BP Horizon Deepwater Oil Disaster : Open Thread

Baby dolphins, some barely three feet in length, are washing up along the Mississippi and Alabama coastlines at 10 times the normal rate of stillborn and infant deaths, researchers are finding.

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...Transocean did have the foresight to insure the Deepwater Horizon rig for about twice what it was worth. It was later reported that the company made a $270 million profit from insurance payouts after the disaster.

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AndyH said:

http://www.care2.com/causes/environ...l-spill-transocean-awards-bonuses-for-safety/

...Transocean did have the foresight to insure the Deepwater Horizon rig for about twice what it was worth. It was later reported that the company made a $270 million profit from insurance payouts after the disaster.

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DrRocket said:

AndyH said:

http://www.care2.com/causes/environ...l-spill-transocean-awards-bonuses-for-safety/

...Transocean did have the foresight to insure the Deepwater Horizon rig for about twice what it was worth. It was later reported that the company made a $270 million profit from insurance payouts after the disaster.

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Most likely the insurance was for replacement cost, whereas the asset on the books was already depreciated. That normally results in a gain. I didn't research this specific matter, it is just what I deal with everyday as a CPA and is the most likely scenario. Over the life of the asset, they deducted depreciation and recorded gain on insurance recovery of approximately the same amount. The cash received from insurance will be used to replace the lost platform and there will be very little cash left, if any, after replacing the platform.

If you have a small business and sell your depreciated car, you too will have a gain when you sell it.

I also doubt any insurance company would insure anything for more than it is worth, because that would open themselves to all kinds of mischief. Just try to insure your house or car for more than it is worth--you won't be able to.

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Just days after BP publicly denied allegations that its Macondo well was leaking, chemists from Louisiana State University confirmed that samples from the water’s surface above the well are a chemical match for the hundreds of millions of gallons of oil that spewed into the Gulf last summer.

On Tuesday, investigators from the Mobile Press-Register collected samples of oil floating on the surface and delivered them to Ed Overton and Scott Miles of LSU. Most of the oil was located in a patch about 50 yards wide and a quarter of a mile long, and reporters found a “pronounced and pungent petroleum smell,” the paper said.

The scientists confirmed that the chemical fingerprint of the samples was identical to the the BP oil, known as MC252.

“After examining the data, I think it’s a dead ringer for the MC252 oil, as good a match as I’ve seen,” Overton wrote in an email to the newspaper. “My guess is that it is probably coming from the broken riser pipe or sunken platform. … However, it should be confirmed, just to make sure there is no leak from the plugged well.”

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We found petroleum hydrocarbon contamination in all of the areas that were sampled and in the tissue of many of the seafood species. The data that we collected also lead us to believe that Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocar­bon (PAH) contamination in some seafood species may be increasing over time.

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...Many like Willie Seaman say they continue to have health problems, even though they still work. They suffer largely in silence, hoping their rashes and coughs and dizzy spells they say are linked to oil and chemical dispersants will wash away with the tides....But that may be wishful thinking if what’s happening to wildlife is any indication. Dolphins continue to die in high numbers. Fishermen report fish with lesions and shrimp coated with black substances that no one has seen before. Crabs and oyster harvests are dismal. Something seems seriously wrong with the fisheries.

All the more reason to ask, Gulf residents say, what about the people?

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Laurel didn’t find dead turtles on a recent stroll on her Gulfport shores, which she now calls "death beach." But walking along she smelled something bad. After poking around in the sand, she found the nauseating source; a dead baby dolphin’s tail, decomposing and buried not more than a few inches in the sand. An out-of-work shrimper came a long and picked it up, and when he realized what it was he started to sob; "This really ruins my day... " Laurel remembers. Tourists looked at it incredulously, Laurel says, their kids screaming, 'Mommy, it's a dolphin's tail!'

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On Earthday, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig sank creating the worst oil spill in history. According to the global media, the story ended when the well was capped – but that’s when the real story began. By exposing the root causes of the oil spill and what really happened after the news cameras left the Gulf states, filmmakers Josh and Rebecca Tickell uncover a vast network of corruption.

The New Orleans Times Picayune says THE BIG FIX is “a full-on, no-holds-barred bit of investigative journalism” into the dark secrets surrounding one of the largest manmade environmental catastrophes in American history.

THE BIG FIX is “a damning indictment” (Time Out New York) of a system of government and corporate collusion that puts the pursuit of profit over all other human and environmental needs. Through “smart, covert reporting that shames our news media” (The Village Voice) The Big Fix is “a mandatory-viewing critique of widespread government corruption” (LA Weekly).

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Despite sales dropping precipitously following the spill, the Gulf's seafood industry was given a boost after the government's Defense Commissary Agency began selling Gulf seafood products on 72 East Coast military bases in early 2011, reported AP.

