Video: A Waterspout moving across Mobile Bay, making landfall near Fairhope Pier

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Helmet tap to Jim Loznicka, video courtesy of Scott Chestnut.

Here’s a still shot of the same twister:

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Monster Bull Shark Caught Near Orange Beach, Alabama

Video via WKRG.

Bull Sharks are very aggressive and have been known to attack humans. Two of the most recent attacks in Alabama waters were believed to be Bulls.

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Well deserved weekend break

Your beloved blogger-in-chief, editor and chief bottle washer is taking the weekend off.

The Shrimp Festival is being held in Gulf Shores this weekend, and since my brood consists of four beautiful walking appetites, we’re mingling, eating and spending money on the Gulf Coast economy.

That’s what it’s going to take for this area to really recover from the oil spill and recent hurricanes.  Get the government and its associated idiots out of the way, and let the business owners and entrepreneurs here do what they do best.

We’ll return to our regular, right-wing flame throwing on Monday morning.

I may (or may not) have some more gorgeous sunrise and sunset photos for you.

Remember:  Keep your enemies close, and your friends… closer.

Ding Dong, the Well is Dead. Gulf Oil Spill comes to anticlimactic end

In a statement released this morning, Admiral Thad Allen (RET) confirms the results of last night’s final pressure test and proclaims the Macondo Well dead; the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill over:

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"After months of extensive operations planning and execution under the direction and authority of the U.S. government science and engineering teams, BP has successfully completed the relief well by intersecting and cementing the well nearly 18,000 feet below the surface.  With this development, which has been confirmed by the Department of the Interior's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, we can finally announce that the Macondo 252 well is effectively dead.   Additional regulatory steps will be undertaken but we can now state, definitively, that the Macondo well poses no continuing threat to the Gulf of Mexico.  From the beginning, this response has been driven by the best science and engineering available.  We insisted that BP develop robust redundancy measures to ensure that each step was part of a deliberate plan, driven by science, minimizing risk to ensure we did not inflict additional harm in our efforts to kill the well.  I commend the response personnel, both from the government and private sectors, for seeing this vital procedure through to the end.  And although the well is now dead, we remain committed to continue aggressive efforts to clean up any additional oil we may see going forward."

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It’s something of an anticlimactic end, as the well was successfully capped on July 15 and no oil has flowed from the well since then.  There’s been quite a bit of speculation as to whether the relief well completion was even needed, as the “top kill” procedure that followed the successful cap stanched the flow of oil and could have been the permanent fix.

Nonetheless, a slow motion disaster has come to a quiet end, nearly five months to the day since April 20, when a methane gas bubble erupted and blew out the well.  The ensuing explosions and fire killed 11 men, sank one of the world’s most advanced drilling rigs and started the worst marine oil spill in US history.

Now comes the continuing recovery, which the Obama regime can hasten by dropping the arbitrary, capricious and economically devastating drilling moratorium.  Let the Gulf Coast get back to work, and it will recover all by itself.

Moratorium only cost 12,000 jobs. “Let them eat cake.”

“Let them eat cake.”

This regime has many aspects about it that rub people the wrong way.  The cavalier attitude towards those affected by its misguided policy decisions might be the most acute.  Late Thursday, the regime released its analysis (PDF) of the economic effects of the deepwater drilling moratorium.  The report estimated that between 8,000 and 12,000 jobs would be impacted by the moratorium, and up to $1.8 billion in spending by the oil and gas exploration sector would be lost.  The report categorizes the effects as “not large.”  “Not significant.”

“Let them eat cake.”

In an editorial yesterday, the New Orleans Times Picayune takes the administration to task for its indifference:

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Louisiana officials and industry observers disputed some of the premises in the government's analysis, and their observations have merit. But even if the administration's figures are correct, 12,000 jobs lost is a major hit for the economy of a recovering region – and the administration shouldn't be cavalier about that.

LSU economics professor Joseph Mason, who has studied the moratorium's impact, said the government's estimate of job losses doesn't differ much from his own. The distinction, he said, is in how federal officials are framing their conclusions. In particular, Mr. Mason noted that many Gulf Coast communities are small, meaning the loss of even a few hundred jobs can be devastating.

"The administration says 'only' 12,000 jobs will be lost," Mr. Mason said. "This is almost as if they are telling a region that has been hit by disaster – both natural and manmade – time and time again that we'll 'only' wipe out a handful of their communities."

