sure knee-jerked a 50 million barrel appraisal with no hesitation. In fact, the amount of oil (in pockets measured in 2-2.5 BILLIONS of barrels…) under the Gulf of Mexico is on the order of 50 BILLION barrels.

In Six Months…

There are between 5,000-10,000 oil drilling rigs (3,600 is the official number) clustered in the Gulf that have been pumping everyday for decades. And all of them (except for 33 ‘deepwater’ rigs under Obama six month moratorium… NOT FOR SAFETY SAKE but to keep at bay any errant, ‘crime scene’ videoing, deepwater, ROV cameras… in six months either IT will all be over or else the moratorium will be extended), the vast majority of rigs are in 500 feet of water or less, that is, a mile above the Deepwater Horizon well, which itself is drilled down another 3 1/2 miles. The gravitational press from that kinda reservoir overhang (and underhang) is pressure and volume that makes a mockery of Tony Hayward’s (mumbled) 50 million barrels, and an insult to the only report he claimed to have received of the whole episode, according to his testimony, that they had made “a discovery”.

Tony Hayward told Congressional investigative eunuchs that all that was reported to him about the Deepwater Horizon well disaster on the day it happened is that they had made a “discovery”. Was is simply a mundane oil discovery? Was it a large oil mother load? Was a pressurized Hiroshima? If he knew the details of “the discovery” then he stonewalled. Did he know? Of course he knew! Then there are no good reasons why he would stonewall on this point.

Today gas and oil and all manner of undocumented subterranean effluent is exploding up through ever-increasing numbers of well-sized holes (beyond the four or five in the opening days) replete with cracking fissures stretching in all directions fueling torrents of clouds of ghastly carbonation… and the sea bed is so compromised that whatever is remaining of the operational structure of the mine… on the sea bottom… the BOP and the riser… are leaning over as much as 15 degrees. The BOP weighs some 40-45 tons while the riser package weights more than 450 tons!

Unprecedented Flow Rates

Any time now the BOP and riser could fall over. Any day now the BOP and riser might simply disappear into the ocean bottom, into a sink hole sand blasted and pressure washed open by such incredible flow rates that the rates have never before been documented in any United States well with the exception possibly of Prudhoe Bay but even that is today a guess since no one knows how much is exploding out in the Gulf, except that it is greater amounts everyday… so much that from the beginning there was no known technology to harness this kinda of pressure and turn it into a functional well.

So that what they are now going to attempt (in August… which sounds conspicuously like a line in the sand, based on extrapolation of the present rate of sea bed erosion across weak bedrock breaking apart across wide swaths, overlaid with millennial sediment)… the US military/BP contingent are actually going to toy Mother Nature a second time and drill straight into the pressurized cavern underlying the Gulf-Mississippi delta, containing a reservoir of gas (and oil) estimated by some scientists to be the size of Mt. Everest!

Billions of Barrels

And inviting eruption on an unprecedented scale… BILLIONS… BILLIONS of barrels of oil through new piercings… and further out-rendering of all manner of gases… especially methane…, ocean altering chemicals and every other manner of pressurized contaminants accumulated over hundreds of millions of years… destroying not just the Gulf (at least one-third dead already in seventy short days!) but the ocean currents will change their temperatures so critical in effecting climate, and the planet’s atmosphere… a significant outgas of methane or unleashing of carbon dioxide would push the limits of global warming or even usher the next ice age.

Why are the BP shills claiming that they are taking time to “home” in with the first relief well using delicate magnetic ‘feelers’ when the second relief well is nowhere in position? So which is it… buying time to hit the 9 inch plate-sized target, or buying time to get a second relief well in place… or stalling for time to push the whole insanity further out into the future… they can’t even get their stories straight.

The US military (and BP puppet contingent) has no idea of what they are doing. They didn’t from the start and they don’t know now. August and relief wells? This latest feigned remedy is stretching the disaster out for as long as is humanly possible given the level of public frustration boiling over behind media obfuscation and the pace at which the oil is overtaking the environment and impending ‘geologic event’. Meanwhile local residents directly affected are coming together and protesting more and more with every passing day. The indigenous population is dying, their lifestyles, their livelihood, their food source, their health, their communities, their whole worlds are being overtaken by poison. No amount of money can ever assuage this. Not a pittance.

Stock Market Blues

This is evident in the stock market of late. The week leading into holidays is subject to an increase in the indices, the most famous being ‘the Santa Clause Rally’. There was no Independence Day rally this year, in fact the markets sold off sharply. Also, at quarter end… particularly the June and December bi-annual closing quarters… mutual funds go in and buy stocks and lift the markets to make their numbers look good when reporting to investors. It is called “end-of-quarter window dressing.” There was no such thing at the end of this June, quite the opposite.

Government insiders know that come August there is no possible chance that BP or anyone else is going to plug the Gulf monster… the South Eastern economic quadrant of the United States (of Corruption) is destroyed forever and those southerners are condemned to live, breath and drink smelly, toxic, carcinogenic oil, the likes of which their own government is keeping secret (the government did the same thing when the radioactive cloud from Chernobyl descended on the school children playing on their swing-sets in the city of Kiev… the government camera men wore radiological hazmat suits, the levels of radiation melting the film in their cameras… while the children swung obliviously in the background, it is no different in the Gulf).

Riots Coming

The only thing that is going to come in August will be a eulogy to the Gulf of Mexico, rioting on a scale that will invite the National Guard (printing money absent the Means of Production in fish, oysters, shrimp, finfish, breathable air, potable land and water… will accomplish nothing to remedy this!). The Gulf residents can not afford relocation and besides, no other (saturated and bankrupted US) community has the resources to absorb even ten percent of them, with panic coming up the Eastern Seaboard as the oil pushes up into Myrtle beach, where elevated, dissolved benzene levels suggests it already has… with the tar balls not far behind…, and after that, the Atlantic Ocean will begin its death of a thousand cuts as the oil moves up the Gulf stream, joining the floating garbage off New York and contaminating much of the world’s seafood.

Evidence of the coming failure of the Gulf relief wells is in the last sentence from the latest USA BP propaganda article: “The weight of 18,000 feet of the ‘drilling mud,’ as it’s called, sitting on top of the well should, it is hoped, be enough to stop the oil from coming out of its reservoir.” This assumes that there is 18k feet of “mud” already pillared inside the well casing (and that the casing has sufficient integrity to house and hold the mud in any meaningful proportion, which according to BP CEO, Tony Baloney, they can’t even look down inside there to see what’s left of the bore, so logic would dictate that after the worst explosion in the history of oil drilling the liner is vaporized).

The ‘Anomaly’

Before BP can even make such a claim about an 18k foot column of containment mud, it has to achieve an 18k foot column of containment mud. Their drills have to withstand and absorb the initial explosion of drilling into the “anomaly”… they couldn’t do it the first time and nothing has changed… so why do they think they can do it a second time…, and then keep it all at bay while they (furiously) pump that mud up the length of the conduit, carried along by the force of rising gas that will most likely vaporize the slurry as fast as they are pumping it in. In fact, there are no technological ‘pumps’ capable of withstanding this kind of eruption… they can’t pump… they gotta BLAST the mud up into the pipe… and it’s just gonna get lost in all the cavities along the shredded steel casing left over from the initial blast, not to mention how they plan to contain it all when it comes blasting up outta the sea floor with a BOP and riser package that are leaning twice as much as the Tower of Pisa!

To these obstacles the company is saying absolutely nothing. Everything that they have been stating is in ‘end-result’ terms. It should be obvious even to the unscrupulous BP engineers… and their half-witted US military counterparts who are impotent to the whole solution or else they would have stepped in from the very first day and taken control… that as soon as they puncture the source of what exploded all the way up five miles… then the whole attempt is going to blow up right in their faces.

Sounds Like a Ploy

Which is why this whole thing sounds like a ploy… to stall the public before they panic at not just the end of their way-of-lives but their health and ultimately their families. And by drilling down so far, into the monster itself… rather than intersecting the bore from much higher up the casing, where one would think that the ‘situation’ is at least quantifiable, this makes little sense unless, in fact, they fully comprehend the high risk gamble involved in what they are about to do come August, and want to ‘manage’ it at the furthest point beneath the earth as possible… to escape the rumble earthquake of failure (unlike the eleven souls who could not), in which case then this entire attempt sounds like one last-ditch effort against a foe that is capable of destroying much more than the Gulf of Mexico… and if the sea floor gives way then a geologic event could in a matter of days empty a reservoir that by some scientific measurement is the size of Mt. Everest!

A piece the size of Rhode Island could belch up from the fragmenting sea floor and the Gulf States would be storm-surged and buried under thirty feet of oil….

We seem to be in a fight to save the planet’s oceans against an eruption that is only becoming more unstable by the day and will continue to do so until the time when it is either stopped (August?) or achieves equilibrium… an outgas emptying of the pressure of the underground Mega-reservoir and along with whatever is pent inside.

 

(If you’d like to have Rick’s Picks commentary delivered free each day to your e-mail box, click here.)

  • Claire August 4, 2010, 4:49 pm

    So, how’s this theory working out today? 8/4/10

    &&&&&

    You ought to spring for a free seven-day trial subscription, Wilkinson, since you seem not to know that we came in looking for a 100-point rally today so that we can short the Diamonds at a very precise price and with a penny-ante stop-loss. Or would you rather remain a lurker, trading on the gist of my headlines? RA

  • Dave July 10, 2010, 11:38 am

    Rick, Thanks for putting the BP/Obama situation in such stark terms. I believe it’s always better to know what’s probably ahead even if it all really happens.

  • Erich Simon July 10, 2010, 3:02 am

    Benjamin, the Highly Pathogenic H5 “Bird Flu” virus is altering the genetic complexion of the entire planet. Highly Pathogenic influenza viruses slaughter birds. One has never before infected a human host, it was impossible by all textbook accounts… all of our seasonal flu viruses and pandemics are low pathogenics, H1’s and H2’s and H3’s.

    This virus is escaped the bird population and systematically running through every insect, mammal, reptile, fish, dog, cat, horse, pig, human, you-name-it population, and killing just about every single one completely upon first contact… ‘sky-droppers’, where whole flocks of birds rain out of the sky dead in mid-flight. Localized populations of all species are either dying off completely upon contact or adapting via inherited, receptor cell mutation, through pure Darwinism (with survivors then reproducing subsequent generations immune to the virus). Hundreds of billions, not millions, of birds are dead or culled, hundreds of thousands of pigs (across China and Asia), dogs, cats, whole zoos of animals, whole stores of pets, instantly dead or “befriended” as asymptomatic, spreader carriers.

    This is also against all laws of Nature. A Highly Pathogenic influenza virus has never ever, not once, never in any science textbook since the beginning of time “befriended” any host species, and never any bird population which is where this genetic blueprint derives. It simply is not possible. The HPs (influenza Type A: H5’s and H7’s) are Mother Nature’s slaughter machines.

    I don’t know exactly ‘why’, or ‘who’, except that this virus is rotten to the core. And I have been monitoring the increasing human cluster rates against background community populations in comparison with total global population numbers, to statistically extrapolate when our turn might be coming. Previously, global medical experts had thought that this virus is so lethal that it burns itself out, killing all hosts so fast that it has little chance to spread, and so it hasn’t… and won’t ravage the human population. But that has now been debunked in experimental papers published in leading medical journals. The reason we are still here is quite simply because H5 has not accomplished the necessary mutational sequences.

    Today the Navy and CDC are globally in lockdown mode collecting and secreting all virus samples. The Eastern Bloc is now completely blacked out, with Indonesia the last to stop sharing collected sequence samples into the public science domain. There are no cures, by the time this virus is sequenced and enough antigen is collected to mix with adjuvant to make a vaccine it is far too late. Not to mention that unlike any other flu virus the antigen itself is so lethal that it kills the host eggs used in vaccine manufacture.

