Back on land, in Houma, to meet with some colleagues tonight after some interesting days afloat. Simply being near the incident site, where so much massive equipment--the best the planet has to offer--is hardly able to cope with this disaster, is amazing. Improvising (intelligently, but still improvising) means to learn about the scale of the spill is fascinating and a challenge. And getting chased off the scene like flock of birds by a dog is different.
I learned, during my first unhappy stint in Louisiana, about the aftermath of a big hurricane. 20-foot tall piles of garbage, including siding to buildings, roofs, telephone poles, boats, trees and buses, lay scattered along the roadside throughout the southwestern part of the state. Telephone poles were wireless and leaning over, years after the storm's passage. Empty, half-wrecked buildings were common. The town of Cameron is still mostly swept away, with concrete pads marking where buildings and homes used to stand. The swamps smelled of decaying animals months after the previous storm.
This time, it's happening live. Tropical storm, soon to be hurricane, Alex is churning westward toward Mexico, having crossed the Yucatan in the last day. And even though the storm center is several hundred miles from here, the system covers the entire Gulf and the winds cleared out all but the largest ships from the incident site (and may well clear them out too, though it's starting to seem unlikely).
Start at the storm center, and head outward at about 1 o'clock. Continue about 1/8 inch past the Louisiana coastline, and that's roughly where I am right now, under those clouds.
We in the northeast simply don't comprehend the force and the scale and the terror of hurricanes. When they manage to touch our coasts, we lose some beaches, snicker at the richies who need to redo the first floors of their mansions, and otherwise suffer through a bad rainstorm with some broken branches. What we get in New England is a decrepit old man using a walker, compared to a wrestler in his prime they have to contend with down here in the Gulf. I'm starting to understand.
SIMOPS--I'm guessing, that means SIMultaneous OPerationS--the on-site coordinator of ship traffic, gave the Ridley permission to enter the 5nm exclusion zone, and approach to 3nm of the wellhead in order to survey. So we did, and I took some more digital photos...
The Discovery Enterprise (the gray one with the drilling tower amidships), partially concealed by support vessels. The smaller, paler flame is from the Discovery: it's flaring methane. The larger, more orange, smokier flame is from a floating platform (almost completely hidden), the Q4000. It's burning oil. Together, they're drawing about 25,000 barrels (~2,000,000 gallons) of oil per day from the well.
The whole floating assembly from a distance--note the smoke.
The flotilla.
Somewhere between those two floating platforms, DDII and DDIII, and 5,000 feet down, is the blown-out well.
Another contracted science vessel, going about its business--water testing.
Pictures from the Ridley Thomas as we pass 5 nautical miles northwest of the Deepwater disaster site. My camera isn't a telephoto, but I did max out the zoom...
URI's own R/V Endeavor, enlisted to monitor traffic in and out of the area. BP is maintaining a 5nm exclusion zone, and you need permission to enter that radius. BP has control over a 15nm radius around the site, meaning they can divert you if they please (they let us in, which is fortunate considering we're working for them). Outside of 15nm vessels are free to move.
The two rigs, DDII and DDIII, drilling kill bores to intersect the blowout well 17,000 feet below the sea floor and seal it off with concrete. First one there wins (and the DDIII is ahead, but it had a two-week head start).
To the left, the Discoverer Enterprise, the ship which has staged the cap-and-pump operation. The flames are methane flares--they simply burn off the natural gas which accompanies the oil. Excess natural gas which penetrated a poorly-made well, and then rushed up the pipe to the surface, is what led to this whole disaster.
Another shot of the kill bore (also known as relief well) drill platforms.
Another of the Enterprise. BP has brought in a platform (out of view from this angle) which is able to pump more oil than the Enterprise can, and another pump ship is on the way, since the Enterprise is better suited to drilling than production.
The drill platforms again. It's not quite as hazy as these photos make it seem--those things are still over 5nm away.
The Enterprise again. From this angle, we could smell the methane flare. It seemed to me like a tire fire (and I could feel a tingle at the back of my throat). Eric compared it to the smell of I95 in Jersey...
One last shot of the Enterprise. Those water jets are to cool off the methane flare pipes.
No blah! Just pictures (and their brief captions). Some of these are from Maine, before I even heard from Louisiana. Enjoy!...
A dishwasher, you say?
Aha, it's a pantry!
...for Dave and the cat, no less!
Speaking of the cat, he's annoyed at waiting by the door.
But hello, what's this?
