Learning to Live: Spectacular and Awful

Our first day on the site, and we spent slightly less than half of it surveying. Our morning was occupied with routine safety, muster and abandon-ship drills, and then waiting for permission to enter the 5 nautical mile exclusion zone and begin working close to the rigs. And once we got permission, in we went.

As ever, part of me was eager to be a gawking touristy little boy, so I put my digital camera to use. Here's a selection:

The legendary A-Whale. This thing was apparently, as of late April, going to be just another run-of-the-mill supertanker, until the Deepwater blew up. Then its builders decided to convert it into a skimmer, which swallows polluted water at the bow, separates oil from water, and spits cleaned water (pretty clean, anyway) out the stern. They completed the conversion in two months. That, to me, is amazing. For the record, I have no idea if the A-Whale will remotely live up to its billing, and the scale of this spill is orders of magnitude beyond the capacity of all the world's skimmers, but hey, if you've got it, use it.

(And that applies to us and our sonar, too. Check out these apples!)

Smaller skimmers at work. Two boats haul a section of boom between them, and one boat pumps in fouled surface water. Unlike the A-Whale, the small skimmers have to haul the oily water to shore, where it's separated. A much less efficient process.

The skimmer again, closer up.

Oil in the water. It's all over the place near the well.

As the oil gets thicker, and goes from being a sheen-type slick to being mousse, it takes on a somewhat crusty look atop the water...and it also turns the foam brown.

One of the dozens of support vessels in the area which we had to navigate around. Those helipads over the bridge are fairly common among larger oilfield vessels--can't do anything good for the ship's stability in a storm!

City of Ships.

Weird support vessels for specialized missions like this. What the heck is that thing on the left, with the three orange tubs on a rack? I have no idea.

The Deepwater Driller III, or DDIII. It's drilling the kill bore which is supposedly just a few feet from intersecting the runaway well. It's also SIMOPS headquarters. That thing floats on gigantuous pontoons, just like the Deepwater Horizon did, just like the DDII nearby, and just like the Thunderhorse platform a few miles away (which almost sank in a hurricane a few years ago).

Another specialized support vessel, with lots of pipes and things, and a helipad too. Duuuude!

More skimmers. A lot of these skimming/recovery vessels are locals who've volunteered or leased their boats out. We spent most of the morning listening to a few chatty skimmers, locals who were having lots of fun wasting radio airtime talking about things. They weren't using boom, though, they were using another type of tool, pompom-type absorbers which basically just sponge up oil from the water. As one said to his buddy on air, "Just dip it in the water, swish it around 3 or 4 times, pick it up and put it in the bag. It's dirty...it's fun...it's funny...it's a job!"

The Q4000, a specialized production platform. The flames are a flare for the oil it's piping up from the sea floor. I read some very intelligent analysis (from my favorite commentator Fishgrease), that BP is pulling some (surprise, surprise) very elaborate fraud by means of this vessel. Rather than carefully separate water, oil and natural gas, BP is simply flaring the mixed oil and gas in haphazard fashion. Because separating them would mean the amounts can be measured, which means that much more definite amounts emerging from the well can be calculated, which would then be entered into evidence against BP in the upcoming court battles. And BP would rather keep important details like the amount spilled as nebulous and inadmissible as possible. I write this not because it's wild speculation--it's intelligent analysis by a longtime oilfield professional.

Still, fraud or no, that flare is pretty effing cool. Or the opposite of cool--blazingly hot. It was nearly 100 outside today, and we were 1.5 km away, so I wouldn't claim to have felt any heat fro the flame. But we could hear it. It sounded like when you take the hose off of a vacuum cleaner, and listen to the air being sucked in the intake. Only, you're a mile away. That stream of water is from a fire boat, to keep the flare pipe and deck cool. When the deck heats up to about 180 degrees or so, the guys ask to be doused with water.

Stern of the Discovery Enterprise, central vessel to this whole operation, and the one from which most operations have taken place. That flare is just methane.