    So unless you built this virus to mutate into a specific end sequence, for which you have a vaccine, then you are as much at risk as the rest of us.

    It would seem with near certainty (aside from the reason in my previous post concerning the ‘detonator’ design of this particular virus being far out of reach of the human host) that our turn is approaching. Our fate was sealed, I’m afraid, with the release of the very peculiar Swine Flu (a dangerous H1 in a whole another category from seasonal H1, but we could survive a Pandemic of Swine Flu, probably, it is an offshoot of a copy of the 1918 Spanish Flu). The Swine Flu is a disaster-in-wait, though, because it is defined by its ease of mating with other viruses (like HP H5, a very real threat censored from public view) and its ease of transmission among humans, faster than its seasonal counterpart.

    In fact, Swine Flu is such a unique, unexplained and unaccounted for new introduction that it has crowded out every other seasonal influenza virus to date (across all three flu category types: A, B and C). How did that happen? Indeed. It’s almost as though someone is trying to provoke a Pandemic. Never mind that flu viruses are the fastest mutating of all the viruses… there’s just too many bullets in the chamber now to play Pandemic Roulette for many more flu seasons.

  • Erich Simon July 9, 2010, 8:46 am

    Ok, I’m gonna say this (first, I don’t blog… I didn’t send my last post, my computer did, I didn’t even think my ‘musings’ were being recorded…, and in fact in all the years I’ve known Rick Ackerman I’ve looked in at his site less than a dozen times… I got my own trading gig). So I’m not gonna go into an encyclopedia of proof here about the larger reality.

    But your accusations (deserve?) to know my opinion on why we are all still walking around with “The Bird Flu” Titan firmly entrenched on three continents. Forget about the Gulf (that’s just another polar event, although most probably now the ‘kickoff’ event, of a list of upcoming, social… calamities, of which Pandemic is the Big Daddy). These were all slated to begin (per me) around 2010 based on simple population doubling against a model I’ve been tracking for more than thirty years, including countless variables, and which is dictating fiscal and monetary policy, another symptom and not a cause.

    The HP H5 virus broke so many laws of nature that it is a hundred million to one shot it originated on-the-fly, particularly in juxtaposition to SARS, which was another freak with its unusually high 10% CFR (case fatality ratio). The HP H5 virus is so lethal right now it has a 60-90% CFR in human beings, with instantaneous death in other animals, like sparrows. It is the incarnate weapon in a branch of the military that has across human history specialized in the development of air-borne (aerosol) delivery, fast-acting Death. The ‘best’ nerve agent predecessor, FYI, caused death in less than two minutes, with just one drop anywhere on the skin. That was yesterday’s technology.

    So why are we still here?

    There’s really only one answer. The version of the virus that was released wasn’t fully weaponized. That last part was kept separate by the manufacturer, how much separated has sweated the brightest brains on the planet these last years behind closed door talks on levels that excused and excluded the highest ranking security badges in the CDC. A Pandemic of a Highly Pathogenic influenza virus most assuredly is the greatest perceived threat to our existence ever to come along.

    The ‘detonator’ technology in this kind of weapon is what is referred to as (human host) Receptor Binding Domain (RBD) technology. These are ‘docking’ cells throughout the body and include the top of the human throat, in the lungs, in the blood and in the nervous system. Right now the virus is capable of docking with all of the above, but only ‘recently’ moving from down deep in the lungs to up higher in the back of the mouth, a very bad thing.

    So what we have is a situation not unlike an atomic bomb, where the raw material, the uranium or plutonium, is buried at one location, while the detonator is ‘stored’ separately to prevent anyone from obtaining a live nuke. Only in this case, the virus was plowed under (most probably by the collapsing USSR in ‘91, who are accusing the Chinese) but without the RBD technology advanced into final stage. But enough so to actually break the species barrier, infect a human host with an ‘alien’ animal virus, and allow that party to infect along a chain.

    What is the ‘final stage’ of a weapon like this? Mail six infected people (they’re called Super Spreaders) to a half dozen US cities and in 7-14 days of unsymptomatic incubation and transmission across 98% of the indigenous population a time released ignition would then quite literally collapse dead the entire country at the exact same instant. The 1918 H1 virus (a LOW PATH) did that very thing to entire villages of Inuit, dropped dead instantly and discovered where they fell. The only handful who would survive such attack would be those with evolutionary mutations in their receptor binding cells not allowing the virus to dock in their bodies, like hemophiliacs injected with HIV tainted blood who can never get sick.

    And this is why, for now, we are all still here. Because the virus was tinkered but the RBD viral-human genome map, along with the aerosol technology of incubation dissemination within the context of time release independent of infection date, was pocketed away….

    • Benjamin July 9, 2010, 4:32 pm

      (Tosses my glasses off, rubbing my temples… puts glasses back on, head-ache gone)….

      I assume you’ve heard of EMP weapons. Well, when I first heard of those, well over a decade ago, the story was that a simple stick of TNT would do the trick. Just wrap that coil around it and set it off and you could a whole nation the size of the U.S. Today, it requires a nuclear explosion. Tomorrow, I’m sure, a death star and a Darth Vader (both of which we have plenty of even today).

      “A Pandemic of a Highly Pathogenic influenza virus most assuredly is the greatest perceived threat to our existence ever to come along.”

      Well, I guess that all depends on the eye of the beholder, Mr Simon. Some will say terrorists, some will say flu, some will say EMPs, some will say gays, even… It’s a lot like listening to comic book nerds argue about the greatest super hero of all time. Rock, paper, scissors. It never ends, though sometimes I wish it would but since it’s all rock, paper, and scissors, I don’t think I’ll ever be so lucky (or rather, unlukcy, depending on how you look at it).

      All I can argue is that a super-weapon is not needed. Plauge still exists. It was a number of years ago where parts of Yosemite national park had to be closed off due to high counts of bubonic plague carriers. There is no cure for plague of any sort. Let some of that loose, and whoever did so would be part way to their goal of wiping out over half the population. Add in some nuclear detonations after, keep it up, and pretty soon you’re near 90% or whatever.

      Of course, I’d have to argue against my own argument, as nature is such a thing that life would persist nonetheless. After all, even after a dinosaur-ending asteroid impact millions of years ago, all life today is because far from all life perished. And I’ve little reason to doubt that it would be human life in the event of a virus attack. The reasons are too many to state, but one is that unless this virus persisted over long periods of time, those doing the unleashing would only be introducing a temporary disruption because when all is said and done, that IS all they can do no matter the level of technology involved. And even if they DID have a virus that could sustain itself for so long to wipe out human life, they would only be screwing themselves in the process.

      The only thing that can wipe out human life is nature’s “decision” to. To go extinct means that a number of uncontrolable factors must come together and persist for much longer than any Illuminati plan can possibly manage. For an idea of how that works…

      http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/04/where-are-the-corpses/

      I would guess that humans would have to be limited in habitat, highly specialized to it. Then something what have to come along, either systematically in each pocket or in one fell swoop, and wipe out the remainder. But I say again that getting humanity to that point itself is a quite a chore.

      Anyway, I don’t doubt that there are people in the world, rich and powerful people at that, that would love nothing more than to see this happen. But what else is new? Those kinds have always been with us. And just because they didn’t always have X technology doesn’t mean they’ll be successful this time around. It’s a logical fallacy to assume so, called the logical fallacy of technology (and by extension, the logical fallacy of tradition). Technology for the purpose of evil is in fact limited by the amount of technology for good purposes.

      Today’s modern understanding of viruses, for example, is at all not because of what the evil desire, bur rather because of what the good sought to explain and deal with. Nuclear technology itself was the result not of having to beat Hitler to the punch, but the millennia of man’s curiosity in explaining the universe. Evolving science all the way up til the point where nuclear weapons were developed had a big jump on the damages such weapons could cause. Human life has only exploded in population and well-being since ancient times, because of science in general. By time nukes came about, it was very likely that they couldn’t wipe us out.

      So to the super virus, I argue that some other wide-spread, persistent and bothersome virus will have to be wiped out first before it can be understood how to create a human-ending super virus such as you desribe. I could be wrong, of course, but thousands of years of recorded human history tell me not to expect an inevitable fluke as the only possibility.

      I can see you’ve spent a lot of time and effort into this, but try to squeeze those considerations in, to let the beast relax if not fall into a coma 🙂

  • Redou July 8, 2010, 1:43 pm

    The public wants to point a finger at BP.
    There is a dead zone at the mouth of the Mississippi River:

    “Currently the most notorious dead zone is a 22,126 square kilometre (8,543 mi²) region in the Gulf of Mexico, where the Mississippi River dumps high-nutrient runoff from its vast drainage basin, which includes the heart of U.S. agribusiness, the Midwest. The drainage of these nutrients are affecting important shrimp fishing grounds. This is equivalent to a dead zone the size of New Jersey. This estimate does not include nor take into account the Deepwater Horizon oil spill which began in April of 2010.”

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_zone_%28ecology%29

    That dead zone was there many years before BP screwed up and it will still be there many years in the future.

    Yes, we all drink water, then we dump chemicals in the drain and on the land and they end up in the rivers and oceans – why do we point the finger at BP – why not ourselves?

    – It’s the other guy.
    – not in my back yard

    &&&&&&

    Oh, C’mon, Redou, give BP discredit where discredit is due. RA

    • Benjamin July 8, 2010, 5:38 pm

      Redou,

      Thanks for posting again, as I live for debate! (takes a few practice jabs before the knock-out round begins)

      The dead zone, eh? Mmmm… No. That’s a movie based on a Stephen King novel, nothing more.

      For one, why are there oil soaked animals down there? What, you think the birds migrate and live in dead areas because they want to get away from all the noise of hunting in the abundant environments they came from? Or maybe they were peacefuly seeking an end to their life, so they went to The Jersey Dead Zone fully expecting to die of starvation, but got a dose of oil instead? And if it was a dead zone, why were there fisherman down there at all (who apparently have been living off welfare the whole time, since they’re fishing dead zones)?

      Besides, I’ve been down there before. There aren’t too many places that I haven’t been in North America, as I used to be a long haul trucker. And the pollution was nothing, especially when compared to the area I live, which is a shout away from the Whiting refinery in NW Indiana. As far as dirty places go, Whiting is in the top two (El Paso being the other). But there’s still plenty of wetlands and wildlife around the Wolf Lake and Lake Michigan area in which the BP refinery operates. They’re dirty, but there ain’t no dead zones up here.

      Ain’t no dead zones down there yet, either, but when you have to pay more to clean shrimp or go further out to get clean shrimp, someone has to pay for it because they didn’t inflict this on themselves. If it’s an act of God, it’s an act of God. But when someone causes you damages, they pay. Simple as that. These laws actually go back much further than Western civilization. Back in ancient times, if your goats got loose and went nuts on your neighbors property… Guess what? The owner was required to pay compensation. Doesn’t matter that everyone depends on goats milk or not. Carelessness is carelessness. And not to put too fine a point on it, but competition works in such ways. The careless/inept price themselves out of the market because they aren’t profitable when they have to destroy as much as, or more than, they produce.

  • David July 8, 2010, 2:48 am

    Thinking along the lines of Rich about how the oil spill and the public’s response to it may be a psychological response to the recession, or stagnation. Thanks to few studies along this line by Roger Kaplan I can come up with two associations that may apply.