Didn't catch the actual confrontation, but the chicken is plainly unfazed. Jasper, the mighty hunter!FAIL
Not many days do we have the chance to enjoy sunset clouds like those.
The inner parking lot at BP's crisis headquarters.
Hmm, seems the photo might have come out better than I thought...there's a fat guard behind that golf cart windshield about to erupt at me.
A single tender--the pickup truck of the sea, and the primary type of vessel in & out of Fourchon.
A few more tenders tied up, across the built-up grassland.
Fourchon's main channel. In good times, there might be a dozen boats in motion in & out.
A few of the guys--Kurt, the industrial hygienist (air quality) from BP, and two crew members dropping a fishingline over the side.
The yard astern.
The yard astern & to the side.
The yard alongside--kind of a bleak place overall.
Home for now, the R/V Ridley Thomas. Safely at dock.
The clients' office--my chair to the left, Tom's straight ahead.
The galley. Getting to know Asian food thanks to the Filipino & Korean crew...
The galley, facing forward. Notice the angle of the portside wall--it's up against the hull.
Survey room. Comfortable work space... and there's Dave, chief scientist (sorry, Lis, not the burning hunk of Aussie manhood you imagined), matching wits with computer Solitaire.
More survey room.
Other side, with Eric, the party chief. He's been burning up the phone lines trying to get this last part on board so we can finally leave...smile, Eric!
Another quick update from dockside in Port Fourchon, Louisiana. I'd take and post some general photos of the boat, but I'm a bit pressed for time today since I have quite a bit of preparatory reading to do before we're on station--assuming we leave port at all. I'll get to the photo ops in a later post, after we've returned. For now, just some facts.
We've been stuck here for quite some time now, since Wednesday at least, with nagging little maintenance issues popping up in series, like a perfectly-spaced line of cars that just keeps you from pulling out onto the road (and sends me into conniptions when it happens--just ask Kate. It seems I'm getting as ornery behind the wheel as Dad used to be, but let's just forget that for now).
Let's roll back to two weeks ago, when I first got word that I might be heading down here, on a Thursday. Packed my bag and was ready...but the boat wasn't. Something vague about crew problems on the sister ship, so the Ridley Thomas was held up at dock...Thursday became Sunday, became the Monday a week later...and finally, I was on a plane. Monday was actually my smoothest travel day in memory, actually, from a nice leisurely breakfast, a quiet ride to Portland with my little bengal (and Eva was fast asleep when I got out of the car, so I didn't want to wake her), and two quick flights to Baltimore and then New Orleans, followed by an easy car ride to Houma. If only all travel could be so simple.
I've described the day or two in between a bit already. Wednesday we had a big briefing, 50 of so of us crammed into a trailer out behind BP's gigantic training center, getting a description of the mission. That afternoon I drove down to Fourchon with the crew chief, Eric, and here we've waited ever since. The gremlins are seeing to that. To list the little maintenance issues which have prevented us from leaving, since Thursday morning until now: a broken backup generator; broken AC; broken oil separator for the bilge pump (one crew member observed: who cares if we're dumping a bit of oil? We're going to work in an oil slick!); and now, broken strobe light warning system for the engine room. Of all those, the AC is the one we could live without, and just make do with a bit of discomfort. But the other three are Coast Guard-mandated fixes, so here we sit as we wait for the special strobes to fit the British electrical system on board this non-American boat.
And on the other side of events? The year's first tropical storm, christened just last night, Alex. It's still in the Caribbean as I type, its winds just topped out over 40 mph as I slept, and the likely storm track has it heading west of here. But one never knows. The Coast Guard has estimated that it will need five days to clear ground zero of vessels should a tropical depression-or-stronger type storm approach. I imagine it's going to be a tense watch for BP/Coast Guard mission control today, as they monitor that thing. Little scatterbug boats like us are fine, as long as we don't blunder straight into the storm. But the big, slow, ungainly ships need to untether and get away from each other, and try to make it to a port well out of the storm's path. (And I assume that includes the square drilling platforms--those things are most definitely not immune to storms.) So the recovery operation is looking a bit precarious right now, for the next week or two, and our own role hinges on installing a few lightbulbs.
How many engineers again, how does that joke go? It's not funny, whatever the punchline is.
