It's been that kind of day, and if we have 10 more of these, I'll be very happy. Steady work, steady accumulation of data, and good crew relations.
Other than that, nothing to say about life on board ship. Literally. I'm not allowed to say anything else, so I won't. I trust that all of the data currently being gathered by governmental, university and private (like us) sources for the Natural Resources Damage Assessment, to be used for the spill litigation, will eventually become public domain. I believe the NRDA framework was all set up by the 1990 Oil Pollution Act, as a direct result of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill. My URI geology advisor, the estimable Dr. B, has described working (either as a contractor or else for the Alaska state or the federal government) on an environmental damage assessment for that spill alongside several other coastal science colleagues. Only, they'd all been hired by different parties, and were not allowed to share any data or thoughts at all. They were staying in neighboring, or the same, hotels, ate and drank at the same restaurants, had drinks together...and couldn't discuss anything of what they'd been doing all day.
Now that's awkward. Dr. B's a fairly savvy guy. He's a born storyteller--one reason we get along--so he's not one of these calculating, overly concealing, close-to-the-chest types who annoy me extremely. But neither is he an oblivious brag, by any means. Dr. B knows how to parse his words and speak carefully, so I'm sure he was able to get along with his buds and not be too inappropriate. But still, it's hard to put your passion to work and devote yourself to a task, and have to clam up about it afterward. But it must be done.
But as far as the dueling environmental assessments, they're a gigantic waste of time, effort and money. They also make open fraud (in the case of Exxon trying to minimize all aspects of the spill's impact) a real and vibrant likelihood. I've yet to read the 1990 Act--I intend to--but my impression is that the NRDA for which we're gathering information is a child of that law. And I'll repeat my hope that the public will have access to this information someday. We all deserve to. This spill is on the short list of world's worst environmental disasters, along with Chernobyl, Saddam's destruction of the Kuwaiti wells, Ixtoc, the loss of the Aral Sea and the ongoing devastation of the Niger delta.
In the meantime, I'll write about quality-of-life things, and ancillary stuff like the photos I've taken to posting. It's good to spread some general contextual info, and bring people a little closer to events down here, even if the science is off-limits for a while.
Aside from that, I do still have thoughts on the outside world...like, I'll never quite recover from the Celts losing in the Finals this year. One quarter. Kobe pushed Perk from behind in Game 6, which is why he landed awkardly on his left leg and blew out his ACL. And that may have been the difference, the loss of interior defense and rebounding. This hurt worse than the Giants beating the Patriots in '08. I feel a little badly for the bengal, who became a serious fan this year (even though we dropped cable 1/4 of the way into the season and couldn't watch any more games) and in the end was faced with a very bleak conclusion to the season.
I also think LeBrand made LeCopOut by joining DaWayne down in Miami. I do think more of Dwyane (the actual spelling of his name) for helping engineer this: that guy's a real baby-faced killer of a player, with far more on- and off-court shrewdness than most. Nothing like Granddaddy Bill Russell, of course, whose practice of taking Wilt out to dinner during series and thereby dulling his competitive edge is both established fact, and legendary. (Nobody will ever surpass Bill Russell for sheer wiliness.) But Dwyane seems to be respectably comparable. He's managed to convince a better player than he is to come join his team and be second fiddle. How about them apples!
As for LeBlah...I don't care if his team wins four, five, or eight championships. He gave up on himself.
On to some pictures!
I couldn't resist some nighttime shots, even despite the blurriness.
Even worse, but the lights on these drill rigs and ships are pretty spectacular.
Check out the smoke from the oil/gas flare, lit by the flare itself.
Saturday morning (July 10), a much clearer, less hazy day. From 10 km, where I took this shot, you'd've seen only impenetrable blue-gray haze on Friday.
A little closer in. That flare is just mean-looking. I read that the gas flares on platforms off of West Africa are so big and so fierce that the workers stationed there sleep in their fireproof suits.
City of Ships, from a distance.
Northwestern corner of the City, with the nearby Loch Rannoch ready to start receiving oil. BP is switching caps on the damaged well today, from the awkward, inefficient first-generation cap to a better-fitting and more permanent second generation cap which is predicted to be able to capture all of the outpouring gas and oil. We'll see.
Southern portion of the City, with the Q4000 and its oil/gas flare, and the DDII a bit to the right of that. Behind the DDII is the rising plume of smoke--hazy blue in the distance--from a surface oil burn, on the Gulf itself, miles away.
The closest I've come to an American morning snack yet--though it's about 3 in the afternoon. The cooks made donuts, but then decorated them with chocolate and, it looks like, peanuts. I scraped off the chocolate and peanuts and was left with a not-half-bad donut. Not quite as sweet as I like 'em (and I do enjoy plain donuts), but far from bad. And that's genuine coffee. From-the-bean, brewed coffee. Matt and I have come to depend on the little stash in the processing room.
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