    During long periods of stagnation the people will become tired of the status quo and begin looking for change, any change even if violent. Another comparison is that it is during periods of high unemployment when society sees more creativity. During prosperous times even our most creative folks are busy making money but when there is high unemployment some of the best and the brightest will choose to pursue their creative avenues rather than taking a low paying job. Simon’s work was certainly creative.

    Speaking of which. The drilling of the relief well is taking readings, including magnetic readings to accurately intersect with the old well. The well is intact.

  • Larry July 8, 2010, 12:07 am

    “Is drilling into the side of a hundred million atomic bombs delicate?”

    What gobsmacking hyperbole.

  • Allan July 7, 2010, 11:46 pm

    A mild rebuke for you Rick. Why are you wasting your time and website space providing a forum for this ill informed, fear mongering, wack-job? Shame on you.

    &&&&

    Allan: Please refer to the scores of responses the wack [sic)-job’s essay elicited. RA

  • Rich July 7, 2010, 11:00 pm
  • alan July 7, 2010, 10:45 pm

    Rick, Whether or not this guy has made a bird flu prediction that didn’t fly (ok…allow me this one pun) this possible outcome to the BP spill is still worth considering; why shouldn’t we believe that this is a potential horrific result of our allowing these corporate incursions into natural balance.

    The conclusion we are left with is that we are doomed by fat congress people whose only job is to get re-elected. They have allowed corporations to dictate the regulation of every industry and facet of our economy. Why should any regulator concern himself with protecting the public when he knows that even the slightest confrontation with industry will result in an order coming down for him to desist? That order will originate with a Barney Frank horrid creature. Someone in the pocket of someone else.

    Did we really need Senator Byrd to have been in Congress since Eisenhower? Is this an accomplishment? What more do any of them know after decades in office other than how to shake down a lobbyist?
    We are doomed.
    Alan

    • Jim K July 8, 2010, 2:28 am

      I find Ron Paul to be credible, competent, honest and courageous – he’s been there a good while also. My district was represented for many terms by Henry B. Gonzales – who spoke truth to power over and over again, introduced a bill year after year to abolish the Federal Reserve Bank – he ran unopposed for a very long time. His son who inherited his seat, however, is not made of the same stuff – when I wrote to ask him to cosponsor Paul’s audit the Fed bill (in honor of his Father) he responded that the Fed needs to operate ‘independent of political influence’ to do it’s job. Paul and H.B. Gonzales maintained their ideals and understanding of the Constitution – while the majority appear to never have had any depth to begin with. Maybe it’s the fluoride in the drinking water…

  • HAL BARTON July 7, 2010, 10:44 pm

    I lusted to alarm people about the Doomsday Gusher – just to get them to think about their lack of caring towards our common environment (our only only), but now I’m a victim of my own propaganda. Getting ready for the end of life on earth as we knew it – but those up above who are in deep denial refuse to see that millions of people need to be warned so they can escape the first results of that reckless, Frankensteinian venture to get even richer than they already are. After all, there are mistresses and their children to take care of – you can’t get too many millions, no-sir-ee ! It is doomsday, soon there will be no more mistresses with perfect breasts and butts complements of artistic plastic surgeons. Thank you for waking me up completely – now I must make the rest of my life count towards my loved ones. oxoxoxoxoxxo

  • ben July 7, 2010, 10:15 pm

    …. The initial sea bed pictures showed four or five Geysers comparable to the size of the initial well bore explosion but those have been removed from public domain….

    Come on. Give me a break. The initial pictures showed just one geyser. Where are these other geysers exactly? Are you saying they were visible in the background, a mile beneath the surface, when they took images of the main geyser? Not even the US government would be able to censor the internet and prevent this quondam readily available evidence from floating around all over the web. Is Erich alleging that the entire internet has been cleansed of these images of other geysers?

    I think everything Erich says should be considered the rantings of a madman until he can prove his allegation of multiple geysers…and as big as the main one no less.

  • hey July 7, 2010, 8:30 pm

    Geology; May 2009; v. 37; no. 5; p. 387-390; DOI: 10.1130/G25465A.1
    © 2009 Geological Society of AmericaThis Article

    Potential field evidence for a volcanic rifted margin along the Texas Gulf Coast
    Kevin Mickus1, Robert J. Stern2, G.R. Keller3 and Elizabeth Y. Anthony4

    1Department of Geosciences, Missouri State University, Springfield, Missouri 65897, USA
    2Department of Geosciences, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, Texas 75080, USA
    3School of Geology and Geophysics, University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma 73019, USA
    4Department of Geological Sciences, University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso, Texas 79968, USA

    Potential field data along the Texas portion of the Gulf of Mexico indicate a large-amplitude coast-parallel magnetic maximum and a smaller Bouguer gravity high. Models constrained by seismic-refraction data indicate that these maxima manifest a deeply buried volcanic rifted passive margin or other magnetic high in the outer transitional crust. Buried 12–15 km, the source is 220 km wide, similar to the Vøring Plateau in Norway and the U.S. East Coast. This margin, which formed during the opening of the Gulf of Mexico, differs in origin from the transform boundary of the northeast Mexico margin (Tehuantepec transform), and we infer a Jurassic triple junction related to the Borderland rift system, which is traceable as far as southeast California.

    http://geology.geoscienceworld.org/cgi/content/abstract/37/5/387

    &&&&&&&

    Nothing like a little hard science to shed some light on the gusher in the Gulf. RA

    • Rich July 7, 2010, 9:27 pm

      So Universal, Palm Springs, NYC and Jurassic Park now on notice too;
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurassic_Park_%28franchise%29
      There are faults right through Incline Elementary also.
      Didn’t stop Milken from shooting off fireworks Saturday.
      http://www.mikemilken.com/
      Seriously, read somewhere, maybe here yesterday, the pre-drilling seismic logs showed salt cap over Macondo Canyon Deepwater 2 cm thin in spots. Red Adair fixed subsidence too at Bravo North Sea blowout after doing the Devil’s Cigarette Lighter John Wayne portrayed as Hellfighters…
      http://www.redadair.com/

  • David July 7, 2010, 6:58 pm

    I haven’t read all the comments on this and all the other articles written on this event, but I’ve read a number, and there’s one thing I haven’t come across yet–the incredible irony in this situation! Here we were, thinking that maybe we were running out of oil as per Matt Simmons’ peak oil theory (which looked for all the world to be correct, given diminishing flow/discovery rates for wells and the industry worldwide), wondering what we were going to do when increasing demand met diminishing supply and forced us to conserve what petroleum we had for petrochemicals instead of burning as fuel, etc., and suddenly, apocalyptically, we’re AWASH in oil!! We’ve got so much oil we don’t know what to do with it all! It’s going to destroy first the Gulf, then the Atlantic, then all the world’s oceans if we don’t shut it off soon! Who’da thunk it?? Frankly, I think we should DAP to collect as much of this bonanza as we can–comments on “skimmers” I believe they are being called are right on the money. Surely we have or can come up with the tech to get most of this oil into tankers before it gets very far? What is the analogy that I’m searching for–flocks of birds gathering to feast on an unexpected bounty, piranha fish in a feeding frenzy,–? Pollution is only pollution when it isn’t valuable. If it is valuable, it won’t remain “pollution” very long. Like cans along the road in a 10-cent deposit state. You don’t see very many of them, do you?

    • Benjamin July 7, 2010, 7:31 pm

      That’s not exactly what the abiotic hypothesis says. Wells will refill with time, and indeed they have, but not like what many perceive to be happening in the Gulf. Thomas Gold set out to prove the _origins_ of oil, not that there was unlimited oil just waiting to keep on gushing up. It’s like this… See this corn seed? Well, no one could argume me it’s infinite potential. But it’s not going to just spring forth an endless bounty.

      That said, yes, I think there is much more to be said about abiogenisis than the hypothesis is given credit for today. And yeah, it is kind of funny, that irony you mentioned. Reminds me of that Indiana Jones movie where he cries out for water (after having used his feet to brake a runaway mine cart) and then the water just comes roaring in!

      Great way to put the value of “pollution”, too. That’s exactly what I was talking about.

  • mario cavolo July 7, 2010, 6:54 pm

    …an odd development…when the DOW was up 15 points several hours ago at the open, VXX was hovering around 27.40ish, slightly down from yesterday…now with the DOW up 140 points, and the other indexes comparably higher, the VXX is still hovering at the same level 27.40ish…I’ve NOT seen that before and yes, I bought some…

  • warren July 7, 2010, 6:43 pm

    I don’t know what firing a gun under water, has to do with bid flu, has to do with Israel, has to do with oil well blowouts. I’m with fallingman, Road apples.
    I’m just going to pray.

  • Redou July 7, 2010, 6:09 pm

    Another thought occurred to me:

    With all the finger pointing – BP, Anadarko, Transocean, Halliburton, Obama, Coast Guard, Etc……

    Where is the public’s culpability?

    Drugs are a major problem – caused by all those no-good drug dealers. A drug dealer cannot exist without a drug buyer. The buyer demands and the dealer supplies.

    The American motorist demands and BP supplies.

    I live in Louisiana. At the bar two shrimpers were shredding BP, planning to join in the several class action lawsuits being filed – the
    lawyers here smell money and are in a feeding frenzy.

    I asked one of the shrimpers how long he had been shrimping and he told me he was third generation – father and grandpa had also been shrimpers. These guys have been making a living using diesel engines for 60 years.. Diesel engines cannot run without BP or another company drilling holes in the earth. So the oil companies have been helping feed these families quite a while – but now when one oil company screws up – 60 years of affordable oil are FORGOTTEN. Human nature………..

    -It’s the other guy.
    -Not in my back yard.

    -WE ALL BURN OIL.

    :
    Abraham Lincoln (Loosely Quoted) said he had rarely ever met a truly stupid person, but, when humans get into a group – they get stupid real quick.

    • Benjamin July 7, 2010, 6:49 pm

      “-WE ALL BURN OIL.”

      WE ALL DRINK WATER!

      But if someone floods my property with their desire for risk, then yes, they would owe me compensation.

      Let’s not give up the cornerstone of Western civilization, please…

  • Jim K July 7, 2010, 6:07 pm

    Viruses lose virulence as they increase transmissibility – this idea that a virus will become more fatal AND more contagious is contrary to what viruses do. In the well announced emergency, with the vaccine manufacturers meeting with World Health Organization with their primary concern being whether level 6 pandemic would be declared (triggering mandated vaccination of many fortunately recalcitrant populations worldwide, using their highly toxic and mandated liability free, ineffective, overpriced fraud medicine). Look at the facts – the swine flu covered the planet – it was highly contagious but far less virulent than regular flu. We have been hearing ‘certain death is coming’ emergency talk ever since SARS, West Nile Virus, Bird Flu, Swine Flu – along with ‘all pregnant women and small children need to line up to get a dose of mercury and brain inflaming immune adjuvants’ – and ‘your neighbors who refuse are putting your child at risk’ – this talk is the most shrill fear mongering – the crisis theater is now playing re-runs because the disaster stories are starting to bore people. What is a growing smell in the air is suspicion that we are being conned about some large part of all the crises because they are too many to be credibly simultaneous – unless you believe in the Wrath of God for all of our sinful ways. No shortage of useful hysterics to keep the ball rolling.

    Living in South Texas, I am particularly worried about the Gulf oil gusher – but I am also very suspicious that this is being spun for some very different purpose. We should keep our eyes on the ball and note how – with all these crises – that the proposed solutions all entail aggregating power away from the Citizens of the World and their locally controlled law enforcement and tax collecting and spending, and instead towards these International consortia of corporations, banks and big governments – also known as Fascism – complete with global taxation by unelected entities. Fear is the avenue through which we are led to this eventuality – and before you know it, we invite tyranny through the front door with welcoming arms. Secrecy is the enemy of Freedom – the press should be allowed out there to give us a better look at what the Hell is happening in the Gulf – be highly suspicious of those who won’t let you see, and government which collaborates with such limitations of the press.