A quick update from Louisiana, since my last post confused a few attentive readers. According to previous plans, I should have been on the Gulf and surveying by last weekend, when I was instead posting lovingly about little Eva learning to crawl. That's the nature of marine work--things are rarely settled. In big-time shipping, barring weather or major maintenance problems (i.e.--things are still not always settled, but it's less of a problem than with smaller, more roustabout-type boats) schedules are pretty strict. When a ship costs the better part of $100K a day to operate, and its cargo is worth tens of millions of dollars, and a long chain of events depends on smooth delivery, then things tend to happen on time. In the case of small scientific or commercial vessels? Not so much. So I cooled my heels in Maine until Monday, when I flew down to Louisiana to begin work here.
I've had just brushes of contact with the monitoring and cleanup effort so far. It's a far-flung, chaotically organized set of activities with several independent command structures. BP is running most of it, of course, including the actual oil capture effort. The state of Louisiana is pushing forward with its misguided--either outright stupid, or else knowingly cynical--effort at building berms across the mouths of inlets. A better idea: bring in the boom left alone along vacant strands of beach, and triple- or quadruple-boom the inlets, and staff those inlets with people--boats, if necessary, where the inlets are wide enough--who will monitor the booms 24/7, and insure the capture of the most oil. When surrounded by a cloud of dust, do you clap a hand over your shoulder, or stomach? No, you clap a hand over your mouth and nose, where the infected air might actually get in. The same principle applies to the coast. The operative concept is triage. Given (highly!) limited ability to mitigate the damage, select those spots to save which have the greatest impact on the rest of the system. Open barrier beach is environment worth protecting, but it's not as critical as the inlets to the low-energy, highly populated marshes beyond.
Diatribe over! BP is coordinating a sudden army of contractors, of which I'm now one, to monitor and remediate aspects of the spill. The federal government, through the Coast Guard, FEMA, NOAA, DHS and other agencies, is conducting studies and remediation efforts as well. There is some, but not necessarily total, coordination between all of these agencies. I just returned from BP's Houma operations center, an impressively big building, turned now into the Louisiana crisis command. Two gigantic makeshift parking lots have been graded out from the fields nearby, as thousands of scientific, administrative, security and PR (don't EVER lose sight of the PR--it's more important to BP than science, by a large margin) now call this campus their office.
I dropped by this morning expecting to enter a briefing, but found that the meeting isn't until tomorrow. So I had a big breakfast instead (even if I get billed, it'll be later, after I get paid...imagine a smiley here), and left. (I'm typing in the hotel lobby right now. After this post, since Kate and I have no spending money at the moment, I'll eschew the sporting goods store and hunt up the Houma library. My rule these days is, when in doubt, geek it up.) As I left, I wanted to snap a few photos. The scene is pretty interesting: huge gravel lots filled with cars, giant glass, concrete and sleek steel building with the discreet "bp" symbol high on the wall, traffic cones connected with plastic chain directing traffic flow, parking lot shuttles, hundreds of people in and out of the building. Security guards zip around the lots in golf carts. In front of the buildings are two tractor trailers, mobile command centers filled with radio equipment, one belonging to the LA State Police, the other to the Department of Homeland Security. I wanted to snap some photos of the scene and received exactly the treatment I expected: an angry injunction from a fat guard in a golf cart to delete the (rushed, badly focused and aimed even worse) photo of the front of the building. I pressed a random button, dismissively said "Done," and drove off, hoping he didn't hear too many of the curse words I followed up with. (The image above is from the internet--I intend to get a shot of the scene, but don't have a plan yet. And it'll probably of UFO-sighting quality when I do, shot hurriedly at 25 mph at 6:30 AM as I drive in tomorrow. We'll see...now I'm determined to show some spite to that fat guard.)
One of my favorite quotes is from Whoopi Goldberg (a vastly underrated standup artist, from back in the day when she did standup: she, Cosby and Richard Pryor are my three favorites). I'm paraphrasing most of this, but she mentioned someone talking about a pet peeve, and then described her response. "Pet peeve? I don't have pet peeves. I have whole kennels of irritation."
One of the loudest dogs in my kennel, so to speak, is being prevented from simply expressing myself. I don't work for the press, I'll honor the confidentiality agreement concerning data (though much is general knowledge now: yes, there is oil below the surface, and it's moving around), and my only object is to inform friends and family about the overall scale and tools involved in this somewhat awe-inspiring effort. In other words, in good faith I want people I care about (and even previously unknown passersby!) to share a glimpse of what I'm up to. I have utterly no respect for the angry, anxious, reality-is-our-property mentality of legal and corporate professions. I can sign off on this confidentiality agreement only knowing that the general truth is already known, and that the NOAA data, at least, will be in the public domain eventually. The whole truth may not always out, but sometimes the gist is enough. When people try to control even the gist, my ire starts rising.
