Hurricane Alex picked up strength before making landfall. The projected effects are ugly.
Hurricane Alex disrupted the BP oil spill clean-up effort in the Gulf of Mexico on Wednesday as the storm gathered strength and was expected to make landfall.
US President Barack Obama declared a state of emergency in Texas as Alex strengthened into the first Atlantic hurricane of the season late Tuesday.
Alex was far from the epicenter of the clean-up operation off the Louisiana coast, but churned up waves and strong winds that forced the suspension of oil skimming and booming operations off the coasts of Louisiana, Alabama and Florida.
Two vessels continued to capture oil gushing from an undersea well 50 miles (80 kilometers) off Louisiana, where the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon rig exploded ten weeks ago sparking the worst environmental disaster in US history.
Waves at the site were up to seven feet (two meters) high, a Coast Guard spokesman told AFP.
Coupled with winds of up to 22 knots it made it too rough for crews to deploy a third vessel, the Helix Producer, that was set to nearly double the capacity of BP’s containment system.
The current containment system is capturing nearly 25,000 of the estimated 30,000 to 60,000 barrels of crude spewing out of the ruptured well every day.
The rough seas have also shifted parts of the slick closer to sensitive areas in Florida and Louisiana, and could also push the oil deeper into fragile coastal wetlands… [emphasis added]
Inserted from <Raw Story>
Keith Olbermann featured conservationist, John Walthen, who brought this home in a way that hits home.
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I thought I was getting so used to the daily horror from GOP gusher that I was becoming jaded, but this prompted me to break down and cry.
4 Responses to “Alex Makes the Tragedy Worse”
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Please don’t tell me that my son Alex is making this worse! 🙁
That vid was very powerful. Seeing those dolphins made me cry. Does anyone know WTF they are doing down there? I would say apparently NOT.
Then lets rename the hurricaine. Let’s call it Lisa. 😉
None of the research that shuld have begun 20 years ago has been done. That’s why nobody knows.
In my opinion NO they don’t know their ass from, you know the rest… Almost everything there doing is wrong.
These machines I found on line are capable of cleaning millions of gals. of water. TC tells me finally their on order. Why we haven’t had them here is crazy. The dispersant should have never been used. That’s what creates the plumes. It also makes it that much harder to clean up. Not to mention the health hazards they present. Workers and Indians in contact are not being protected. When you see some workers in PPE, it’s for the photo opt.
I’m a bitter old fart, but their running this like everything else that’s being run, half assed. Tell me they couldn’t have driven off the Dolphins and other animals before they were trapped. And yet we still have the dirty bastard Governors and such wanting to drill more right now… I implore the people of those states to wake up and get rid of those hacks.
Tim, they ordered them weeks ago. What the manufacturer has not publicized is that they do not carry the machines in inventory. They did not begin manufacturing the order until they received it. The oil companies should have had a stockpile of these units to mobilize in the event of an accident. They did not.
If there is a way to herd marine animals, I have never heard of it. I did a brief search, and from what I can see, the ability to drive off the animals does not exist.