    &&&&&

    Great post, Jim — thanks. RA

    • Rich July 7, 2010, 8:43 pm

      Government by crisis emergency.
      Meanwhile, consider James Wright of Boots and Coots, a spinoff of Red Adair, has a 40 of 40 success record with relief well bottom kills. Red Adair, BTW, put out the biggest North Sea offshore well, Bravo, which included seabed subsidence and all the other shrill hysterics going around.
      APC and BP are up 20% and 24%…

  • Redou July 7, 2010, 5:42 pm

    This has happened before:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ixtoc_I_oil_spill

    It seems the Ixtoc spill was contained in 9 months.

    You may perhaps take note of the last paragraph of this terse and well written article – “Despite over 3.3 million barrels of oil ending up in the environment after the cleanup, the beach fauna or beach populations were back to where they were before the spill within two to three years. [11] After 6 years, it was difficult to find any evidence of oil.[12] Today, after more than 30 years, there is little sign of the oil spill.”

    An internet reading of the fragmented information available led
    me to the conclusion that the two events were roughly similar.

    It appears that BP was basically taking a chance. Apparently the
    drillers and mud engineers warnings went unheeded. Of course,
    BP wanted production – Meaning – DIG THE HOLE. Most likely, BP had taken these chances before and gotten away with it. I believe drilling costs are high – Million a day? – So you can see why BP doesn’t want to stop/slow drilling and circulate mud to equalize the pressures – like they are supposed to. They were “drilling for KICKS” ( “kick” is an oil drilling term – google it and read about it…..) and they got one.

    The above article is so poorly written – I don’t know why Mr. Ackerman passed it along except perhaps to stimulate discussion.
    The writer’s style is an embarrassing caricature of William Faulkner’s (the most famous Southern writer in American history)
    apocalyptic style. Faulkner’s writing style elevated worldly events
    to supernatural proportions. Good fiction (in Faulkner’s case) but the style is totally inappropriate for any type of technical discussion. The style here functions to cover up missing facts and messy logic. Kind of like smoke, mirrors and light shows function to cover up the inadequacies of shitty rock music.

    By the way; what does the MILITARY know about oil wells?

    • Rich July 7, 2010, 8:44 pm

      BP the primary provider of petroleum products to the US Military…

    • Rich July 7, 2010, 9:00 pm

      Ixtoc was in shallower warm water like the Persian Gulf where the bio-organisms could do their work. Deepwater Horizon Macondo Canyon is a mile underwater, where 2 degree temps make it a much different story.
      Adding the toxic Corexit Cocktail to the mix may be a biological disaster wildcard.
      Despite claims by Nalco and EPA citing US Government Safety, and BP workers without hazmat suits, respirators or gloves, the MSDS says otherwise:

      HANDLING :
      Avoid eye and skin contact. Do not take internally.

      SYMPTOMS OF EXPOSURE :
      Acute :
      Excessive exposure may cause central nervous system effects, nausea, vomiting, anesthetic or narcotic effects.
      Chronic :
      Repeated or excessive exposure to butoxyethanol may cause injury to red blood cells (hemolysis), kidney or the liver.

      UNSUITABLE CONSTRUCTION MATERIAL :
      Copper, Mild steel, Brass, Nylon, Buna-N, Natural rubber, Polyurethane, Hypalon, Viton, Ethylene propylene, EPDM

      * Can be absorbed through the skin.

      RESPIRATORY PROTECTION :
      Where concentrations in air may exceed the limits given in this section, the use of a half face filter mask or air supplied breathing apparatus is recommended. A suitable filter material depends on the amount and type of chemicals being handled. Consider the use of filter type: Multi-contaminant cartridge. with a Particulate pre-filter.
      In event of emergency or planned entry into unknown concentrations a positive pressure, full-facepiece SCBA
      should be used. If respiratory protection is required, institute a complete respiratory protection program including selection, fit testing, training, maintenance and inspection.
      HAND PROTECTION :
      Neoprene gloves Nitrile gloves Butyl gloves PVC gloves
      SKIN PROTECTION :
      Wear standard protective clothing.
      EYE PROTECTION :
      Wear chemical splash goggles.

      OCCUPATIONAL EXPOSURE LIMITS :
      Exposure guidelines have not been established for this product.

      NLC, EPA and NOAA were saying this product was tested safe!

      US Military/Coast Guard was spraying Corexit into the air over land, people and the sea with Hercules C-130s while BP reportedly told hirees they would not be paid if they did not sign a liability waiver or not wear respirators requiring unavailable training:

      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkYJDI8pK9Y&feat… 15:44

      http://www.deepwaterhorizonresponse.com/posted/2931/Corexit_EC9527A_MSDS.539295.pdf

  • Rich July 7, 2010, 5:27 pm

    In psychological terms, much of this oil spill discussion seems like displacement activity to ignore the fact widespread expectations of market collapse, excluding gold and silver, were scuttled, while other markets, including APC and BP, so far turned up since Independence Day.
    Re Tesla, not so sure I want to buy a stock that admits it will not have earnings for at least two years. Maybe that is the new normal…

    • mario cavolo July 7, 2010, 5:50 pm

      Hi Rich, good point and I’d like to say again that the idea of a stock market “collapse”, that doomsday we’ve, ahem, discussed here, is not going to happen while interest rates are at zero. Now, I said “stock market” will not collapse, to be clear; which is to say that if the entire damn economic “market” of the world collapses via some disastrous black swan event in the banking or energy industry, then surely the market’s will tank to hell and wow will that be an amazing buying opp for all of us.

      Here’s what is going to happen:

      1. The stock markets and world economies are generally going to be in decline the next several months or longer into a global “Japan” situation. Then prices will somehow start back on the upswing.
      2. Currency buying power will continue to deteriorate, a sneaky, ugly cost of good inflation. This is how the printing of excess money will ultimately get worked out.
      3. China will NOT under any circumstances “collapse”. Everyone should be thanking the Chinese right now, they have SO much cash and assets you just can’t fathom it. I’m talking citizens, not just the government coffers.
      4. Same with oil…can’t go up now with global recessionary pressures but will get very expensive later on.
      5. Gold will continue its rise of course.

      Way too boring for most readers here to accept.

      Cheers, Mario

    • Rich July 7, 2010, 9:11 pm

      “Here’s what is going to happen: ”

      Thanks Mario;

      Could I sell my gold to you privately at 1265?

      Guess I had better sell APC and BP when this rally stops.

      Maybe Shanghai Composite is ready for a rally:

      http://stockcharts.com/chartsgallery.html?s=%24ssec

      Cheers…

    • Benjamin July 8, 2010, 12:20 am

      Rich: “Could I sell my gold to you privately at 1265?”

      Trade the g/s ratio, not the price. You’ll be able to skim profits in oz, which, if you must consider it, amounts to $ gains.

  • fallingman July 7, 2010, 5:12 pm

    Horse hookums.

  • Benjamin July 7, 2010, 4:45 pm

    In light of Rick running this another day, and in light of Mr. Simon posting his response, I’ve decided to tackle some other issues that we commonly see in assessing the possibilities…

    Poison gas bubbles:

    Of course there uncounted cubic feet of gases down there. Of course they are poisonous. However, gas disperses much differently than oil…

    Take a tank full of compressed air, with a hose attatched. Or better yet, a straw and your lungs. Blow into a large vessel of water, such as your bathtub. Now, why do the bubbles seem to grow as they approach the surface?

    Aside from colliding with other bubbles, the pressure of the water weight on top lessens to allow the bubble to decompress. The more it decompresses, the more it will grow in area. The closer the gas gets the surface, the more area it distributes over. And unlike the oil, once it does break the surface, it only continues to go out and up, allowing it to spread into even more area, in more directions than the oil caught by the currents.

    So most of the gas still distributes away from the land. This is not to say that the gas won’t be a problem. It’ll stink, at the very least, and perhaps be in killing concentrations at worst. Evacuation may be nessecary, and, I contend, should be done. No one should be living in the immdediate danger-zone. Even though it’s not certain there will be a massive gas blowout, there wouldn’t be enough time to evac once that were to happen. So I wouldn’t argue against an evac of those areas, for that reason.

    However, this would not require a mass migration of the entire coast. The gas goes out and up, increasingly disipating over more area, decreasing it’s concentrations. This wouldn’t require more than evac’ing the immediate area from the former rig site.

    But the EPA said…!:

    Said what? That there’s several times over the threshold concentrations? But this raises the question as to where they’re starting their measurement from. That starting measurement says nothing for how it will dilute. Too, are these concentration measurements from beached oil or oil slick sites? If so, I say again the problem is that oil isn’t being collected like it should. As for…

    Gas-bubble tsunamis:

    The trouble here is that some have it exactly backwards. A massive object plunging into deep water causes a ripple, so it must be the same for a massive cloud coming out, right? No…

    /\ \ /
    / \ \/

    Energy only disipates from it’s area of origin. In fact, that is why the gas won’t spread out at further depths like it would in the atmosphere. The water pressure prevails, to keep it’s area limited until it gets closer to the surface where it decompresses more.

    ie, When an object(s) emerges from water, the potential energy to cause a surface disruption is ALREADY removed once it gets to the surface. This is the exact opposite of, say, a metor or landslide going INTO a deep body of water. The falling object(s) LOSES energy as it makes it way downward from the surface. Which means that most of the energy it has to lose is at the surface of the water, which is, because that water is only under atmospheric pressure, enough energy to displace the water and cause a ripple of some sort depending on the energy dispersed over a weaker force.

    But the pressures, man!:

    Well, of course if you increase the pressure enough, you can get enough energy to causes a massive, subsurface tsunami. That is why psi of 100,000 is being bandied about. But even if that were the case, ripples do the exact opposite when the energy is on the bottom than from on top. Again, an entering object disperses most at the top, diminishing toward the bottom. This is why the many termors on the ocean floor MOSTLY don’t bombard us with constant tidal waves.

    As for the pressures involved, discharge a firearm underwater if you don’t trust the laws of physics…

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0KLQ1v41V4

    At that depth, and under the pressures that live ammo is under, there should have been a big splash upward. But that doesn’t happen. And 357 Mag ammo is especially under much more pressure than depth water….

    http://www.ramshot.com/powders/loadguide/Handgun%20Powders/a%20ZIP/Pdf/ZIP%20357%20Mag%20Lead%20Bullets%20Page%209.pdf

    35,000 psi. I bet even if fired at under one foot it wouldn’t cause a splash, much less a tsunami.

    But the scale is much greater than a gun, you idiot!!!:

    SO WHAT?! It’ll only be a tsunami if it’s going to be anything at all! And it’s not like the coast ISN’T used to being hit by water!

    And not to put too fine a point on it, but the proxminity to land is going to aid in reducing the tsunami if it happens. Tsunamis radiate outward into water, and since there’s so much Gulf to the south, it’ll have that much more room to peter out. Mexico and the islands could have some flooding, and probably nothing more than it already isn’t used to.

    And hell, that might help with the natural dispersal of the oil. Blast the coast and growing slick with water going en masse in the opposite direction from where all the oil is going. I know that things could and should be better, but let’s not refuse to look for silver linings in the worst cases sceanrios.

    I know there are problems, but… ugh!… Why can’t more people keep this in perspective? It’s almost like they WANT the world to end. And that’s not an opinion, it’s a sickness. If you delve down deep into yourself and find that to be the case, either rethink your mind or get help if you have too much trouble. Because it’s not healthy to live your life this way.