He's right, and that goes against President Obama's promise that his administration would help our region recover from this disaster.

The problem is not just that government officials were, and apparently still are, oblivious to the economic pain caused by the deepwater moratorium. The administration has not even acknowledged the damage from what local officials have characterized as a de-facto moratorium on shallow-water drilling.

Federal officials have said there's no official ban on shallow-water drilling. But 15 of 46 shallow-water rigs active when the Deepwater Horizon exploded are now idle, and four other have left the country. In addition, the federal government has granted only four permits for new drilling operations in the past four months. That many shallow-water permits were granted on any given week before the moratorium.

Industry officials said the shallow-water slowdown also is costing jobs. Shallow-water operator Hercules Offshore, for example, said it's laid off a few hundred employees. Seahawk Drilling Inc. has idled four rigs and put 150 workers on unpaid leave.

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The regime’s unwillingness (or apathy toward) admitting that its capricious policy of halting drilling in the gulf is having a significant economic impact, combined with the cavalier attitude towards the impacts that it does acknowledge, gives lie to the promise Obama made “heal the Gulf.”  He either doesn’t care, or he doesn’t care to care.

It’s this attitude—along with a long list of other dilettantish traits—that irks and angers so many Americans, not the least of which are the people of the Gulf Coast. They are “only” losing 12,000 jobs and $1.8 billion in economic impacts from the moratorium.

“Let them eat cake.”

NOLA—and Obama—should be thankful for George W. Bush

Heritage’s Rob Bluey has a great opinion piece in the Daily Caller today, rightly placing credit for New Orleans’ degree of protection from future storms. 

Bluey gets it right and sadly, he seems to be the only conservative who does so.

Katrina was a once-in-a-lifetime combination of meteorology, geography and hydraulics.  It’s not likely to happen again for a very, very long time.  But if it does, New Orleans stands a much better chance of surviving.

Credit for that goes to George W. Bush, and Bluey lays it out:

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The city’s fortunes might be different had Bush not taken a deeply personal interest. His televised speech from Jackson Square two weeks after Katrina marked a turning point. Bush created the Office of Gulf Coast Rebuilding to coordinate the region’s recovery — an office Obama abolished earlier this year. And in 2008, Bush struck a landmark deal with Louisiana to pay back within 30 years its $1.8 billion portion of the hurricane prevention project.

“Thank you, Mr. President,” the Times-Picayune wrote after Bush granted the executive order.

Today there is growing confidence among residents about the new system being built to shield the city from a hurricane. According to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll, 74 percent of respondents were upbeat and 70 percent said the recovery was heading in the right direction. Louisianans also give Bush higher marks for his response to Katrina than Obama’s handling of the Gulf oil spill — by a margin of 54 percent to 33 percent, according to Public Policy Polling.

It helped that New Orleans remained dry after Hurricane Gustav hit in 2008. Now, two years after that storm, the system is even more robust. When construction and reinforcement of levees, flood walls and pump stations are done next June, the city will be protected from a hurricane twice the strength of Katrina, which had storm surge of up to 28 feet and waves up to 55 feet — the highest ever recorded in North America.

Karen Durham-Aguilera, the civilian director of the Corps’ Task Force Hope, credits the Bush administration for securing full funding for the project. That eliminated costly turf wars and bureaucratic holdups.

“We’re not even on the same universe as we were before Katrina,” Durham-Aguilera said of the threat posed by a hurricane. “There’s just no comparison. That’s why even during Gustav, when it was only partially complete, it held up. If we get hit this year — and we very well could — we’re better off than a year ago.”

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Bluey is something of an outlier among conservatives in that he’s identified a successful federal endeavor—rebuilding the levee system—and giving proper credit for why it’s been successful.  There are two reasons why New Orleans is better protected now than at any time in its history: (1) The administration forced the US Army Corps of Engineers to use good science and (2) the administration forced the agency to develop a schedule for completion and stick to it.  The result: good government.  The Obama administration is just going along for the ride, and taking credit for the success when none is deserved.

On the other hand, conservative bloggers, pundits and talkers are following this line of thought.  These kinds of comments are neither wise nor helpful, because they demonstrate either naiveté or willful ignorance about New Orleans, the Hurricane Storm Damage Risk Reduction System (HSDRRS), or the root causes of the levee failures five years ago.  There are no ideological or political points to be scored by dismissing the “bellowing for federal dollars” and comparing the “people down there” to helpless infants. The federal government put the area at risk by constructing poorly designed levee systems.  Ergo, the federal government should be responsible for making it right.  And don’t even start the argument about whether people should live there or not.  New Orleans was placed where it was for strategic purposes, and it remains where it is out of national economic necessity.  The port of New Orleans isn’t closing, the oil and gas industry isn’t going anywhere and all of the people who make those industries work need a place to live. 

