PICS before and after BP shut off the oil!

[GreyGeek]

Some of you may have read on CNN or other news sources that BP has STOPPED the flow of oil out of the Deep Horizon well!

I have some pics of the event, both before and after. In addition, I have a couple pics showing a fish at 5,000 ft which dropped by to look into the camera of an ROV, and a good side shot.

[GreyGeek]

Re: PICS before and after BP shut off the oil!

Here are the fish photos. Sadly, the fish, which appears to be about 1 meter long, slowly swam a few meters away, slowed to a stop, and slowly sank to the sea bed, where it laid for several hours, not moving. It appeared to be dead. A couple hours later the ROV moved its camera to another location so I do not know if the fish was just sleeping or was poisoned by oil and/or surfactants and that spot marks its grave.

[kyonides]

Re: PICS before and after BP shut off the oil!

I wonder if this is true or BP is just fooling us with fake pictures and videos... After all they could have done this way before and prevent it from killing so much sea flora and fauna. (Or was it just an excuse to do something else (something darker) for the meanwhile?)

[askrieger]

Re: PICS before and after BP shut off the oil!

I know that tropical fish in a home tank with lights do "sleep" when the lights are off. At least, until inquisitive children bang on the side of the tank. But, they "hover" at a constant depth. They do not lie on the bottom. However, we are looking at a large marine fish at great depth, so my limited knowledge may be totally irrelevant. Nonetheless, as a former resident of southeast Texas, I can tell you that even a perfectly functioning oil well is not exactly a treat for the senses.

[GreyGeek]

Re: PICS before and after BP shut off the oil!

I don't believe they were fake.

Their web site had code that allowed them to turn off video steams to the webpage (a blank video was called the "default" video) at their discretion. I merely accessed the Microsoft media servers directly from the streams before the streams hit their web page code, and I watch live video (with date and time stamps that approximated what was on my box) of them hauling ROV up onto the deck, working on them, lowering them back down, etc. Cameras of ROVs setting on the decks of the service ships were often left running. I could see other ships in the background. I could see oil swelling to the surface, and ships in the vicinity gathering it up. A couple months ago when they lowered an ROV I watch as it hit the clear blue water and before it had gone 50-75 feet I could see the sea floor and fish, varying in size up to a couple meters, swimming around. Then, the ROV moved horizontally for a couple hundred meters before it began an decent at around 65-70 degrees for 1,500 meters, whereupon it leveled out and traveled another couple hundred meters to the Deep Horizon well head. I took my estimates from the navigational coordinates which was displayed on the video. it took over an hour for that ROV to reach the bottom. All that I saw in those videos was too complicated to create graphically and in a timely manner to show in fake video streams. IF they started those videos LAST January there wouldn't be enough time for them to create 12 fake video streams that showed all that activity. Even AVATAR, as good as it was, wasn't able to completely fool the viewer as to what was real and was was graphic imitation. BP's video people would have to have more skill and better tools than James Cameron, which is something they do not have.

Finally, the big reason why it is not a fake is because the oil WAS spewing, albeit at more like 80,000 bbls/day +- 10,000 bbls instead of the 5,000, then 10,000 then 15,000 and finally the 25,000 bbls/day BP said was flowing, and after the oil leak was stopped no more oil swelled to the surface. They can't fake no more oil reaching the surface because their surfactants are not that good at dispersing the oil.

[GreyGeek]

Re: PICS before and after BP shut off the oil!

...
Nonetheless, as a former resident of southeast Texas, I can tell you that even a perfectly functioning oil well is not exactly a treat for the senses.

Yup. I was an analytical chemist for Bradford Labs for several years (while I worked my way through college) and my work was analyzing substances and fluids of all types brought back from oil wells. Hydrogen Sulfide does not smell nice in any form.

[kyonides]

Re: PICS before and after BP shut off the oil!

I found this link regarding other oil leaks in the Gulf of Mexico, but since it was posted by Aljazeera, IDK if it isn't just some sort of ill driven comment or not.

[Bruce]

Re: PICS before and after BP shut off the oil!

Aljazeera is a more honest reliable news source then the circus side show acts this country now calls news channels.

[askrieger]

Re: PICS before and after BP shut off the oil!

@kyonides: Please post the link, if possible. I've seen articles elsewhere about a spill in Guatemala quite a while ago (20 years?) that is still evident.

@Bruce: I have absolutely no experience with Al Jazeera, but I can state from personal experience (in the 1970's) with the US news media, that, honest or not, American journalists (even those from "boring" publications like Aviation Week and Discovery) look for the aspects of a "story" that are most likely to interest a superficial reader who is skimming the publication, i.e. "If it bleeds, it leads!". A superficial glance at the six o'clock news on any US TV channel indicates that this attitude has not changed.

[kyonides]

Re: PICS before and after BP shut off the oil!

How weird, I really thought I already did that...

Gulf oil leak from other wells

I also found this today.

Storm Might Delay Gulf of Mexico Oil Well Fix

[GreyGeek]

Re: PICS before and after BP shut off the oil!

The Al Jazeera story is identical to stories from several other news sources, so I think it is accurate.

The leaks that are occurring around the DH wellhead are minute. Two are on the BOP replacement and are releasing about one drop per second each. Another leak is coming from the sea bed some distance away (over a mile). It builds for a while and then a gob the size of pint jar break loose. When the ROV fans hit it the blob breaks into dozens of small drops.

There aren't any other major oil leaks in the North side of the Gulf. If there were, then there would be, for years, a constant occurrence of tar balls washing up onto the white sand beaches from Southern Texas to clear around the coast of Florida and up the East side. I've waded the shores of both sides of Florida (Tampa and the Cape) and never saw a tar ball or tar of any kind.

[askrieger]

Re: PICS before and after BP shut off the oil!

I thought you were referring to an article about previous oil leaks in the Gulf of Mexico. As I said, I've seen or heard (can't remember whether it was TV, radio, or magazine) mention of at least one shallow water leak off Guatemala that is still evident, decades later. The general message was "Don't hold your breath waiting for everything to get back to normal, because it ain't gonna happen any time soon."

[GreyGeek]

Re: PICS before and after BP shut off the oil!

Here is a list of oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico:
http://response.restoration.noaa.gov...lfofMexico.pdf


Interestingly, the previous "largest" spill was Ixtoc, off the coast of Mexico in 1979. It released as much as 300,000,000 gallons during the nine months it leaked. By comparison, using my 86,400 bbl/day figure, Deep Water Horizon has released around 348,000,000 gallons.

Twenty years after that spill I was walking the beaches by Tampa and didn't see any signs of oil, although the Ixtoc oil spill polluted the beaches from Ixtoc upward for 800 miles along the coast of Mexico and Texas. The PDF gives a map showing the extent of the contamination (at least the official version of it).

[askrieger]

Re: PICS before and after BP shut off the oil!

I must admit that I can't recall whether the spill that I was thinking of was Ixtoc, or another spill near Guatemala which (I now realize) would not have been in the Gulf of Mexico at all. The coast of Guatemala would border the Caribbean Sea, or the Pacific Ocean. The major point, though, was that the environmental damage from major oil spills takes decades not months or years to heal.

My only personal experience is that the sand on the beaches near Galveston is (or was, as recently as the 1970s) brown. In contrast to Atlantic beaches (from Florida to New England) and Pacific beaches in southern California, where the sand that I have seen, is white. I thought that the brown sand was a natural phenomenon. Now, I'm not so sure.

[kyonides]

Re: PICS before and after BP shut off the oil!

I read the other day China now has a similar oil leak problem...