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“We’re still seeing oil coming in during storms,” says Cherri Foytlin, a former features writer for a now shuttered newspaper that was run out of the small town of Rayne, Louisiana. Foytlin began reporting on the spill as soon as it happened and says most of the country never really understood how bad things were for people along the coast because BP and the government controlled much of the press, staging media events in areas that saw the least damage.

Residents are still sick and it’s hard to prove why. At every turn, she says, people have been ignored. “It’s hard to pin down the causation and BP knows that,” she says. “But we have health problems that weren’t here before the spill.”

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evnow said:

Ironic - just heard on NPR that Obama is very unpopular there because of his environmental policies.

So, people whose livelihood depends on dirty fossil fuels, prefer disasters like this over clean energy.

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...at the moment, the anti-intellectual movement in the United States, which is shocking to me, is making sure people don't know what's going on...

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Up to 10 million gallons (38 million liters) of crude oil from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill has settled at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, where it is threatening wildlife and marine ecosystems, according to a new study.

The finding helps solve the mystery of where the "missing" oil from the spill landed. Its location had eluded both the U.S. government and BP cleanup crews after the April 2010 disaster that caused about 200 million gallons (757 million liters) of crude oil to leak into the Gulf.

"This is going to affect the Gulf for years to come," Jeff Chanton, the study's lead researcher and a professor of chemical oceanography at Florida State University, said in a statement. "Fish will likely ingest contaminants because worms ingest the sediment, and fish eat the worms. It's a conduit for contamination into the food web."

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On April 20, 2010, communities throughout the Gulf Coast of the United States were devastated by the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon, a state-of-the-art, offshore oil rig operated by BP in the Gulf of Mexico. The blast killed 11 of 126 rig crewmembers and injured many more, setting off a fireball that was seen 35 miles away. After burning for two days, the Deepwater Horizon sank, causing the largest offshore oil spill in American history. The spill flowed unabated for almost three months, dumping hundreds of millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic ocean, shutting down the local fishing industry, polluting the fragile ecosystem, and raising serious questions about the safety of continued deep-water offshore drilling.

Brown traveled to small towns and major cities across Alabama, Louisiana and Texas to explore the fallout of the environmental disaster. Years later, the Southern Americans still haunted by the Deepwater Horizon explosion provide first-hand accounts of their ongoing experience, long after the story has faded from the front page.

The Great Invisible makes its television premiere on Monday, April 20 at 10p.m. ET / 7p.m., only on Pivot TV.

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Stephen Stone was one of the 126 crew members aboard the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig and near the end of a three-week shift working for Transocean when an explosion and blowout began the Gulf oil spill on April 20, 2010. After escaping the burning rig and spending nearly a day aboard a lifeboat, Stone made it to land.

Five years later, he still suffers from PTSD.

“For a long time, I couldn’t close my eyes after the rig stuff. Even taking a shower, washing my face. I had to it fast, I didn’t like to do it," he says in the interview above from PBS' "Independent Lens" series. “It feels like someone’s going to be there or something’s going to happen.

Stone is one of several people who were featured in the 2014 documentary "The Great Invisible," a firsthand look at the oil spill through the people it impacted. The film will debut on television on Monday, April 20 at 10 p.m. EDT through the PBS "Independent Lens" series, which shows documentaries made by independent filmmakers. Pivot network will show the documentary at the same time.

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A northern Gulf of Mexico (GoM) cetacean unusual mortality event (UME) involving primarily bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama began in February 2010 and continued into 2014. Overlapping in time and space with this UME was the Deepwater Horizon (DWH) oil spill, which was proposed as a contributing cause of adrenal disease, lung disease, and poor health in live dolphins examined during 2011 in Barataria Bay, Louisiana. To assess potential contributing factors and causes of deaths for stranded UME dolphins from June 2010 through December 2012, lung and adrenal gland tissues were histologically evaluated from 46 fresh dead non-perinatal carcasses that stranded in Louisiana (including 22 from Barataria Bay), Mississippi, and Alabama. UME dolphins were tested for evidence of biotoxicosis, morbillivirus infection, and brucellosis. Results were compared to up to 106 fresh dead stranded dolphins from outside the UME area or prior to the DWH spill. UME dolphins were more likely to have primary bacterial pneumonia (22% compared to 2% in non-UME dolphins, P = .003) and thin adrenal cortices (33% compared to 7% in non-UME dolphins, P = .003). In 70% of UME dolphins with primary bacterial pneumonia, the condition either caused or contributed significantly to death. Brucellosis and morbillivirus infections were detected in 7% and 11% of UME dolphins, respectively, and biotoxin levels were low or below the detection limit, indicating that these were not primary causes of the current UME. The rare, life-threatening, and chronic adrenal gland and lung diseases identified in stranded UME dolphins are consistent with exposure to petroleum compounds as seen in other mammals. Exposure of dolphins to elevated petroleum compounds present in coastal GoM waters during and after the DWH oil spill is proposed as a cause of adrenal and lung disease and as a contributor to increased dolphin deaths.

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