What the Bush  administration did—and did quite well—was make sure that the Corps got it right this time.  So far, so good.  The projects are on schedule.  The projects are within budget.  The projects use good science and engineering.  That’s good government, and conservatives should take notice when government gets it right. 

It doesn’t happen very often.

Gimme some feedback in the comments.

Envirolarmists in a Tizzy: Microbes are eating all the damned oil plumes!

Who woulda thunk it? 

Scientists have not only discovered a previously unknown oil gorging germ deep in the Gulf of Mexico, they now also think that microbial action in the water has been so effective that virtually all of the oil really is gone.

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A top scientist studying the ability of bacteria to break down the oil plume in the Gulf of Mexico says that microbes have been so successful that the oil may be gone.

Terry Hazen, a microbial ecologist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who published a groundbreaking study of microbial activity Tuesday in the online research journal Science Express, has had a team of researchers out in the Gulf since May 25 collecting water samples. They noticed a dramatic drop-off in the amount of oil in the Gulf immediately after the well was idled July 15, and now they can't find any oil in the ocean.

"In the last three weeks we haven't been able to detect a deep plume anywhere," Hazen said. "We can't see it now. We can't see anything at the surface. We can't see anything in the deep subsurface either."

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Hah.  The Gulf of Mexico is a resilient, warm, germ-rich environment.  For millions of years, oil has seeped from the bottom, giving rise to a large population of microbes that are floating appetites for oil.  The little buggers probably rival the US in terms of crude oil consumption, and that was before the spill.  As soon as the Macondo crude hit the water, the microbes went to work.  But the real nut-grabber for the environmental wackos and conspiracy nutjobs has to be this:

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That the oil-munching bacteria were able to consume tiny droplets of oil could validate the use of the Corexit chemical dispersant for helping to speed the biodegradation of the oil, Hazen said, although the long-term effects of Corexit on the ecosystem in the Gulf remains to be seen.

"It certainly looks like it may have had some positive effect by keeping that oil down there and allowing it to be biodegraded," Hazen said, adding that his team hasn't been able to find the presence of any Corexit, either, because it's water-soluble.

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The long term effects of Corexit are on the order of the long term effects of your average bottle of generic dishwashing liquid.  Hell, it’s probably even good for your skin.  The stuff is also a miracle of modern chemical engineering.  It breaks the oil into tiny droplets, then it dissolves in the water and goes away.  Just like…  Well, dishwashing liquid.

If they have any left, maybe they should host an eco-protest and when all the nutjobs show up, bathe them by hosing’em down with Corexit and cold Gulf water.

Gimme some feedback in the comments.

August 23, 1864: Union Troops Occupy Fort Morgan

On this day in 1864, the Confederate Garrison at Fort Morgan raised the white flag of surrender, and Union troops and Marines occupied the fort. But only after a three-week long siege, during which its formidable withstood near constant barrage from Union land and sea-based artillery. 

Construction of Fort Morgan was completed in 1834, and named after Revolutionary War hero, Daniel Morgan.

During the remainder of the Civil War, Union troops used the bastion as a staging ground for reconnaissance, raids and launching site for  attacks on Spanish Fort and Fort Blakely, the latter of which was the last major battle of the Civil War.

After the war, the fort fell into disrepair until receiving upgraded, concrete batteries between 1900 and 1904.  The Army eventually abandoned the fort in 1924.

In April 1942, the Army re-occupied the fort and constructed an adjacent airfield. Initially, the Coast Artillery brought five Model 1918 155mm gunsplacing two on top of Fort Morgan on mounts that permitted 360 degrees traverse. The remaining three guns stood on the Fort's parade ground.

The Coast Artillery disbanded in 1946, and the  Army again abandoned the Fort, turning it over to the State of Alabama in 1947.

 

 

In 1960, Fort Morgan was designated a National Historic Landmark.

The fort still stands today and serves as a popular tourist destination, but in 2007 it was designated as "one of the nation's 10 most endangered battle sites" by the Civil War Preservation Trust in History Under Siege: A Guide to America's Most Endangered Civil War Battlefields. 

