Yesterday, I watched Kent Wells' presentation to the press explaining the latest operation that the Coast Guard finally pushed them into starting today. Wells did a good job, as always, explaining the specific operation, but avoided key questions about what all of us want to know: the flow rate, and what happened to the BOP (blowout preventer). As we talked about earlier today, the Coast Guard insisted that BP use the present weather window to get what is now called the "capping stack", which is three ram blowout preventer cavities with hydraulically controlled flow valves between them. I don't know yet what rams are in the cavities (those are the big white things sticking out the sides), but obviously they have at least one set of blind rams. Here's a good illustration of the entire assembly:
The stack lands on the latching collar the will then be looking up from the spool. Once the flex hoses are connected to the production valves on the side of the stack, they're going to do shut-integrity tests. I assume this means they will close one of the rams partially and take pressure readings to see if pressure in the well is down enough to just shut it in. They declined to give any more detail on that question, too, so we'll just have to watch what happens. Here's Well's video from yesterday:
This is good progress, but my question is, that why did this stack take 2 1/2 months to build? In one of the presentations, they said that this was one of the first ideas they had. If that's true, why didn't they just build the damn thing? It looks like all standard Cameron components, and it doesn't take 10 weeks to weld up high pressure spools. This all seems like too little, too late, but I guess we all know why that is.
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For the last 81 days, I've been watching the government, perpetually 2 steps behind BP, fail time after time to keep BP honest, or even understand the issues enough to not just take what they were saying at face value. It started from the first moment. Initially, when the Horizon sank after being incinerated for 2 days with flames roaring 250 feet over the rig floor and melting the derrick, BP said the well wasn't flowing. Then a day later, the Coast Guard announced, with BP's silent assent, that it was flowing 1,000 barrels per day; then a few days later the estimate was reluctantly raised to 5,000 barrels per day. For the subsequent 5 weeks, staring at the video feeds and knowing that the oil boiling out of the destroyed riser was far more than the volume that Adm. Thad Allen kept repeating, the BP rep almost always stood behind him, mum, or repeating the mantra that the volume was not important since the "response would be the same no matter how big." It's been a long, ugly road.
First, we watched the early, very heavily edited (and blurred) video feeds of the ROVs trying in vain to shut in the BOP (I still think some of that was file footage from Oceaneering). Then we watched the giant containment dome being built for days on the docks, the continuous coverage of it being shipped to the site, the days of waiting for the result. When they were building it, I kept thinking that first, it wasn't big enough to fit over the BOP, which is over 50 feet tall, and second "what were those wings they were building on it?" When I found out that they were putting it over the bent riser on the seafloor instead of at the wellhead, I realized that that whole effort was just for show. No serious person would have thought it would work, plus, the biggest leak was going to be out of the cracks in the top of the bent over riser, not 600 feet away, especially after days of sandblasting inside the valves and piping that were making things worse by the hour.
Thank God at around this point Ed Markey pitched a fit, demanding continuous video feeds rather than the days-old PR style videos we were getting out of BP. Suddenly, the whole world could see the gushing well 24/7; at least when the websites showing it weren't swamped with viewers. After the containment dome failed, we watched for weeks as the RIT (riser insertion tool) finally was finished and inserted, catching a mere trickle of the torrent of oil flowing out of the blown out well while BP reps claimed victory that finally, at least something was working. Sort of. I kept asking myself, why don't they just cut off the damn riser and get over the well with a flanged cap, or another BOP? No one from the press would ask that simple question, and, if they did, the Coast Guard would just defer to more double speak and platitudes from BP reps.
Then, the top kill came. After much hoopla, the effort started just before the Memorial Day weekend, and we heard breathless accounts of the horsepower, the pumping rates, the volumes of mud; all the oo-ahh snippets, but no real information. During the kill, Adm. Allen actually said that the kill was being successful, which anyone watching the feeds knew that it wasn't. BP and Allen kept repeating the newest mantra that it would take "24-48 hours before we know." On Saturday, I starting hearing that the effort had failed, but that BP would keep pumping through the weekend so they wouldn't have to announce it before the holiday and before the next containment cap was ready. That's when I came out with the story that it failed. In mid afternoon of that day, in a hastily called press conference just hours after my story posted on the Hurricane and Huffington Post, BP and the Coast Guard announced that the effort had indeed failed. A few days after, I heard that they had suffered some kind of downhole failure and the Coast Guard had ordered a halt to the procedure. The Wall Street Journal printed that same account shortly after.
Finally, they cut off the riser and put on the ill fitting containment cap. At least it was something. The problem was that the ship they had moved out there, the Discoverer Enterprise, could only handle about 15,000 barrels a day. People who were paying attention immediately started saying, "That's not big enough." Sure enough, when they got the cap on, it could only contain the 15,000 barrels a day, so the Q4000, used originally for the top kill, was brought in to take production off the kill manifold and burn it off. Even with that, oil is still gushing.
And on and on. Obfuscation about the flow rate; multiple teams of scientists pouring over blurry video footage and putting out a volume ranges of plus or minus 100%. Then we find out that BP had HD video of the well the whole time. The lame clean up effort; keeping media away from the worst areas; skimming and recovery assets not even close to what was needed. Orchestrated press conferences that were long on words, short on data.
Which brings us up to today. The Helix Producer has been on station now for over a week. It's an FPSO (floating production storage and offloading) vessel that can process 25,000 barrels a day. BP has been steadfastly putting off installing the latching containment cap, and hooking up the Helix, citing high seas, bad weather, hang nails and sinus congestion. Thursday, finally, the US government awoke from its leadership coma, demanding to know what's taking so damn long and what can you do to hurry up containing the well? We all know that BP is strongly motivated to not contain the whole flow, since we would then know exactly what it's producing and back-calculate how much they have polluted the Gulf since the well blew out on April 20. Surely, they were hoping to get it killed with the relief well before they got around to getting the flow contained so they could argue for lower volumes to reduce the massive EPA fines that will come. Heavy subsea dispersant use was also used to cover the evidence. Suddenly, BP is ready to go with the new containment system. They start installing it today, and is a subject of a post later today.