    As for Bird flu… Mario Cavolo, could you please step foward and give us the word from China? Are there people dropping dead like flies from this escaped virus, as Mr Simon contends?

    • mario cavolo July 7, 2010, 5:39 pm

      Hi Benjamin…..

      Stepping up to the plate….

      Pitcher throws a curve ball….

      Batter swings…

      Strike Three…the big zippo…nothing much going on in China on the bird flu… an article I read the other day that four people had died from it….that qualifies as “not news” in my book…if I ever might start seeing numbers like 500-5000 + I’ll mention it…I attended the monthly U.S. Consulate Briefing last night, not on the CG’s agenda or a question by anyone so obviously an item of zero concern…SARS, Swine Flu; its all proven to have been nonsense; to sell more drugs as far as I’m concerned…I haven’t gotten a flu shot in my entire life and neither have most people I know, its ridiculous. I can’t speak to military conspiracies to eradicate human life via bio-engineered virus strains…we’ll certainly start seeing some fresh big mortality numbers if that project gets a go ahead!

      Cheers, Mario

    • Benjamin July 7, 2010, 6:21 pm

      And there ya have it.

      On the matter of the military… What would waking up do, exactly? Would we be any safer for being “less sheeple” than we are? I mean, if they knew that we all knew, they would release it anyway. And it raises the question… Why are they waiting if the need to exterminate the planet is so urgent ?!

      That’s what I don’t like about most conspiracy theories. They defy logic at every turn. Then the theorists think themselves immune in knowing something we don’t. It’s their high-horse moment, but if such a thing were to happen, they wouldn’t be any more safe than “us idiots” who ignore them.

      Besides, if I wake up dead tomorrow, I’ll take the option of vengeance from the grave. Yes, there is such a thing. And if I and many billions wake up dead, they’ll have to dig Hell deeper in order to describe what I would unleash on the surviving perpetrators…

    • Antipas July 12, 2010, 11:44 pm

      Mario and Ben,

      You two must have missed the Ukraine last November in your glossing over of the Avian flu…not much news about that anymore, but don’t you think there should have been more information? Some investigation? Some understanding? Some news about what happened there, what variant that was, why was it so lethal? We don’t even really know what they died of, other than their lungs looked scorched and black (quite the fever, eh).

      Ukraine declared marshal law, no one was allowed to leave their home in several cities for three weeks…do you think its contained or out there floating on the wind…media black out, ha! It either a media blackout or nobody cares…I can’t decide whats worse!

      BTW the same thing happened in Kansas (Nov-Dec), fewer cases, but same symptoms, everyone who got it, died. Think it is contained in Kansas (Kansas and Ukraine, kinda far apart)? Who knows…that story died as soon as it was born, no further mention of it, the cause, containment…etc.

      Personally, I am going with God’s version, where he says when he judges the world, men left over after judgement will be scarcer than pure gold lying on the open ground. Also I have faith in His promise that the rich in their caves, and hiding in the depths of the ocean and in the heavens (outer space)…aren’t going to get away with spoiling the earth and living through what is coming either, at last the earth will have justice.

  • nonplused July 7, 2010, 4:34 pm

    Look, even if we accept the higher end estimates of 100,000 bbls/day (no reason not to I suppose), total daily oil production is 850 times as large as this oil spill. (85 million bbls/d over 100,000 bbls/d). Put another way, the BP oil spill is 0.12% of daily production. And guess what happens to all that other oil? It goes into the environment, either as CO2, plastic, chemicals, pesticides, or what have you.

    The spill is a big deal. It’s plain awful. But only an American could believe that because it happened to him, it’s the biggest deal ever in the whole world. The fact is an 850 times larger ecological disaster happens every single day just with regular oil consumption. But I guess all those deer mowed down on the highway and the gaping holes they dig in the tar sands don’t count, never mind what’s going on in the Nigerian delta. And now let’s add in coal and nuclear and see what we’ve got going on….

    Fact is this spill has a wealthy foreign target, and that’s the main reason to hyperventilate. The total ecologic damage we willfully do to the environment to support fossil fuel consumption is orders of magnitude larger. It’s just out of sight and more dispersed.

    So let’s stop the hyperbole and maybe focus on clean up efforts.

    For insight on this and other energy issues from people who actually know the oil & gas industry, go to http://www.theoildrum.com

    • Benjamin July 7, 2010, 5:15 pm

      Now nonplused, that’s another I’m about sick and tired of hearing…

      “The fact is an 850 times larger ecological disaster happens every single day just with regular oil consumption.”

      It would be GRAND if, for once, the spouters would provide meaningful evidence of their OPINIONS and personal philosophy, rather than the generalized, 100% politically correct (because let’s face it… that’s been the message for decades) bashing on mans footprints.

      And I’m still holding you accountable for the rudeness of pinning the young earth on Thomas Gold. The scientific community that I know and respect… we never do that, unless it’s by error. And when we’re found to be in error, we retratc and apologize.

      As for the Oil Drum… Oil Drummers remind me a song. I can’t remember for the life of me who wrote it, though. Anyway, it goes like this…

      I don’t wanna work
      I just wanna bang on the drum all day
      I don’t wanna play
      I just wanna bang on the drum all day

      To the oil drummers…

      I don’t wanna look
      I just wanna post on The Oil Drum
      I don’t want debate
      I just wanna bang on The Oil Drum

      Now, to be fair they do keep the topics scientific. But that’s a problem in and of itself. They don’t really grasp the soft sciences of, say, economics. Or rather, don’t cross them. And why should they? They’re hard science folks. But at the same time, they are touching upon a subject that is riddled with the soft sciences of economics and policy, so that is nesseciated.

      Put shortly, mu contention with the Oil Drum in general is that they commentate about ecnomic oil from a limited perspective of how things in the soft-science world are. They don’t even consider that so much malinvestment is making perfectly economically extractable oil into perfectly uneconomically extractable oil.

      One thing I oft say when the topic is health care, is that investment in coverage, however provided, is a massive malinvestment of limited capital. That surely has a large impact on anything when we consider commerical viablitity of a venture.

      But that’s soft science. So they take at face value that things will continue into the future at these current configurations (an unfree market, ie). From there, while they routinely dismiss what the peakers have to say, they are also of the mind that we’re running out of economical oil.

      Well, if they would just do what hard science doesn’t allow them to, they could answer many questions and open the door to many possibilties. But they (in general, btw, indicating no particular person) don’t do that. They stick to hard science only, forgetting that they aren’t hard science, but hard SCIENTISTS. A scientist can consider other angles that the hard science cannot.

      This is just my opinion of the Oil Drum over the years I’ve been reading their stuff. And because I got tired of it, I confess that I haven’t gone there in a while. But clicking your link and having a scan, it doesn’t seem anything has changed.

  • Pat July 7, 2010, 3:24 pm

    ROTFLMAO…..

    “There are other observations I left out of the Gulf piece. Like the fact that the black oil is absorbing the sun’s energy and superheating the jetstream which is raising temperatures up here in the NE into triple digits. And that is raw read, without any ‘heat factor’.”

    That is the biggest piece of horsesh#t nonsense I’ve ever heard. For the NE to heat, like it is now, means that the jetstream has to move much further north, perhaps into Canada. Simply put, temperatures south of the jetstream are usually warm/hot and north of the jetstream mainly colder. The jetstream has been running well up into Canada and the far northern US for at least the last week or so, that is why the NE, and many parts of the US, have been hot.

    If the jetstream were to dip as far south as the GoM and tap into some of that “oil induced heat” ( LOL) , it would mean the northern US would be likely very cold compared to normal.

    You need a serious dose of some heavy meds dude !

  • JF July 7, 2010, 3:03 pm

    “Who really cares where it comes from? It is coming. And our military and government are so aware of this coming reality that they have plans on blackboards right now to diminish our numbers by one half in all of two weeks.”

    Erich, would you mind elaborating how you know that? And would that plan be a sort of firebreak? If so, how does it fit with your contention that this H5 baby is airborne? Would that not trump the firebreak?

    So, are ‘they’ going to go to their underground bases ala Richard Sauder’s research, and hope beyond hope that it doesn’t get down there, or have ‘they’ shot themselves in the foot by dicking around with the genetics of this thing and made their bug-out infrastructure obsolete? And now ‘they’ have to survive topside, which is very unappealing to Morlochs, and leads to their need to contain the spread by reducing host numbers? How’re ‘they’ gonna zap all the birds?

    For what it’s worth, I think you are projecting in the deepest psychological sense of that term but I’m open to any enlightenment on the above questions that you are willing to share. Thanks, JF

  • mario cavolo July 7, 2010, 2:57 pm

    Hi Erich, …”like the possibility of the use already of a ‘non-military’ nuke, thermite, C4… already deployed during the deepwater moratorium and resulting underground shock wave. If true, it failed. And is the main reason why the Gulf is quickly turning black.”

    If such a planned large explosion took place, aren’t there any other non-BP monitoring devices such as earthquake sensors, weather sensors, radar, satellite imaging, etc., out there which would detect such blasts and help us figure out what has/is going on?

    Thanks and Cheers, Mario

  • Erich Simon July 7, 2010, 10:52 am

    Boy, you guys are rough… but scrutiny is all we have left when the Deceivers work their alchemy. Whoever dug up my background reminds me of why I don’t put out personal info on any sites… none are private. Actually, the MBA came from the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business… Bill Gate’s Alma Mater… and I did my undergrad down in the Gulf. At Tulane.

    While my college friends went off to work as roustabouts on the Gulf oil rigs back then in the ’70s, 16 hour days, 6 weeks out with no helicopters to ferry them shoreside unless they were crippled or worse… which happened a lot, dangerous work, I took my turn at wheel-barreling 300 pound loads of concrete in the Louisiana heat (1o5 degress in the shade come 11Am, 100% humidity and no rain), I was the only ‘honk’ on an all black crew humping for the son of the owner of the largest concrete plant down in the south, Dixie Concrete. Back then there were oil spills all the time… I used to walk along the beach in Biloxi and stare down at the black soles on the feet of the families on the blankets and scratch my head.

    There is much I would like to say, but for now only this… and it isn’t much about the Gulf, we will learn about that soon enough, I want to talk about Bird Flu. And only one or two of hundreds of facts that you have all gleamed far too casually.

    There are only two H’s in the 16-H influenza nomenclature that in their highly pathogenic state can cause “instantaneous” death (most likely inhaled but through all manner of contact) in numbers approaching 100% of a given population (H1 is recognized recently for the same but for subgroups, like Inuits and First Nation peoples).

    Anytime and Everytime that there has been an outbreak (in poultry, the origin of ALL influenza) the military has been brought in immediately, a perimeter has been cordoned and every bird of every type has been culled. Which makes the H5’s and the H7’s penultmate military weapons of mass destruction given adaptations to human receptor binding which according to all natural rule, have been accomplished… and surpassing all other WMDs, manmade and natural… gamma bursts, asteroid impacts… nothing comes close to a virus that kills “instantaneously”, incubated in sufficient window to spread through host carriers, infiltrate nooks and cranys of underground bunkers with ‘detonation’ like, simultaneous population collapse regardless of exposure or length of host carrier incubation).

    Since 1997 something incredible happened. Against all laws of modern virology. A highly pathogenic H5 ‘got out’. Not only that, but it broke a second law of modern virology, that an HP H5 or H7 could never infect a human host. The virus was just so extreme it killed before any further remote transmission between bird, the source, and the human, an entirely separate genome with spearate receptor binding physiology.

    After all, on aver a highly pathogenic killed 100 percent of the infected bird in an ‘average’ 48 hours, many were dead in mere hours. How could it then jump to humans, when such evolution could take years under perfect circumstances… tens and hundreds. And yet it did!