Fort Morgan is just one of many historic  and fascinating places along the northern Gulf Coast.  The area is steeped in more than 300 years of colonial and early American history. And on this day in 1864, Fort Morgan’s guns fell silent, never to be used again in anger.

Be The One

Be The One.

www.restorethegulf.com

Please note that this is the .com  "Restore the Gulf" site, not the .gov propaganda site set up by the regime to cover for its pathetic response and political exploitation of this disaster.

Go visit the site, go sign the petition.

Gimme some feedback in the comments.

Obama issues new round of crippling economic sanctions--on the Gulf states

The Obama regime issued crippling new economic sanctions today, in what can only be described as concerted effort to destroy the southern economy and throw tens of thousands of people out of well paying blue collar jobs.

While the moratorium was getting its final, poisonous touches over the weekend, El Presidente treated himself to his eighth ninth round of golf since the oil spill began and finalized plans for his third vacation in less than 90 days.  Perhaps he believes we should thank him.

Secretariat Salazarovich has called this moratorium thing a "pause."  There is no "pause" in the offshore oil and gas drilling industry.  The industry is either drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, or it's drilling in the waters off of Brazil, Africa or Egypt.  Rigs like the Diamond Offshore Ocean Endeavor
are leased in long term deals that will keep them out of the Gulf of Mexico for years.  Eventually, the drilling, engineering and support jobs in cities like Houston and Mobile go with them, or the drilling companies just hire Brazilians or Egyptians and terminate the jobs in the U.S.

U.S. Federal Judge Martin Feldman swiftly struck down Moratorium 1.0 last month, and the U.S. Fifth District Court of Appeals denied the government's appeal even more swiftly. If I were Judge Feldman, I would command Secretariat Salazarovich stand in my court and show cause why he should not be jailed for contempt.

Defying a court while issuing crippling new economic sanctions ain't cool, bro.

Gimme some feedback in the comments.

Relief well ahead of schedule, could kill spill in 14 days?

Finally, some hopeful news on the continuing slow motion disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.  The Houston Chronicle reports that independent analysts believe that the drilling of the relief well is sufficiently ahead of schedule that the intercept could be made within 14 days, and the well killed very quickly afterwards:

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While BP has not adjusted its early August timetable for completing the first of two relief wells boring toward the Macondo more than two miles beneath the Gulf of Mexico seabed, independent drilling engineers and some energy analysts said the company could be in a position to intercept the damaged well and begin the critical kill operation within 14 days.

"Two weeks might be reasonable," said Darryl Bourgoyne, director of the petroleum engineering research and technology transfer laboratory at Louisiana State University, though he added the company still has many steps to complete first.

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Before getting too excited over this, it's important to remember that we've been given hopeful news in the past, only to have those hopes dashed by failure or disappointing performance.  First, there was the four-story containment dome contraption that failed because of methane hydrates clogging the valves.  Then there was the insertion tube strategy, followed by the top kill, kill shot, junk shot and currently, the "lower marine riser package," otherwise known as "top hat."  None of these top-down procedures have worked terribly well, but the relief well is a bottom-up approach.

BP is sticking to their August completion date, and performing ranging runs after every few hundred feet slows the drilling process down so engineers can check the aim of the intercept well.  They're trying to hit something the diameter of a soccer ball, located more than three miles below the surface, so while plugging the damned hole quickly is good, getting it right is critical.


Gimme some feedback in the comments.

The President. A straw. You must caption this...

Gentle readers of the I Bleed Crimson Red blog, please use the comments section to caption this photo, taken during teh Obi one's visit to Tacky Jack's in Orange Beach, Alabama.

If you're ever in this area, be sure and visit the local watering holes.

The abysmal oil recovery effort

NOTE: Click the image for the full size version
The chart above shows that, to date, the effort to recover some of the lost oil from the Deepwater Horizon well has not been as effective as Gulf Coast residents would have hoped.  The Deepwater Horizon rig, owned by Transocean and leased by British Petroleum, suffered a catastrophic blowout on April 20, 2010.  The ensuing explosion and fire claimed 11 lives, and the vessel sunk two days later.  As she went down, the riser pipe attached to the well was damaged, allowing oil to spew nearly uncontrolled one mile below the surface.  On April 24, the US Coast Guard announced that it had discovered the leak, but, believing that the leak was not as significant as it would turn out to be, did not activate a plan in place since 1994 to immediately contain and burn off oil as it reached the surface.

