Oil reaches Louisiana shores

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/05/oil_reaches_louisiana_shores.html

by jacquesm • 16 years ago

77 53 16 years ago

boston.com

jrockway3• 16 years ago

A small price to pay knowing that you won't have to sit next to anyone on the way to work.

cesare• 16 years ago

I can't tell if you're serious or not.

axiom2• 16 years ago

As horrifying as this disaster is, I think painting oil as some minor convenience that spoiled fat Americans narcissistically demand is disingenuous.

People forget that the alternative to oil was either whale blubber or armies of horses that left cities knee deep in shit (literally.) The fact is that oil was a technology that substantially decreased pollution. The proof of that is that water and air quality has been improving steadily over the years since the 1800's (partly because of legislation, but largely because of technology. You can't legislate away horse manure - but you can legislate cars with cleaner engines.)

So yeah, I look forward to the day when oil is obsoleted in favor of some magic green energy source that produces no pollution (although rest assured, people will find something else to bitch and moan about.) Until then, I'll breathe a silent "thank you" to the grimiest oil refinery out there for making my life that much easier.

phaedrus• 16 years ago

It's not either-or. We can use oil, while still asking the question, do we need to use so much, and do we need to push so hard to get more? You don't have to stop using oil entirely tomorrow to be concerned that the returns we get from what we're doing now are not worth the damage.

dejb• 16 years ago

> for making my life that much easier.

Yea it really sucks having to sit next to somebody else on the way to work. Especially if they are really fat. Of course you need a 2 tonne truck to get to work as well, cause smaller cars or motorbikes just aren't safe enough with all those 2 tonne trucks on the road.

It's all cost/benefit but in the 21st century I think we can afford to change the balance.

waterlesscloud3• 16 years ago

And to sit in a chair that shipped across oceans, made of materials that were shipped across oceans so that you can type on a device that shipped across oceans, made of materials that were shipped across oceans. While eating food that shipped across continents if not oceans, inside a house made of materials that were shipped across continents, if not oceans.

Just sayin'.

jrockway3• 16 years ago

Freight shipping is vastly more efficient than driving your SUV in from the suburbs everyday.

Just sayin'.

krschultz8• 16 years ago

More like "a small price to pay for having the jet age". We will be able to eliminate the need for gasoline in cars long before in airlines.

And frankly your alternatives for oil in power generation are coal and nuclear. Take your pick.

_delirium4• 16 years ago

In terms of aggregate usage, cars are by far the biggest transportation users, though, so are the main place to look if you wanted to reduce usage. In the U.S., for example, aviation used about 15 billion gallons of fuel in 2005, while road vehicles used about 175 billion, and rail used about 5 billion: http://www.bts.gov/publications/national_transportation_stat...

wizard_2• 16 years ago

Easy, nuclear.

We put more radiation into the air with coal ash then we have ever released with nuclear power.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is... (first article I found - there are plenty)

czhiddy• 16 years ago

It's a link to Boston's BigPicture. I'm curious why you gave reddit credit for the link.

jacquesm9• 16 years ago

Because that's where I found it. Absolutely shocking images, this really rams home the scope of what is going on there.

I fear this is just the beginning though.

One thing I can't understand, and this is not an armchair oil spill cleanup attempt, why are they so trying to avoid the oil coming to the surface, isn't that the only chance you get to contain it and to deal with it? Dispersing it underwater seems to me to make it much harder to get rid of it.

Can someone with more technical insight here explain that?

tokipin• 16 years ago

the explanation some scientist gave at a hearing was that the dispersion is BP's attempt to curtail the bad PR that images of thick black globs of oil would bring

_delirium4• 16 years ago

The typical reason to use dispersants, at least as I understand it, is that most of the damage, or at least most of the damage people care about, is done by oil washing up on shore and coating everything, which can be partly avoided if the oil is dispersed into a dilute mixture in the water.

megablast2• 16 years ago

These Boston Globe photo essays are absolutely amazing. No matter what subject, and my level of interest, I really find myself drawn into their Big Picture expose.

This is one medium where digital really shines, I can't imagine how they represent this in the newspaper, but an single page of high quality images is just brilliant. Lets hope they don't feel the need to put this in a slide show format.

jacquesm9• 16 years ago

If a picture paints a thousand words then the impact of these images is probably larger than any of their editorial pages on the subject. That's also a risk because by selecting the images you could make it appear more or less worse than it really is.

This selection though, does not give me the impression that they've done that, however that may be the art. Still, if this is 'all there is' the problem is of an unbelievable magnitude.

People keep comparing this to the Exxon Valdez spill, and while there are parallels I can't help but notice that that happened in a much less populated area of the world, and even this many years on there is still surface oil to be found there, and it still affects the local wildlife.

krschultz8• 16 years ago

The comparisons to the Exxon Valdez are really over wrought, there really isn't a lot in common

- The Exxon Valdez was a static amount of oil, we knew how much there was immediately. We can only estimate the amount of oil leaking here and nobody can accurately predict the date when it will finally be shut off. The whole "we have to stop the leak" part was missing in the Exxon Valdez, frankly that is the pressing crisis now.