    That is unless the receptor binding domain technology was tampered to infiltrate the human host.

    Right now Highly Pathogenic H5 HUMAN virus is endemic in four countries, China, Indonesia, Egypt and Vietnam. We don’t know about Russia. According to every virologist with this dispersement of highly pathogenic virus brushing up against the human host (and now with highly efficient H1 making the rounds with the second attribute that it mates easily with all viruses… like HP H5) the world is on borrowed time.

    ANYONE who is dismissing the above civilization-ending event… with annual, media blacked-out censorship with ever greater and increased clusters (human to human to human to human to human… out to eight documented transmissions), and now with THOUSANDS of sub-strains branching more than half a dozen T. Rex super strains… is I’m sorry to say, a Sheeple to be slaughtered.

    This has nothing to do with big pharma making a fast buck. I can pen a whole book and prove it beyond a doubt. It was all along like pulling teeth to get the Pandemic alert increased and it is just this lull that is setting up to blind side us all.

    One last comment, in 1974 I began work on a sociological-demographic Malthusian model that geometric population doubling would lead to a critical event in the year 2010. I was wary of atomic war in the ’70s, I was wary of Y2K (as a blowup of the impoverished masses, today all around), I isolated influenza (because it mutates faster than any virus… along with the crush of the animal/human habitat) and with all flu originating in birds, and I did so even before SARS or Bird Flu or Swine Flu came across my trading desk… the point being, ladies and gentlemen, we are at the cusp not of stress free enligtenment, but disintegration.

    Who really cares where it comes from? It is coming. And our military and government are so aware of this coming reality that they have plans on blackboards right now to diminish our numbers by one half in all of two weeks.

    The Gulf oil Disaster is every bit as bad as I described. There is much I left out because I am still collecting facts, like the possibility of the use already of a ‘non-military’ nuke, thermite, C4… already deployed during the deepwater moratorium and resulting underground shock wave. If true, it failed. And is the main reason why the Gulf is quickly turning black. Oil is not gushing anymore, it’s overtaking.

    And this goes a long way to explaining why there is no well anymore, never mind the longterm effect of this toxic domino, and why they have to now go all the way down. And use a bigger charge and missile it into the reservoir for detonation to blow out (and mushroom back and just maybe disperse the reservoir into the surrounding deep earth containment.

    There are other observations I left out of the Gulf piece. Like the fact that the black oil is absorbing the sun’s energy and superheating the jetstream which is raising temperatures up here in the NE into triple digits. And that is raw read, without any ‘heat factor’.

    This is not science fiction. Anyone pointing that finger had better do their due diligence. Because if not,

    • Rich July 7, 2010, 5:14 pm

      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkYJDI8pK9Y&feat… 15:44

      Ellenor Whitty says:
      July 3, 2010 at 4:25 am

      After day 21, I made arrangements to cash in some retirement funds and other accounts, then managed to get a corporate transfer from Houston to Minneapolis (I work as a media relations specialist in telecommunications). As much as I love Texas, I knew that if I waited to leave by some future government decree, it would be impossible to hire movers, rent a U-Haul truck, get the needed moving supplies, etc. And I didn’t want to be given a Camp FEMA t-shirt and put onto a bus, so I went ahead and left on my own, before the cost of moving from the Gulf Coast skyrockets.

      Minnesota has 10,000+ lakes with natural water sources, and NO affiliation with the Gulf of Mexico, OR the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. It seemed to be the safest place to move. I got a good deal at a swanky midrise, but I’ll bet that if people start coming up here en mass, the rents up here will also go sky high. A lady up here told me to NOT tell anyone what I did because the people up here don’t want a KATRINA-type situation. Neither do I…… after Hurricane Katrina, the City of Houston went down the toilet and crime went out of control when they hauled all of those poor people to Texas.

      Just thought you’d enjoy my story here. I have no guarantee that I will survive any better up here than in Houston, but I feel a lot safer. Of course, many people think I am crazy for doing this, but I’m just lucky I could do this. It has already cost me around $10K, but the fun part is that corporate relocation expenses can offset my income when I do my 2010 tax return.

  • Mike July 7, 2010, 5:13 am

    WOW! Chill out man! Of course Tony doesn’t know what is down there — and he can’t see down the casing… Any water-well driller will tell you that you never really know what is down there. Of course you can’t see in the blown out casing!! its spewing oil- duh!! What a chicken little!!

  • Rick Ackerman July 7, 2010, 2:59 am

    Posted by Rick for Dean Ezell:

    I read a report today in http://www.rickackerman.com/2010/07/a-dire-view-of-the-oil-gusher-in-the-gulf/#more-23911

    That really got my attention. Some of those remarks are in fact off target; not even close to being correct OR so I thought. I got my trusty pencil out to do some basic figuring and was I surprised. My calculations in brief show that the pressure at the well head is in excess of 8,000 lbs. per square inch of surface area at the exit surface of the blowout preventer without any fluid moving; I, e, that is the weight of the hydrostatic fluid in the pipe casing – the oil itself – at bottom of the 18,480 foot deep hole.

    That 18,480 feet column of oil fluids weighs that much at the bottom of the hole; therefore to push the fluids out of the well there must of necessity be a bottom hole pressure greater than 8,000 lbs. To this force must be added more force to actually move the fluid up the hole. I would guess that 8,500 to 10,000 lbs. per square inch of force are being exerted. With that in mind I am still of the opinion that a new BOP could be set on top of the original BOP with all the valves opened while bolting it in place. Then the valves could simply be closed one at a time. A pipe riser could be attached with a tight connection, etc. etc.

    There has been a lot of talk about the seabed opening up such that oil is gushing up in plumes from the seabed fissures. I for one did not accept that ; rather I thought of that as scare talk. But then I was unaware of the story of June 17th, 2010 that I have copied and included herein below. This changes most of the speculation. BP and Congress held the public up to a scam.

    Consistent with BP’s Tony “Hayseed” not being told, I was not aware of that, no one told me that, I never saw that information, etc. etc. we too can say that neither did we. Bp’s actions in drilling the 1st hole that they abandoned were careless, see story below. They should be made to account for their irresponsible behavior. We are not told that they ever cemented the bottom of the 1st hole when they lost circulation mud, stuck the bit and used drill pipe tools to cut the drill pipe. That bottom part should have been cemented.

    It is said that huge cracks were created when they lost drilling mud fluids. Perhaps they just drilled into a crack and the drill pipe fell so fast to the bottom of that crack that it was stuck beyond all pulling power. Right here is where the whole problem developed and where BP failed. It is from this point & their subsequent actions that BP perpetrated a crime & the cover up started. The story said they “abandoned” the hole. Perhaps they did not abandon the hole as said. They might not have even cemented but rather pulled back toward the top & restarted using a “whipstock” bit to start a new hole from the original one, somewhat above the hole bottom where the drill pipe is still stuck in the hole, without even trying to cement the bottom cracks to seal them off completely.

    The cracks, lost drilling fluids and stuck pipe that was cut off the main length of drill pipe are the heart of the issue and we are not being told all the facts. The story could take several routes – that is all speculation. We don’t know what the facts are and neither does BP. It is my opinion that all those cracks & fissures at 18,480 feet deep should have been sealed off completely – not abandoned! We are not privy to their actions, so we cannot help them, no matter how hard we try. BP does not want our help.

    BP just wants this to just disappear. I want to see them hung from the gallows in some city square in the middle of America. Jail is too good for them! Here is how I found this story: I did a search on Yahoo.com by typing in: oil well blowout / open fissures / plumes – which led me to this: the 6th article from the top of the Yahoo search.

    • mario cavolo July 7, 2010, 2:36 pm

      I’m going to go along with Mike here. Suggestions of evil conspiracy go way too far…put yourself in the shoes of BP people….if it was me dealing with something that had NEVER happened before, I’m as much in the dark about what we “should” do as anyone because alot of what we NEED to know CAN”T be known…we can’t take a peak down an 18,000 ft freakin hole that’s gushing oil like a volcano, nor can we just cap it like its a bottle of shaken up champagne at a party….of course I am NOT defending them, for any negligence or greed they may have committed leading to the explosion whatever they may be…but after the fact, the folks dealing with this deserve a modicum of empathy…would YOU be floating on a ship in THAT water today trying to help knowing that if the bedrock or fissures or whatever rupture then there will be a nuclear level expulsion?. We ARE at the mercy of nature here with very little control of the outcome…Mario

    • Benjamin July 7, 2010, 4:57 pm

      It’s the nature of search engine results to change overnight.

      ” I did a search on Yahoo.com by typing in: oil well blowout / open fissures / plumes – which led me to this: the 6th article from the top of the Yahoo search.”

      http://www.investorvillage.com/smbd.asp?mb=4947&mn=9267&pt=msg&mid=9167943

      That’s my 6th result, but I don’t think that is what you were nudging us toward. Could you post the link please?

  • Dave A. July 7, 2010, 2:35 am

    Boy what a mess!
    When I was 19 around 1980 I got a job as a mucky muck from the local EDD a government agency that gets jobs for people. Funny that the agency was
    not helping the Unions at that time.I was a strike breaker(I didn’t know it)
    It was not known to me at that time, but I knew that a job was available and all I had to do was go down town with what they said to bring. They said bring clothes that could get dirty; long sleeved shirts and pants. I was to show up at San Diego Tank Cleaning Co. at 5:00 PM.
    I was dropped off by my Dad and had no clue as to what I was to be doing. $7.00/Hour was good pay to me at the time. When I was dropped off, I filled the work papers out and just waited to be told what to do.
    We (me and other people) were told to get in white vans that waited
    to bring us somewhere. Honestly I had no clue as what we would be doing. It was getting dark and I was surprised once we were loaded in the vans and on the way that nobody had been told what we were going to be doing or what the job was. I did hear some rumors that we were going to clean out a tank but that was all we knew.
    We arrived at 10PM at a hotel in Long Beach to drop off our stuff as it was going to take a few days for this job. We were ordered back into the van after 30 min.
    Why were we going to be working in the middle of the night?
    I found out it was because there was a long shoremen strike and they were not happy.We went through a guarded gate at the ship yard. A mucky muck is the guy that cleans out the inside of a ships tanks. Luckily for me we were to clean out the inside of a Chevron oil tanker’s oil holds.
    There were, to my memory, 11 sections or tank holds on the ship and split in the middle by a wall that ran the ships length.
    The opening was a hatch that was like 4′ in diameter. It lifted back on a hinge. There was a hygenist that took oxygen samples to make sure that it was safe to go inside. Blowers sent fresh air into the ships hold.
    The way we got to the bottom was an almost vertical stair/ladder and had to be at least 100′ down or more.
    What was going on was the tank had been steam cleaned and the crude oil residue settled on the floor of the tank. The walls were cleaned
    good, but the floor had this crude oil in low areas and it was like black honey.
    The smell is strong and the stuff will not come off of stuff it touches.
    We had to clean up the crude with putty knives and scoop it in plastic bags and then put them into buckets with ropes to be hoisted up to the top. Some guys were not as careful around the crude and got the stuff all over them.
    These compartments are huge. There are 20″ high ribs that run the length of the ship along the bottom and are about 3 feet apart. The rib is capped on the top edge like an angle. Under the angle lip is a pipe that steam runs through. It heats the oil so it stays less viscous and flows. The vapors were strong when we opened the hatch but it desensitizes
    the noses ability to sense it. It is still there though, in full force. Once you smell crude oil that much, you can smell the crude in all the products it makes, like vasoline and solvents. It was not fun. Long exposure for the people working in the Gulf will get to them. If the air quality is bad (low oxygen) we were not to go in the holds.
    I hope people understand that this was in a controlled situation.The Gulf will smell for a long time to come. Santa Barbara has its oil smell all its own from the approved drilling rigs off shore.
    I pray to God to give Man the solution needed for the Gulf oil leak.
    Groucho

  • JPM July 6, 2010, 8:11 pm

    I don’t know whether my comments some weeks ago suggesting that the Deep Horizon disaster could become something worse than Chernobyl inspired Erich to talk about Deep Horizon Chernobyl (and all the rest), in which case I apologize, because I think that he needs to calm down, get real and control his logorrhoea fits. One way to do it is just go on holiday to New Orleans and get in touch with those whose present miseries appear to affect him so much. He could write
    chronicles for us to read them, which at least would be a great help to assess the situation and its seriousness.
    Otherwise, he could start fantasizing as to whether there might be an important relation (physical, metaphorical or other) between the Deep Horizon event and the great event nearby that 70-75 million years ago wiped out the dinosaurs making it possible for human kind to develop and oil to become available.

