Friday, July 02, 2010
Thursday, July 01, 2010
Independence from Oil - a history
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
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Another Endangered Species Endangered
From Associated Press
NEW ORLEANS — Whale sharks, the huge fish that feed by vacuuming the sea surface, have been seen in heavy oil a few miles from BP's spewing well in the Gulf of Mexico, a scientist said.
The University of Southern Mississippi researcher who's studied their migratory habits in the Gulf says the question now is how many of the creatures are dying in the oil.
"Taking mouthfuls of thick oil is not conducive to them surviving," said Eric Hoffmayer of the USM Gulf Coast Research Lab.
Oil could clog the cartilage filter pads that direct food to their throats and could coat their gills.
Hoffmayer said three of the sharks, the world's largest fish, were spotted within four miles of the spill site on Monday. They migrate north in late spring from waters near the Yucatan to feed off the mouth of the Mississippi River. The Deepwater Horizon site is about 40 miles southeast of the river.
"That basically confirms our worst fear: these animals do not know to stay away from the oil," Hoffmayer said.
They're easy to recognize, up to about 40 feet long and black with rows of white spots.
But there won't be any way to tell how many die. Sharks don't float.
"If they do die from the oil, they're going to sink to the bottom," Hoffmayer said.
News of whale sharks in the oil came less than a week after a huge group was spotted elsewhere off the Louisiana coast where oil had not yet been found. One aerial photograph showed dozens of them.
"It blew my mind. There were probably more than a hundred sharks," he said.
The group seen June 22 was about 70 miles southwest of Port Fourchon, and about 60 miles from the western edge of the spill as shown on a federal map, he said.
Hoffmayer said it was hard to say whether the three seen Monday were from that group because the animals can travel more than 60 miles in a day.
"I've got a feeling that until whatever the food source they found disappears, they're not going to want to go," he said.
Nobody knows just how many whale sharks exist. They're on the World Conservation Union's "red list" of threatened species.
Hoffmayer said the animals can dive a mile deep, and could escape any effort to herd them away from the oil.
Last week's spotting came as part of a two-day excursion organized by the director of a documentary being filmed about marine biologist Sylvia Earle, creator of the Mission Blue Foundation.
Hoffmayer said four of the sharks were tagged.
BPs cops are our cops!
are actually local cops working for BP on their own time. Click this link to read the whole story and about the ACLU weighing in.
At this link, read about how these "officials" are harrassing people in various ways.
SCUZZBUCKET OF THE WEEK
From the NY Times
VENICE, La. — In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, they became a symbol of the government’s inept response to that disaster: the 120,000 or so trailers provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to people who had lost their homes. The trailers were discovered to have such high levels of formaldehyde that the government banned them from ever being used for long-term housing again.
Some of the trailers, though, are getting a second life amid the latest disaster here — as living quarters for workers involved with the cleanup of the oil spill.
They have been showing up in mobile-home parks, open fields and local boatyards as thousands of cleanup workers have scrambled to find housing.
Ron Mason, owner of a disaster contracting firm, Alpha 1, said that in the past two weeks he had sold more than 20 of the trailers to cleanup workers and the companies that employ them in Venice and Grand Isle, La.
Even though federal regulators have said the trailers are not to be used for housing because of formaldehyde’s health risks, Mr. Mason said some of these workers had bought them so they could be together with their wives and children after work.
“These are perfectly good trailers,” Mr. Mason said, adding that he has leased land in and around Venice for 40 more trailers that are being delivered from Texas in the coming weeks. “Look, you know that new car smell? Well, that’s formaldehyde, too. The stuff is in everything. It’s not a big deal.”
Not everyone agreed. “It stunk to high heaven,” said Thomas J. Sparks, a logistics coordinator for the Marine Spill Response Corporation, as he stood in front of the FEMA trailer that was provided to him by a company working with his firm. Mr. Sparks said the fumes in the trailer from formaldehyde, a widely used chemical in building materials like particle board, were so strong that he had asked his employer to provide him with a non-FEMA trailer
Federal officials have struggled to figure out what to do with the contaminated trailers, which have cost nearly $130 million a year to store and maintain, according to federal records. As a result, the government decided to sell the trailers in 2006.
The trailers have found a ready market in the gulf.
In an April hearing, members of the House Energy Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection raised concerns that the trailers would end up being used for housing. More than 100,000 trailers have been sold so far in public auctions.
The trailers are “not intended to be used as housing,” said David Garratt, FEMA’s associate administrator for mission support. “Subsequent owners must continue to similarly inform subsequent buyers for the life of the unit.”
