A lot of analysis has been done since last year, including a complete review of all procedures, and a forensic study of the blowout preventer that failed to close off the Macondo well. Ultimately, the last line of defense, the blowout preventer, failed, so there was nothing left to prevent the disaster.

Not many lessons that aren’t proprietary were learned, especially this one. The blowout preventers have a design flaw that causes them to fail about 45% of the time when a well blows out. The blowout can damage the blowout preventer to the point that it cannot function nearly half the time.

We don’t really have a handle on what has been learned because the oil industry claims those lessons are proprietary and won’t be made public. They’re saying “trust us”. I hope we can because it seems like we don’t have a choice.

Some things have changed, procedures have been reviewed, but not really that much. The main focus has been on training and stepped-up third-party inspection certification. New permits are now being approved by the Interior Department for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

The rub is, the same blowout preventer technology is still being used on all these newly approved drilling rigs as well as all the older wells that use them. The last line of defense is still the same flawed piece of equipment that failed to prevent the blowout of the Macondo well.

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Here is the link to the DNV report Forensic Examination Report of DeepWater Horizon Blowout Preventer (pdf)

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Here is a link to The MaddowBlog with all the links and video collected through March 30, 2011 about this story. Here is a link to Bob Cavnar’s blog, The Daily Hurricane with more video and analysis.

Investigative journalism wasn’t welcome by the government on their decision to start issuing drilling permits. The Rachel Maddow Show received considerable complaints by the Interior Department about their coverage of the story:

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They don’t seem to like it that news of the biggest change made is well containment after a blowout happens. They now have the containment “hat” thing built and ready to be deployed along with remote operational vehicles (ROVs) when a well blows out. Now they don’t have to hurry up and build them on the fly.

President Obama promised no drilling would resume until we are sure it can be done safely:

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I want to highlight why Rachel stopped the tape to explain about the world oil market. Any oil that is drilled anywhere on the globe goes onto the world market and is sold to whoever is buying. Oil is fungible. That means it doesn’t matter where the oil comes from. Oil is oil. What we get out of the Gulf of Mexico doesn’t necessarily stay in the United States.

Here’s another example that may make the definition of “fungible” more clear. Think of a twenty dollar bill. I can trade my twenty for a ten, a five and 5 ones. I still have twenty dollars. I can trade my twenty dollar bill for your twenty dollar bill, and we both still have twenty dollars. Money is fungible, and in today’s world, oil is fungible.

The whole notion of domestic oil is false. Anyone saying we have to reduce our dependence on foreign oil doesn’t understand how the market works. If we want to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, we have to reduce our dependence on oil period. In a world market, domestic and foreign oil are all the same thing. Oil is fungible.

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What happens when the blowout preventer fails? How about we improve drilling and design so that we don’t depend so much on blowout preventers or post-blowout containment?

And how about we redesign the blowout preventers to actually prevent blowouts, and deploy them throughout the industry? That sounds like a way to create a lot of good manufacturing jobs. There are a lot of oil rigs.

Technorati Tags: addicted to oil, blowout preventer, BP, Gulf of Mexico, Gulf Oil Disaster 2010, Macondo well, oil drilling restarted in Gulf

Five years ago this morning, August 29, 2010, Hurricane Katrina hit just east of New Orleans.

Five years later, we still don’t feel like we’re really part of the United States. We don’t seem to fit into the rest of the country. We feel taken for granted and then forgotten. Then we get remembered and hope returns for awhile.

This is one of the worst things I have gone through in my life. It has left me with some serious mental and emotional scars, and a great deal of anxiety, especially when a storm is brewing that may make it’s way to us.

Rachel Maddow sums it up so well in the following clip from the end of her show’s two day coverage of the 5th anniversary:

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I’m still angry that in 21st century America, a catastrophic disaster led to anarchy. Those who could help stood by doing nothing for way too long. Those who were powerless were left to die, or fight for their own survival, hoping not to get shot trying to get food and drink from closed stores. Those who tried to cross the bridge to the west bank, to dry land, were turned back by men with guns who were unwilling to share at the expense of human lives. Not only were the New Orleans poor treated as second-class citizens, they were expendable. It didn’t matter enough to those who could change the situation to do so before lives were needlessly lost.