    It is always a pleasure,

    JPM

  • Rich July 6, 2010, 6:22 pm

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AAa0gd7ClM&feature=fvw 2:48

    At least now we know why sushi went ballistic…

  • Rich July 6, 2010, 6:18 pm
  • Rich July 6, 2010, 5:42 pm

    “They are going to attempt to drill into the point of maximum pressure, close by where the August 20 explosion blew up in the first place.”

    You mean April 20th?

  • DAN July 6, 2010, 5:21 pm

    shun Israel and GOD will punish you

    sea-floor fissures are GOD’s work.

    Drill no, Pray yes, and support Israel

  • fallingman July 6, 2010, 5:10 pm

    “Maybe we didn’t die of the bird flu yet…”

    Oh, please. I’m completely unqualified to offer any useful opinion on the oil gusher. But I can tell you the bird flu scare was pure propaganda, direct from the government, WHO, and vaccine makers.

    One thing Mr. Simon got absolutely right. The government lies.

  • David July 6, 2010, 5:10 pm

    Brad,
    The well casing is 32 inch diameter with 2 inch wall thickness for the first (I have forgotten the exact lengths but in the ball park) 1000 feet. From there the next 2000 feet is 28 inch with similar wall thickness. Erosion from sand blasting is controlled by pressure and velocity. It is one reason to keep the pressures and size of the orifice at present levels. There are no signs the last time I checked of erosion being a problem.

  • nonplused July 6, 2010, 5:06 pm

    You’ve got to be kidding, Rick. Do you put stuff like this up just to stir the pot? Heck, maybe we’ve discovered the long lost energy source for the city of Atlantis!

    Just the suggestion that the well blew on contact with the reservoir should elliminate all doubt this guy is not a reliable source. They were 2000 feet into the reservoir and had not performed a cement bond log before removing the mud. Human error, not freak of nature.

    Actually I wish it were so that some source of “abiotic” oil could be found. That would save our bacon in the short term. But sadly, abiotic oil is the result of thinking with a lack of knowledge and a set of assumptions designed to prove a young earth, and was discarded by the oil and gas industry almost as soon as they started piecing together what it was they were drilling trough. There have been enough exploratory wells drilled to “the basement” that we know where the oil comes from. It comes from deeply buried shale, and after it’s formed it migrates upward to the surface or gets trapped under domes. The stuff that got trapped is what we drill for. It’s what BP hit.

    If you want to know something about oil & gas, visit http://www.theoildrum.com. They are covering the Gulf spill extensively. There are a lot of professional oil & gas people posting to this site.

    • Benjamin July 6, 2010, 7:21 pm

      “But sadly, abiotic oil is the result of… a set of assumptions designed to prove a young earth”

      But sadly, though it’s been a while since I read “The Deep Hot Biosphere”, I certainly don’t recall any mention of a “young earth” by Thomas Gold.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Gold

      However, apparently some have latched that hypothesis onto abiotic oil, as I came across some of that in a search (out of morbid curiosity). I’ve seen no direct conection made by Gold, not by any of his words or in his works. Damn internet strikes again!

    • mario cavolo July 7, 2010, 1:32 pm

      Hi nonplused!…you need to ask? Rick’s great at picking stuff to stir up the pot!! That’s a good thing because he has a large following which includes a number of very successful and intelligent people who contribute here, making this little slice of the web his little world that we are fortunate to be aware of and a great resource in its way too….yea yea, of course you have to have the intelligence to be able to weed through the moronic, emotional responses by folks o their frustrated high horse who just snorted another line or on their fifth Scotch of the day…oh yea, don’t forget to watch out for the bloviating, hard to catch it sometimes :)…

      Cheers, Mario

  • FranSix July 6, 2010, 3:49 pm

    I was looking up ELE meteorite strikes, since the Gulf was the site of a supposed ELE event. Actually it was a number of meteors all impacting around the same time:

    Chiccxulub crater

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater

    Shiva crater:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiva_crater

    The Shiva crater is bigger than Everest.

    Also, listening to the U.S. Coast Guard, they say that tar balls wash up on the shore naturally, and that tons of oil seep up into the Gulf every year:

    http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2000/01/000127082228.htm

  • Dale July 6, 2010, 3:21 pm

    Erich asks the question “Why are they waiting until August? How about September, or October. Or never?” but he doesn’t give us the answer. Well, I did a little research and found “the answer”.

    It was in fact answered by Erich himself on another blog where he describes himself as a “financial event impact consultant” with an MBA who also holds an “associate masters from IIST in Japan” and “was sent to learn survival skills in Quebec” presumably by his father “one of the Neurologists accredited with establishing the science of Neurology in New Jersey. The Neurology Department at Mercer Hospital in Trenton, NJ is named after him (Dr. Erich H. W. Simon(e)).”

    His answer….. “…being employed for no other reason than to buy time (a coupla months?) to hold anarchy in check until key personnel in the private sector can be relocated beneath the surface in advance of Margaret’s ringing of the Pandemic Bell”.

    Actually, this answer was given to a question relating to “the coming tax rebate ‘helicopter’ money drop, inflationary and contrary fiscal policy, turning a bad credit collapse situation even worse”, but I think it works quite well here too, don’t you?

    Erich is an incredible writer, I must say, and I will not pretend to know if his analysis is well founded or not as I simply don’t know. But I am open to all theories, and until proven false, will remain so. Incidentally, Clif High of the Web Bot project has labeled the period Aug 1-12, the 12 days of torment for Obama and his minions. Could this be related to a relief well catastrophe?

    Yes, Confucious, we do live in interesting times.

    Oh, to read some of Erich’s earlier writings on bird flu mainly, check out his posts on this blog
    http://scienceblogs.com/effectmeasure/2007/12/bhutto_birdflu_and_who_bashing.php
    and
    http://scienceblogs.com/effectmeasure/2008/02/indonesian_virus_sharing_by_th.php

  • Brad Archote July 6, 2010, 2:57 pm

    I grew up in South Louisiana and most of my family still live there in St Bernard and surrounding parishes. My father worked for a major oil corp for 40 years. I asked him about this event just after it occurred, about the pressure from this type of deep well and he told me some amazing things. The description of the post reflecting on the worst case scenario is not too farfetched in some of its evaluations. The enormous pressure erupting out of the damaged well casing is spewing not only the crude oil/gas/chemical mixture, but also the other abrasive contaminants as well. Sand and particulate debris are mixed into this gusher and as with sand blasting, even hardened well casing can and will be “sanded/eroded” away at some point with this uncontrolled movement of sludge rushing through the fragile steel tube. It doesn’t take high level rocket science to understand the physics of all of this. When the steel casing has been compromised to the point of it being a thin layer of sheet metal, the next thing that will be sand blasted is the direct opening that the drill pipe has punctured into this gigantic pressurized “tank” of oil. This has the capability of “sand blasting/eroding” away the opening into who knows how big an area to create a hole that could grow to be as big as it needs to release this ginormous hole in the Gulf bottom until the pressure equalizes itself with what’s above it.

    Not high-level rocket science but a real scenario of what the final outcome is headed for. My hope is that somehow these relief wells will hit their mark and be able to out-pressure this gusher and stop the flow of this monster well before physics has its final say concerning the steel casing and abrasive power of the sludge.

    Wake up, Peoples of this nation! The false info being fed to us is being fed to us by the culprits who enacted this doomsday episode, the wolves watching the chicken house. Maybe we didn’t die of the bird flu yet, but Armageddon could be disguised as an oil gusher. Ask the good Peoples of the deep Gulf states. The “oil flu” has contaminated their lives and the lives of all of us if we want to be aware of this. Pandora’s box has had its lid opened. Pray for a miracle…

    • Rich July 8, 2010, 12:03 am

      BP knew exactly how big the reservoir was before drilling. SLB earned its money with seismic logs that mapped the area. For competitive reasons BP pay prefer not to release the log…

  • David July 6, 2010, 2:43 pm

    Huh? What?
    Given a few more paragraphs and this author would have the drill pipe blowing up, out of the whole, penetrating the stratosphere and the resultant vacuum sucking earths atmosphere into space causing a gravitational disturbance first among the planets, then the stars, the galaxies, with a final implosion of the universe. We could then have a big bang and start all over again and be back where we are again 900 billion years from now. Only this time we will use enough drillers mud. Obama will have bailed out God. Everything hunky dory, let’s see what’s on the other channel Margarette.

  • Jim K July 6, 2010, 2:36 pm

    This fellow is a science fiction writer. And the previous point made that pressure doesn’t build as a result of pressure being released is obvious on it’s face – showing Erich Simon to be only a second tier science fiction writer. That this ‘unstable sea bed’ has been precariously containing the monster for eons does beg the question of why have we not seen other examples of this phenomenon in our vast world? Invoking anthropogenic global warming, as if it were a theory rather than an hypothesis, further reduces the writer’s credibility. Call me ‘crisis weary’ but the confluence of Global: environmental, terrorist, pandemic, and financial crises has never passed the smell test, especially given that the solutions offered all entail handing over a whole lot of authority – indeed sovereignty – to global entities – too much of a coincidence, sorry. As for this disaster, particularly given the secrecy, I can’t help but wonder if it too is being spun and managed to serve some other purpose – complete with some heroic global rescue authority that we will submit to – like Cap and Trade or some other equally irrelevant power-grab. It would help if our President and Congress had a better grasp of science, too – we are vulnerable to being scammed here.

    • storfisk July 6, 2010, 3:59 pm

      What can one say? As soon as they can build a rocket ship capable of intergalactic travel,and as soon as they can find a planet capable of supporting life, and as soon as they can figure a way to keep me alive for a few thousand light years, i’m outta here. This place is doomed!

  • Marty July 6, 2010, 2:14 pm

    Dave,

    Thank you for your thoughts. Can you explain a bit about the steps beyond the current effort to drill a relief well? What would be “next’, should this fail? Also, why do you think technical information is so scarce….in coming out from the government/BP?

  • Dave July 6, 2010, 1:47 pm

    As someone who drills oilwells for a living I have genuine understanding of what’s going on. I haven’t read the bird flu article but I can assure you this guy has no clue what he’s talking about. Please don’t take him seriously on this issue.

    • Jim July 6, 2010, 4:35 pm

      Thanks.

    • Mark July 7, 2010, 3:18 pm

      2nd thanks

  • Louis July 6, 2010, 1:40 pm

    Thank God I already died from the bird flu and don’t have to live through this!