These rules are not being followed in many cases, however. Officials with the inspector general’s office of the General Services Administration said Wednesday that they had opened at least seven cases concerning buyers who might not have posted the certification and formaldehyde warnings on trailers they sold.
Caren Auchman, a spokeswoman for the General Services Administration, said in an e-mail message that her agency was taking steps to ensure that the units were not used for housing.
Still, housing remains tight. In June, Mr. Mason’s firm and another consulting firm began proposing a plan to large contractors in the region to put about 300 of the trailers on barges for offshore worker housing.
Officials from BP and the “Center for Toxicology and Environmental Health, which is BP’s subcontractor that is handling most of the air sampling in the region, said they had no plans to move forward with the proposal.
Standing in a small field surrounded by a new shipment of the trailers, Mr. Mason declined to say whether he informed buyers of the formaldehyde risks or kept warning labels on the trailers.
One of Mr. Mason’s trailers, shown to a reporter, had an overpowering smell of formaldehyde inside and none of the required placards on the outside or inside indicating the formaldehyde risk or that it was not supposed to be used for housing. The trailer did, however, have a note taped inside to call FEMA.
Mr. Mason, who is based in Texarkana, Tex., added that all of his customers have been happy and that he planned to lease land for 50 more trailers that he would rent out to workers.
“Bottom line,” he said, “I’m providing a service.”
This assclown reminds me or Mr. Haney from Green Acres. Except that Mr. Haney didn't knowingly poison people.
Picture of Gulf oil spill
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
"Unauthorized" flyover of Gulf of Mexico
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Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Trying to save the baby pelicans
WWL-TV Eyewitness News
FORT JACKSON -- Nearly 700 oil-covered birds have come through the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center at Fort Jackson.
Workers there said about 80 percent of them are surviving. But they're not all adults. The center has a number of baby pelicans separated from their parents.
Veterinary intern Dr. Leslie Pence is used to treating birds at the West Esplanade Veterinary Clinic in Metairie. But lately, she has a weekend gig cleaning oil-covered pelicans at Fort Jackson.
“I was there when they started getting some of the babies, the little hatchlings in, probably ten or so,” Pence said.
Now workers are caring for 75 baby pelicans that are kept in a pen outside.
“They are cute. They sound like little pterodactyls,” Pence said.
“They're the more aggressive, everybody that's been bitten has been bitten by a baby. They think they're friendly and they snap you right in the face,” said director of the Wildlife Rehab Center, Jay Holcomb.
The baby pelicans are the orphans of the oil spill, separated from their parents, removed from the only islands they've ever known.
But this is not the first time the workers at Fort Jackson have cleaned oil off Louisiana birds.
In 2005, two months before Katrina, oil spilled into Breton Sound.
“During a storm, all the adults leave, and the babies stay. So, they got covered in oil. We picked up a thousand birds, and we only released 250 of those because they were burned from the oil, from the sun,” Holcomb said about the event that taught him how to care for the pelicans.
So far, the center has treated and released 250 birds in Texas; 72 more were scheduled for release in Georgia today.
The question now is what to do with the babies.
In '05, workers raised the babies back on the islands that were cleaned of oil, but in this case, the oil is still gushing.
According to Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries, BP's contractor that runs the site is still trying to find an extended rehab facility for them.
“The big ones are getting really big and in a few weeks, they'll start test-flying. So, we want them out before then. So, we're pushing the agencies to go faster and get this plan going,” Holcomb said.
And much like saving them, it's a race against time, before there's too much human contact and they can't survive back in the wild on their own.
Holcomb said experts used the same technique to bring back the brown pelican population in Louisiana.
They fed them in their natural habitat until they could fly and kept them near adult pelicans so they can see how to catch fish on their own.
Monday, June 28, 2010
top ten
10. Catch Osama
9. Contaminate waters around a country like North Korea
8. Reveal secret behind his soft and lustrous curly hair
7. Apologize on The Golf Channel
6. Shoot new BP commercial where he is viciously pecked by angry pelicans
5. Join Team Coco
4. Get a job at Poland Spring; accidentally dump a billion gallons of water into the gulf
3. Improve his image, are you kidding? He's doing great!
2. Hang out at BP station, let customers inflate his butt with air hose
1. Dial it back from "arrogant bastard" to "smug
Get your act together, National Wildlife folks!
| National Wildlife Hotline Tells Plaquemines Parish Coastal Zone Management Director PJ Hahn To Leave Bird In The Water |
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