The government, while talking tough, has been complicit with BP, deferring far to often to the company's representatives and rhetoric. This disaster has dragged on far too long, but we can expect little else since BP remains in place as operator, allowed to continue running the containment effort while the Coast Guard stands aside and the White House stamps its feet, not knowing what to do.
While I don't presume that anyone in the White House actually reads this blog or watches my television appearances, but certainly I'm glad someone finally woke up, if just for a minute, to do what I, and other industry bloggers have been yelling about for weeks (months?).
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Ndagire Sarah walked the red dirt carpet in her perky hairdo and a beautiful blue and white gown. She carried herself like a rich lady in a gomesi, the formal dress of women in Uganda. When I saw her, I was overcome with tears of joy. I had met Sarah in 2006 when she was so sick with HIV/AIDS that she could hardly breathe. She lived in a slum in Kampala and was poor beyond belief, a widow who could not afford to feed her family or send her children to school, one of the hundreds of millions of women who live around the world in extreme poverty. But that was then. Today, just four years later, Sarah was being honored, with 21 other women for an incredible achievement. She had paid off a home that she built for herself in the village of Mukono, and was being awarded the title to the land she sat on. Sarah, who just a few years ago thought she would die and leave her children with nothing, was now a homeowner and one of the very small percentage of women around the world with land in her own name.
Sarah's transcendent moment came because of her partnership with BeadforLife. For many months she rolled beads out of recycled paper and saved her money for a down payment. Beads became bricks and a ladder out of poverty. She didn't eat the profits, worked hard, and became an entrepreneur who also raised poultry. Sarah was the pioneer in Friendship Village. She built the very first of 130 homes, even though the men who helped her thought she would not live long enough to sleep in it. Today she is the proud owner of a brick house with a tin roof. She has a lawn, a garden and 1000 neighbors. The women roll beads to pay off their mortgages and not a single one defaults. On this festival day, Sarah and 21 others call themselves brides, and they march from home to home. Each woman is given a certificate and dances with it on the porch she dreamed about. "This is really a day of glory for each of you," BeadforLife founder, Devin Hibbard, proclaims. She tells Sarah and the others to close their eyes. "Think about where you were and think about where you are now and my challenge to you is to create your next dream as you become homeowners today. What do you want to accomplish in the next three or four or five years? Can you picture yourself and where you will be if you accomplish your next big goal? Because this is not the end of the path. This is only the beginning for you."
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by Erin Rosa, Media Consortium blogger
On Tuesday, the Department of Justice filed suit against the state of Arizona in an effort to overturn a stringent anti-immigration law passed in April. The move is a breath of fresh air for immigrant rights supporters. Democracy Now! and the Washington Independent have the story.
The suit will take on Arizona's Senate Bill 1070, a law that requires local law enforcement to check an individual's immigration status if there is "reasonable suspicion" that said individual is undocumented. The law has sparked national outrage and serious concerns that Latinos will be racially profiled by the police. Another provision of SB 1070 requires immigrants to carry papers denoting citizenship at all times while in the state.
Is SB 1070 unconstitutional?
At ColorLines, Daisy Hernandez reports that "the lawsuit, which was filed in a U.S. District Court in Phoenix, argues that it's against the Constitution for a state to make its own immigration policy" because of "the legal doctrine of 'preemption,' which says that federal law trumps state statues."
The key argument being that "the federal government already works with states to enforce federal immigration law," so there's no need for a law like SB 1070 to intervene, according to Hernandez.
A civil rights fiasco
Since April, the Arizona law has served as a rallying point for immigrant rights supporters, who refer to the bill as the "Juan Crow" law. The nickname references the Jim Crow laws that existed prior to the civil rights struggles of the 1960s.
Jessica Pieklo at Care2 notes that the DOJ suit "also contains a civil rights component and argues that the law would lead to law enforcement harassing U.S. citizens and lawful immigrants in efforts to hunt down undocumented workers."
Citizens react
At New America Media, Valeria Fernández gauges immigrants' and Arizona residents' reactions to the suit.
"I really feel that the Justice Department will be on the winning side of history," said Mary Rose Wilcox, a supervisor for District 5 in Maricopa County, AZ. "I think when justice needs to be served, you should never look at political costs."
An undocumented immigrant named Griselda told Fernández that she "jumped for joy when she heard the news," and "Thank God there's another one in the fight."
The immigration reform battle moves forward
Last week, President Barack Obama called for Congress to put politics aside and focus on immigration reform as quickly as possible. The speech and suit are fueling demand for comprehensive reform and it's clear that the issue won't be going away.
Yet despite the need for reform, there are roadblocks. As Paul Waldman writes for the American Prospect, "It's true that there is little incentive for politicians to produce comprehensive reform. It's guaranteed to displease much of the public, while there is a powerful incentive to play on people's fears and resentments."
However, there is hope in the organizing that's being done by immigrant youth. Undocumented immigrant and student organizer Tania Unzueta said in an interview with In These Times that immigrants from across the country are risking deportation and incarceration to come "out of the shadows and into the spotlight."
As Unzueta explains in the interview, "When you stop being afraid, there's a whole world of possibilities in terms of how much risk you're willing to take to fight for what you believe is just."
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about immigration by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Diaspora for a complete list of articles on immigration issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, and health care issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, and The Pulse . This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
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