The fact is, we are still surviving. We still have a long way to go before we are back to pre-Katrina levels of business, tourism, population, public housing, bus service, public schools, Charity hospital and other health care for the poor, etc. New Orleans was a poor city and it is still a poor city today. It still has the same problems it did before the storm.

I’m angry about the city counsel deciding (pushed by the Bush Administration) it was time to socially re-engineer the New Orleans population. The poor, mostly black population wasn’t welcome to return because Bush thought social programs cost too much and should be eliminated in the new, re-engineered city. It didn’t work. Crime is still high.

Interview with James Perry, GNO Fair Housing Action Center:

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Tracy Washington of the Louisiana Justice Institute had to sue to get public schools reopened:

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The New Orleans justice system completely broke down and prisoners were left to drown in the prison. Things here are a magnification of what the rest of the country is or will go through. This is a fight for American democracy. Interview with Billy Sothern, author of Down in New Orleans:

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Old school radio was the only means of communication. It was a life-line for weeks. Garland Robinette on WWL-AM radio:

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New Orleans is part of America.

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Flood Protection Update

Katrina is the worst natural disaster in American history to date.

But the New Orleans flood was not a natural disaster. It was man-made. The Army Corp of Engineers under-engineered, falsified data, and ignored the facts of the real dangers of the levee system. The Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MRGO) shipping channel funneled storm surge directly into the city.

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Please see my related article: Why Wetlands Are So Important

Interview with Dr. Ivor van Heerden, author of The Storm, about MRGO and flood protection:

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When will New Orleans be fully recovered? I don’t know. I hope by the 10th anniversary we will be talking about all the new things that were built to solve our problems, help the poor have real opportunities and an affordable life, and protect us well from future storms.

It is very heartening to see that there are strong people working on public housing, public schools, fighting for buses and public transportation and reopening the Charity hospital system. It is also heartening that there are people who are working to get the poor a living wage and restore the services they need so badly.

I know we’re making progress. It remains to be seen whether the new flood protection systems will protect the city and rebuild the wetlands. We must restore our barrier islands and rebuild our wetlands, and it must be done fast.

If we don’t rebuild our wetlands, New Orleans may not be here by the end of this century. The coastline may be as far north as Baton Rouge by then. We can no longer wait for progress. We must fight for it and do it before it is too late for New Orleans and the rest of southeast Louisiana.

Acknowledgment:

I’d like to thank Rachel Maddow and The Rachel Maddow Show on both MSNBC and Air America Radio for continuing to cover the Katrina disaster for the past 5 years, and for keeping us in the national news. This 5th anniversary update is invaluable in nailing down the real story and the progress we have and haven’t made.

Rachel, as far as I’m concerned, you are a full, native resident of the Who Dat Nation. Come and see us any time. You and your crew are always welcome.

This article is part of a series about south Louisiana wetlands loss and the BP Gulf of Mexico Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The first article is located here:

• BP Gulf of Mexico Oil Disaster

Today is day 74 of the Deepwater Horizon BP oil spill disaster.

Have you ever seen a wetland? Have you ever visited one? Been fishing or boating in one? Water skiing in one? I’m guessing probably not, unless you live in South Louisiana or around the Florida Everglades.

Without knowing what a wetland is and what it does, it’s hard to know and understand why wetlands are so vital to Louisiana and America.

This post will show you what wetlands look like, what they are, the incredible biodiversity they contain, and how important wetlands are to the economy of the Gulf of Mexico and storm protection of South Louisiana, New Orleans in particular. Wetlands literally mean life or death for people, communities, tourism, and our fishing, shrimping and crabbing industries.

Please be sure to watch the videos and visit the interactive map or you won’t be able to understand what I’m trying to explain. Words alone don’t do this environmental problem justice. You’ve got to see it.