Tomorrow at 0800 I'll go into the briefing, we'll get more specific plans, and then head to the ships (probably docked at Port Fourchon).
Then the adventure will begin in earnest. Right now I'm still polishing armor, doing calisthenics, watering and haying the horse, so to speak...only my trusty squire Jasper is many miles away, and lady Kate and young mistress Eva are too. Swamp knight...
...anyhow, no reason to abuse your patience with inanities like that. I have one little anecdote, completely unrelated to the spill or Louisiana, to share. Now that I've posted a video to this blog, I want to keep doing more, of course, and I found a convenient excuse with cats and rabbits. Only, this isn't the video itself, but instead, a link to a YouTube video. Links go bad, so this one might, and it's copyrighted material (Warner Brothers), so there's a very good chance of that happening. But I can't download the video to this computer, so for right now, the crappy-and-maybe-dead link will have to do.
Dave & Ande keep rabbits, about eight, in pens out back. A ninth roams free, a slightly mangy-looking cinnamon-sugar bunny named Houdini. Houdini's pretty bold, and will hop right on by you with indifference as he goes about his business. He now suffers Eva to touch him (even when she grabs a little bit, or is rather, um, forceful in her petting). He's also digging a cave next to the barn door, where he can hide from the sun. That hole's nearly two feet deep. Houdini is the coolest rabbit I know.
Enter Jasper. Jasper is still a little overwhelmed, sort of half-heartedly following his feral instincts, with only occasional bursts of anything you'd call initiative (sort of like me in my first year of graduate school). I told you about his abject failure with the chicken. Things with Houdini never even got that far. Jasper crept up from behind, and the rabbit was of course aware of him, but never really even turned to address him. Houdini just kept on eating grass, ears erect and eyes turned, but otherwise projecting an impressive amount of "ho-hum" for, as I've heard them called, a walking furry hamburger.
Only, that rabbit is comparable in size to the cat. Houdini's maybe, I'm guessing, about 10 pounds, and maybe 10" long rump-to-nose. Jasper, maybe 12 or 13 pounds, 14" rump-to-nose, and perhaps more importantly, much longer, more lithe and delicate. Rabbits have lots of muscle compacted in that rear end, the better to skedaddle with. One good, frantic kick in the accidentally right spot could startle the heck out of, or even badly hurt, the cat. And I just have no confidence in Jasper's ability to wrestle prey, tiger-style, to the ground. He just doesn't have the game, you know? Sort of like Ricky Davis versus Michael Jordan (look those guys up, bengal!). I'll leave it for you to figure out which Jasper resembles more--MJ or Davis.
Anyhow, Jasper failed before he even started with Houdini. The two now treat each other with all the indifference of family.
However, a neighbor's cat showed up one afternoon, and began stalking the rabbit. (Jasper began stalking the cat, which turned out to be very boring, because as we all know, cats hate to fight, and would rather sit and stare, or talk about it.) But this gray-and-orange tiger cat from down the road had foolish designs on Houdini. The bunny was sensitive to the cat's intent, and this time, wasn't eating. He was poised to jump, ears up, eyes on the cat, keeping about fifteen feet between them. The cat crept forward, and the rabbit leapt away. The cat tried again, and the rabbit jumped again. The cat kept trying to get closer.
Houdini had had enough, and just took off around the house, clearing over ten feet per jump, it seemed. In less than a second and a half, the rabbit had disappeared around the entire side of the house, making an arc from the front to the back yard.
The cat remained in a crouch, following the rabbit with his head, and then sat up. He stayed there for a good ten or fifteen seconds. It was rather like this (the first minute or so):
That's Jasper's first problem with the rabbit, too. Not only would he probably get beaten up, but, well, he'd never get the chance in the first place.
Start at the storm center, and head outward at about 1 o'clock. Continue about 1/8 inch past the Louisiana coastline, and that's roughly where I am right now, under those clouds.
We in the northeast simply don't comprehend the force and the scale and the terror of hurricanes. When they manage to touch our coasts, we lose some beaches, snicker at the richies who need to redo the first floors of their mansions, and otherwise suffer through a bad rainstorm with some broken 
branches. What we get in New England is a decrepit old man using a walker, compared to a wrestler in his prime they have to contend with down here in the Gulf. I'm starting to understand.