  • Steveh July 6, 2010, 1:32 pm

    Two points that haven’t yet been covered:
    Firstly, why have the rocks, which have contained the oil at extremely high pressure for thousands/millions of years, suddenly cracked into lots of fissures? If the rock layers are that fragile or brittle then surely an earthquake many years ago would have cracked the reservoir enough to leak out the contents?
    Secondly, why isn’t more effort going into scooping up the crude oil when it gets to the surface? It’s cheaper than scraping it off the beaches and you can still sell the stuff to the refineries which makes a contribution to clean up costs.

    • Benjamin July 6, 2010, 6:23 pm

      “Secondly, why isn’t more effort going into scooping up the crude oil when it gets to the surface? ”

      They’ve just finished building some new super-skimmers, ten stories tall, many football fields in length. I guess you could call them Paul Bunyan canoes. Anyway, they can clean up something like 1/2 million barrels a day from the water. They finally began testing these about a week ago. My question is similar to yours…

      While building these super thingamajigs, why wasn’t the area above the old sight swarming with a fleet or two of just SKIMMERS over the leak area? Sure, it would have been more expensive (diminishing returns, and all that) but they wouldn’t have had to use so many over the long run. Just long enough to get the supers built, tested, and deployed. And it’s not like BP couldn’t have afforded that expense while the supers were being developed. Yeah, they’ve had some skimmers out there, but an all-out onslaught? Doesn’t look like it. Instead…

      I mean no disrespect to the knowledge and skill of the engineers, but… Why can’t men be men anymore?! All is reduced to pussyfooting around like an old lady with her walker chained to the wall, where it should be like a fit, well-oiled machine, strong enough to knock King Kong on his ass with one punch!

      Now, I’m not talking about plugging it. Clearly, this has had many problems, as it was destined to. Wouldn’t it have been better from the get-go to just leave the damn thing alone, let a fleet of skimmers do their thing until the super-dupers could be used, while keeping focused on the relief well? Or maybe even, heaven forbid, just leave it alone, don’t drill a relief well, and just collect?

      Because that is what this is and always has been. It’s an environmental problem only because it was never looked at as solely a collection problem. Of course, that wouldn’t have been politically workable. Let oil into the ocean even though that’s precisely what’s been happening anyway? This ISN’T an environmental problem? Surely it is an enviro-demon of some sort who would even dare suggest such unthinkable and blasphemous things!

      But here’s the thing. We’ve all seen the live web cam footage down there. The oil and other crap billows up, and from time to time you can see something swimming or darting around in the clean, surrounding water. All of the oil-covered life we’ve seen is on the beaches. Which would make perfect sense. Why would birds and oysters and turtles know how to deal with gushing oil? And why would things living down deep know how? Rather obvious that it’s a matter of habitat. One is more subject to those things in its habitat while the other is not. Ergo, one is clean and the other is smothered. So it would not have been unconscionable to let it leak up through the ocean, and just keep collecting on the surface. The irony is, is that in thinking about what was “best” (the extremity of zero tolerance) for the environment and human health, the environment and human life only suffered more.

  • SDavid July 6, 2010, 2:34 am

    My only question is this:

    Aside from financial obligations, why is BP EVEN involved in this? They have no say anymore!

    And when I read that the US government has rejected other countries offers to help …..

    This isn’t JUST a US problem.

    It’s the planet’s problems …. from humans to dolphins to birds to turtles …. right down to the lowly gnat.

    What is going on?

    Wake up America.

    And wake up planet earth.

    The earth isn’t ours. We share it. Remember??

  • Benjamin July 6, 2010, 2:13 am

    Not to be rude, and not to knock someone for their pessimism, but… SHEEZE! Get a grip, guy!

    Managing vs ending problems: No problem is ever well and truly solved. It’s all managed.

    Sheeple People going about their lives and business: No offense, but don’t be a butt-head. Of course I’m going to just go about my life. Why make things worse in dropping all to bow in awe to a disaster?

    The monster grows, etc: But if I were going to drop all and fully tune in to this sucker, what disaster is there that hasn’t already been experienced? All this talk about growing pressure and cracks and sky-high this and that is complete nonsense. Poke a tiny hole in a basketball. Let it leak. Add more holes. Widen them. Let it gush. Does the escaping pressure increase or decrease? Right. So it’s only going to become less with time. And since it’s not already gushing out well past the ocean surface, the chances are pretty good that it won’t no matter what happens next.

    Ye Olde Oily Monster: What matters the antiquity of the oil? I already know, as I have an internet too. And I got news for the internet… Oil can’t be carbon-dated, especially oil which has been bound under tons of rock and water for millions and millions of years. In order to carbon date anything, you gotta have look and personality and, most of all, it needs some exposure to the atmosphere no more than 50,000 years ago. Besides, what does the date of the oil have to do with anything?

    Ah, but I know the answer to that, as, again, I have an internet too. The only problem with my internet is that there’s a lot of crap on it. If only I could use the internet that the snobby rich people use! Anyway, to that story I say: Take a match, light it, and throw it in an especially dry patch of grass or forest. The earth is covered with grass, trees, and other flammable things. The wind is always blowing. So we have an ignition source, fuel, and accelerant. Lying military and plundering governments or not, though, the earth still has yet to reduce to a cinder because of a forest fire.

    We’re alive and well. Rejoice in that miracle, don’t worry yourself sick about it!

    Mt Everest: Mt. Everest is never going to rest at all so long as people keep on comparing things to it. Besides, there are bigger things on earth than Mt. Everest…

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Challenger_Deep

    That mother could swallow Mt Everest by more than a mile, and while I’m not entirely sure, I’m sure the area of that trench is comparable to the Himalaya range. I don’t ever hear anyone talk about any Challenger Deep-sized problems though. Mt Everest gets all the attention, all the girls, all the fame and fortune…. What’s up with that?!

  • Peter Montgomery July 6, 2010, 2:08 am

    keep screwing with Israel and the disaster will grow worse

    guess who is in Washington DC meeting with Obam_allah right now…

    look at this scenario

    # Weakened sand and salt layers above the reservoir simply collapse, turning a wide area of the outer continental shelf sea floor into an underwater sinkhole that could bleed 2 billion to 3 billion barrels of oil into Gulf waters. In addition, seismic-shock tremors roll in all directions for miles, with an unknown effect on other nearby fields, especially BP’s Thunder Horse (18 miles) field and Shell and BP’s Na Kika complex, located in Mississippi Canyon Block 474 (approximately 15 miles south-southeast of the blowout).

    http://industry.bnet.com/energy/10005034/apocalypse-in-the-gulf-could-a-sinkhole-swallow-the-deepwater-horizon-well-and-bp/?tag=content;selector-perfector

    • Benjamin July 6, 2010, 3:14 am

      “…one of three scenarios may occur (presented here from best-case scenario to worst):

      [worst case] 3.Weakened sand and salt layers above the reservoir simply collapse, turning a wide area of the outer continental shelf sea floor into an underwater sinkhole that could bleed 2 billion to 3 billion barrels of oil into Gulf waters. In addition, seismic-shock tremors roll in all directions for miles, with an unknown effect on other nearby fields, especially BP’s Thunder Horse (18 miles) field and Shell and BP’s Na Kika complex, located in Mississippi Canyon Block 474 (approximately 15 miles south-southeast of the blowout).”

      It would be useful to know what other seismic activity takes place in this region and at those depths, as well as other areas currently being drilled. It could be big, but then again, perhaps it’d only be “background noise” by comparison. Too, landslides are not equal to earthquakes. Massive landslides can cause tremors and tsunamis, but not anything like those caused by actual earthquake tremors.

      And doesn’t draining the ground of anything cause the ground weaken into a sinkhole anyway? If so, how many of these potential sink holes exist in the ocean, and how many have collapsed in the past? Though it would be the worst case scenario, would it actually be unprecedented?

      So many questions, so few answers. What we do know is that the engineers and other professionals haven’t bolted. I read somewhere else that prior to the rig exploding, advisors shrugged off by BP management got out of there as fast as they could. Maybe the fact that they’re still there now says something.

  • Pat July 6, 2010, 1:27 am

    I have no idea whether this gusher will ever be stopped, but anything this guy says should be taken with a giant “grain” of salt ! According to his bird flu “prediction”, about 50% of us should be dead by now. This guy needs to chill out and get on some serious meds !

    I don’t think this dude has a clue what he’s talking about, just trying to garner some attention.

    I suppose the next “global catastrophe” will be that Martians are scheduled to start launching nuclear warheads at us any day now !! LOL

    • Mac G. July 7, 2010, 9:08 pm

      Erich Simon’s fear-induced rant included exaggerations and lies, some of which I will document.

      Why isn’t the military intersecting the broken well

      It’s not the job of the US military.

      the Blowout Preventer (BOP), which was not the victim of shoddy manufacture per the ongoing propaganda play act, but rather the victim of an encounter with such extreme force that nothing manmade could ever have withstood such an event

      The annular gasket on the preventer had been compromised several days earlier when a mistake was made during a routine test. The preventer was compromised and could not have worked properly.
      http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/05/16/60minutes/main6490197_page2.shtml?tag=contentMain;contentBody
      http://www.lakecharleslapersonalinjury.com/2010/05/bp-oil-blowout-preventer-had-hydraulic-leak-prior-to-explosion.shtml
      Further speculation about the preventer being unable to handle the pressure is Erich Simon’s fear-mongering disconnect from the reality of the broken preventer.

      There are between 5,000-10,000 oil drilling rigs (3,600 is the official number) clustered in the Gulf that have been pumping everyday for decades.

      Drilling rigs drill. They don’t pump. In the entire world there aren’t 5,000 waterborne drilling rigs.

      in six months either IT will all be over

      This puts your timeline as the end of 2010. I will mark the calendar so we can judge your hysteria.

      the level of public frustration boiling over
      I have witnessed no public frustration with the oil in the Gulf. People around here are more frustrated with the economic implosion and the theft of our taxes to fund banker’s bonuses.

      the levels of radiation melting the film in their cameras

      Please provide documentation of this Chernobyl claim. My research did not find melting film, just the tell-tale “flashes” from higher radiation levels.
      http://www.abc.net.au/quantum/info/radiotx.htm
      “Three kilometres from Chernobyl, in the town of Pripyat, radiation levels were so high, telltale flashes appear on this film.”

      Chernobyl was due to ineffective regulation by failed government. BP’s Gulf well problem was also caused by ineffective government regulation, in particular MMS which was tasked with oversight.
      From lead in toys, to harmful food, to fluoride in water, to drilling oversight, government regulation fails.

      US military counterparts who are impotent to the whole solution or else they would have stepped in from the very first day and taken control

      It is unclear why the author thinks the military has the training or resources in this area. Even if the US military had the skills, this is not the job of the US military.

  • rockingham July 5, 2010, 11:18 pm

    That was poetically dire as I have seen. On the bright side I know someone very smart who says no way is that reservoir super high pressure. 100,000 psi is mentioned and he says that is impossible. That this kind of pressure would have leaked out and equalized over geologic ages. He says 10,000 psi is more reasonable

    With two relief wells one could divert half the pressure off the gusher hole while the other intersects a few hundred feet above and pumps mud and then cement into the gusher hole. I would make the odds better by having two additional relief wells bored. That should have started months ago and they should have been dual purpose. For production too so BP gets the money to pay damages

    The above is based on a reasonably intact steel casing and I think it is. August will tell its tale. A failure will be deflationary. Destruction of our SE economy will result in destruction of money.

    Richard Hoagland was on Coast to Coast last night with his dire scenario. He was going on about how the methane, hydrogen sulfide, butanes were poisoning the Gulf waters and air. He had predictions of Gulf catastrophe from poisoned air. He said the only way to seal the gusher is a very high radiation nuke (maximum neutron flux?) sent down a bore hole. That very high radiation would be the right kind of nuke for maximum glassification. Would be done thousands of feet down of course.