Introduction and the story in short (4 min.):

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To recap, 1 foot of hurricane storm surge is absorbed by 2.7 square miles of wetlands. Four linear miles of wetlands between two points also absorbs 1 foot of storm surge. A 2.7 square mile area must be the shape of a long, skinny rectangle 4 miles long x 0.68 miles wide. A whole bunch of those rectangles have to be lined up side-by-side to take a storm surge down one foot. Lines of rectangles stacked in rows between the Gulf and the inland areas needing protection take down multiple feet of storm surge, depending on how many rows there are.

As the crow flies, Slidell is about 20 miles north northwest of Chalmette. You can see the difference between the damage Katrina did to both towns, and Chalmette fared far worse.

Barataria Preserve at Jean LaFitte National Park

Rachel Maddow interviews David Muth, chief of planning and resource stewardship at the park, and Dr. Larry McKinney of the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M University, Corpus Christie, Texas. Notice the large diversity of plant life.

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Let’s slow down a moment. Dr. McKinney didn’t go into the process of exactly how wetlands are built or how they are lost. NOLA.com published a series by the Times-Picayune about the disappearing wetlands, and here is a 7-min. audio-slide show presentation and interactive map showing how south Louisiana came to be about 6000 years ago, how the wetlands were built, and maps of what they looked like over 75 years ago, what they look like now, and what is expected by 2020 and 2100 if we don’t do enough to stop the loss.

Be sure to click on each of the black buttons across the top of the map to see how the causes of land loss occur. At the end of the presentation you can click on date buttons and toggle the map between the 1930′s, 2005, and what is expected by 2020. The land loss is extremely clear if you start at 1930 and then click on 2005 and see how much land disappears. Then toggle back to 1930. Visualizing the land loss so clearly demonstrates just how serious the problem is.

The link to the article series is located here: Last Chance

Rachel continues her interview with David Muth and Larry McKinney on a boat out in the bayou.

On top of the other causes of wetland loss, add coating this extremely fragile ecosystem with crude oil.

Depending on how much oil gets into the wetlands, it will at least partially suffocate anything it coats. It will kill the wildlife and the plants to at least some extent. We have to hope we can keep the oil out of the wetlands. If we can’t, we have to hope that’s the worst that will happen and that the wetlands will be resilient and rebuild themselves over time, the parts that aren’t lost to other causes that is.

If oil gets into the marshes and swamps, there is no way to clean it up without doing more harm than the oil itself.

As of today, the oil is being kept out of the estuaries with booming and oil skimming. Oil is getting onto barrier islands, but so far, just around the edges and up on beaches. My next post will cover barrier island impact and preventing oil from getting further into the wetlands. We should also know soon what damage, if any, the higher tides from Hurricane Alex caused.

As Larry McKinney says, if enough oil gets into the estuaries, it could kill the plants all the way down to their roots, and that would spell the beginning of total destruction of the wetlands. It will take a few years to see them all disappear, but the oil killing the vegetation will throw the ecosystem out of balance and start the process of the wetland fauna eating the dying vegetation until it’s gone. All the sediment once anchored by the vegetation would erode into the gulf. The plants are what keep the soils and sediments in place. When the plants disappear, the soils erode quickly.

If (worst case scenario) the wetlands become open water, the habitat for all the animal life will be gone, and so will a very large part of America’s fish and seafood supply. Thousands of people will lose their livelihoods of fishing and tourism, and the inland areas that were once surrounded and protected by the wetlands will be so vulnerable to hurricane storm surges that they may have to be abandoned permanently.

I can’t imagine a world without New Orleans in it, but it may come to pass in my lifetime if we don’t stop the wetland loss and rebuild them back to the way they were before man interfered with nature.

Here is an example of the human encroachment problem:

References:
Photo: Maddow Blog
Video: The Rachel Maddow Show
Interactive map presentation: Last Chance Graphics
Times-Picayune South Louisiana land loss and restoration article series: Last Chance Series

Technorati Tags: David Muth, Importance of Wetlands, Jean LaFitte National Park, Larry McKinney, Louisiana, Louisiana Coastline, New Orleans, Rachel Maddow, Wetlands