Several days of bad weather dispersed the oil, and the the size of the spill grew beyond the capability to trap and burn it.  This caused the cleanup strategy to change from one of collect-and-burn to collect-and-treat.  The results have been disappointing.

The dark brown line shows the cumulative release of oil from the well since the day the leak was discovered.  For this series, I've chosen the mid-point of the government's range estimate of 500,000 to 1 million gallons per day.  The actual amount of oil released could be anywhere from around 23 million to 46 million, and officials have said that the flow rate has varied on an almost daily basis.  So, the mid-point of the range seems reasonable.

The red line shows the amount of oily water recovered over time by skimming, booming and other collection methods at sea.  Officials have said that the oil-and-water mixture contains about 80% water and about 20% oil (on average).  So, the blue line represents the actual amount of crude oil recovered from the Gulf waters.

To date, somewhere in the neighborhood of 35 million gallons of hydrocarbons have been spilled into the Gulf.  Some of that material is also natural gas, and there is no way of ascertaining the proportion of gas to oil.  So the actual figure could be somewhat less, or somewhat more, depending on how much material is being ejected and what the actual hydrocarbon mix is.  But less than half of that amount, or about 15 million gallons, has been collected in the diluted oil-water mix.  And, since that mixture only represents about 20% oil, somewhere in the neighborhood of 3.0 million gallons of actual crude have been recovered, leaving more than 30 million gallons to foul marshes, wash up on beaches, destroy wildlife habitat and kill untold numbers of wildlife.

Both BP and the federal government bear some responsibility for the failed cleanup and containment effort.  BP bears some of the blame because mobilizing equipment in a large enough scale to perform a robust collection effort is expensive.  They wouldn't volunteer the option if they didn't think they had other, less expensive options.  But the federal government shoulders the blame, as well.

For starters, reports issued in the aftermath of the accident showed that there was a culture of substance abuse and promiscuity between regulators with Minerals Management Service and oil company officials.  Reports also documented lax inspection and safety controls for years, but particularly in the weeks leading up to the disaster.

Secondly, after the incident, the government didn't begin to fully mobilize resources under the Oil Pollution Act until April 29, nine full days after the incident and five full days after the spill was discovered.  President Obama did not name an Incident Commander until May 1, eleven days after the incident and a full week after the spill was detected.  For federal officials to claim that they've been on the job "since day one" is a laughable farce.

Furthermore, the 1994 in-situ burn plan called for the staging of specialized fire boom in the area so that the plan could be implemented without delay.  However, neither the Coast Guard, nor BP, nor Minerals Management Service had even one linear foot of the material on hand. Indeed, in order to conduct the alleged "test burn" on April 28, the Coast Guard had to order the boom material from a supplier in Illinois!

And lastly, under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, the United States government has the authority to direct the "responsible party" to take whatever action the government deems necessary in order to minimize damage and protect property.  Knowing as soon as April 24 that the Deepwater Horizon incident could morph into an unprecented environmental disaster, the government essentially allowed BP to tell them what the plan was.  No one seemed to have a clue; no one seemed to be in charge.

Extra Point: What else could Obama and his regime have done to contain and cleanup this spill?  Hmmm...

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America watched and waited through the failures of the sequential solutions: from Top Hat to Top Kill. What made it all the more frustrating is that a few enterprising media reports mainly outside the media mainstream told us President Obama apparently had options that could have -- and probably should have -- been ordered while we waited for the leak to be plugged.

Especially the supertanker vacuuming solution.

We learned of it from the web sites of Esquire Magazine and America Online. Esquire was the first to tell us about a 1993 effort in which Saudi Arabia used empty oil tankers to siphon away a huge oil spill at sea. Saudi Aramco, the huge oil company, reportedly kept the leak and the solution secret so the world wouldn't focus on the fact that perilous oil leaks can happen.

Esquire and aol.com interviewed a Saudi Aramco engineer at the time, Nick Pozzi, who detailed what had occurred: a flotilla of empty tankers pumped the vast oil-and-water slick into their cargo holds, then sailed to ports where the oil was removed and the water was returned to the sea.

Former Shell Oil Company president John Hofmeister also told reporters from both organizations that the tanker-vacuuming plan had worked -- and urged that it be tried in the Gulf of Mexico. He repeated his recommendation on NBC's Today Show -- so it got into the media mainstream, even though no tankers were commandeered and sent into the Gulf.

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