Broader dangers of deep water drilling go unscrutinized

Even as regulators investigate the causes of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the broader dangers posed by the industry’s push into deeper waters have gone largely unscrutinized. “Our ability to manage risks hasn’t caught up with our ability to explore and produce in deep water,” said Edward C. Chow, a former industry executive who is now a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The question now is, how are we going to protect against a blowout as well as all of the other associated risks offshore?”
http://www.nytimes.com, Aug 30, 2010

Obama in New Orleans: Man on a wire

"We are going to stand with you until the oil is cleaned up, the environment is restored, polluters are held accountable, communities are made whole and this region is back on its feet," Obama said.

Turtle Today

Behind the Spill, Acrimony and Stress

Interviews with BP engineers and technicians, contractors and Obama administration officials who, with the eyes of the world upon them, worked to stop the flow of oil, suggest that the process was also far more stressful, hair-raising and acrimonious than the public was aware of.
New York Times Aug 27, 2010

Tons of Gulf waste headed for landfills

NEW ORLEANS — The cleanup of history's worst peacetime oil spill is generating thousands of tons of oil-soaked debris that is ending up in local landfills, some of which were already dealing with environmental concerns. The soft, absorbent boom that has played the biggest role in containing the spill alone would measure more than twice the length of California's coastline, or about 2,000 miles. More than 50,000 tons of boom and oily debris have made their way to landfills or incinerators, federal officials told The Associated Press, representing about 7 percent of the daily volume going to nine area landfills.
Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press.
August 25, 2010

A Gulf Science Blackout

Opinion: Linda Hooper-Bui

THE Deepwater Horizon blowout may be capped and the surface oil slick dispersed, but the scientists’ job has just begun: hundreds of us are working in and around the gulf to determine the long-term environmental impact of the drilling disaster. Although we are all doing needed research, we’re not receiving equal money or access to the affected sites. Those working for BP or the federal government’s Natural Resource Damage Assessment program are being given the bulk of the resources, while independent researchers are shoved aside.

New York Times, Aug 25, 2010

Linda Hooper-Bui is a professor of entomology at Louisiana State University.

Media said to have over-reacted to spill

Paul Voosen and Allison Winter, give a clear-headed, unemotional assessment of the situation, with no alarmism. If the rest of the media had taken that tack from the beginning, this oil spill would not rank as the most disgraceful episode of the millennium in the mass media.
When it comes to the Gulf oil spill, the media have done the exact opposite. First the media exaggerated the possible effects of the spill beyond all proportion. Then when those alarmist scenarios failed to materialize and the oil disappeared in record time, no one in the media admitted getting it all wrong. Instead they convinced the boobs that the oil is still lurking out there creating all sorts of potential hazards.

Reflections on Gulf Oil Spill Disaster Seminar

The good news is, although the ecological destruction in the Gulf isn't good, it's not as terrible as was once thought -- and for a variety of reasons.

By John Mauldin Aug 16, 2010
http://www.minyanville.com

Officials testing seal at BP's busted Gulf well

NEW ORLEANS – In the strongest indication yet that BP's broken oil well in the Gulf of Mexico may be plugged for good, officials on Thursday said they're conducting tests to determine if further work to seal the well is needed.

Oil spill: Not as bad as we first thought?

Signs of recovery from the Gulf oil spill are already appearing, but scientists caution that many unknowns exist – including the effect of millions of gallons of oil dispersants.

The federal government has opened roughly one-third of the federal waters in the Gulf it had closed to fishing. At week's end federal officials sounded a conditional all-clear for southern Florida, the Keys, and the state's east coast – a region long concerned that the Gulf's loop current would sweep surface oil into its flow and daub the state's coastal areas with crude. The condition? That the flow from the well remains stanched.