- The Prince William Sound is very enclosed compared to the Gulf of Mexico. The concentration in the Gulf is much lower, we won't be seeing anything as bad as the 2" thick crude oil goo covering everything in sight because the oil is spread out relatively thinly across a huge surface. On one hand that is good because it will break down faster naturally, on the other hand it makes corralling really hard to do, the area is massive. June and July are very timid months for weather in the Gulf because the water and land are very similar temperatures, what happens in the fall when hurricanes start rolling through the oil patch? It is going to be hitting everywhere. We lucked out that for the first few days the prevailing wind was from the northwest, but as soon as it turned around all hell broke loose.

- There are marshes in the Gulf. Suffice to say cleaning the oil out from between blades of grass is a lot harder than off of rocky beaches.

- Exxon got a lot of blame in 1989, BP has been lucky enough to have this widely labeled the "Gulf of Mexico oil spill" or the "Spill in the Gulf", the gulf of mexico did not spill the oil, BP did. Make a point to correct people who incorrectly label the spill.

megablast2• 16 years ago

The fact that it was in a must less populated part of the world, in many ways make the Exxon disaster worse. Since we have so many people on the ground, observing the effects of the BP disaster when they walk down the beach, or try to go fishing, the effects will be harder to hide.

And with things like twitter and facebook, we have a great way for the ordinary person to keep the pressure on.

Also, the amount of oil being released here is huge, and it is going to affect a much larger area, if it does not disperse quickly. Lets just hope they get this under control.

From what I have read, people at BP/Haliburton should go to jail for letting the drilling go ahead, when there was damage to the saftey mechanisms.

vaksel• 16 years ago

the guy behind the globe photo essays is a redditor, so I wouldn't worry about that, pretty sure he mentioned that due to the popularity he has a lot of leeway

darien2• 16 years ago

I think individuals should make it their business of collecting the crude oil into drums and selling it back to BP or at market. This isn't an Exxon Valdez situation where the oil was contained inside a tanker, this gulf oil is spilling out of the earth. It should be anyone's oil, especially when the spill is in the process of destroying the environment and people's livelihoods. People should get out there and make some money... get congress behind you.

jacquesm9• 16 years ago

If it were that easy to collect this oil in a usable form then I'm pretty sure that it would be done already. The problem here is that the oil is spread out and mixed in with all kinds of contaminants (or rather, there is all sorts of clean stuff mixed in with the oil, but since you're looking at extracting the oil let's name them contaminants), to do so cost effectively is likely impossible.

The best you can hope for at this stage is that BP does not go bust (down about 29% since this all started, from $60 to $43 now), and that they will be able to pay for the cleanup.

darien2• 16 years ago

Are you talking about the chemical dispersal contaminants more more physical containments (ie: algae, etc)?

I don't think this is necessarily a for-profit situation in terms of refinement, but I think that there is a possibility that if groups and organizations assembled themselves to simply collect the oil, that they could publicly lobby congress to purchase the oil back. Essentially it will be the taxpayers who pay for cleanup either way. At least this way is faster and is more populist (in terms of flag-waving and what it means to be an american).

rjett2• 16 years ago

"The best you can hope for at this stage is that BP does not go bust (down about 29% since this all started, from $60 to $43 now), and that they will be able to pay for the cleanup."

Does anyone know much of this cleanup is being covered by some form of disaster (or other) insurance?

waterlesscloud3• 16 years ago

"BP PLC, Europe's second-largest oil company, said Tuesday that first-quarter profit more than doubled from a year earlier to $6.1 billion "

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/04/27/business/main64360...

krschultz8• 16 years ago

It is still usable in some context, and they are collecting it, it is just a matter of square miles covered in oil vs vessels capable of collecting it.

http://www.slate.com/id/2252136/

whyenot• 16 years ago

Over time (12 hrs - 3 days), oil in spills becomes weathered. The more volatile compounds evaporate, photo-oxidation takes place, and the oil to some degree forms an emulsion with sea water. It's not like oil straight out of a well, and probably wouldn't be worth very much or useful for much of anything.

krschultz8• 16 years ago

It is still usable, both for asphalt and for burning in some furnaces. It won't end up in your car but it will be used. I'm pretty sure Slate.com had an explanation of this recently: http://www.slate.com/id/2252136/

As for oil/water emulsion in sea water, having been around that stuff one thing people don't point out is the stench. It is at or worse than sewage.

jgg2• 16 years ago

The photo with the kids at the beach having to use a plastic pool was particularly striking.

asdflkj• 16 years ago

I didn't make the connection when I saw it, that plastic is made of oil.

s3graham• 16 years ago

The boats driving around aren't powered by solar either.

lleger• 16 years ago

This is just absolutely heart-wrenching. Louisiana is a very beautiful place with a wonderful ecosystem. It really, really pains me to see BP totally destroying my home. Louisiana's coast has a hard enough time as it is, what with erosion — this is the last thing we needed.

tlrobinson• 16 years ago

A comment on that page mentions hurricanes. Anyone have any idea how hurricanes might affect the situation?

Oil reaches Louisiana shores

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