Tropical Storm Isaac Spares Florida, But Track Takes It Towards New Orleans

The storm track was great news for Florida, but the worst of all worlds for the Gulf Coast. While much of southern Florida was drenched with soaking rains and strong winds, the damage was minimal compared to what could have been.

The storm is now over the open water of the Gulf of Mexico and that's going to allow the storm to intensify. The tracks are putting it further and further to the west.

In fact, it appears that the track is shifting towards landfall in and around New Orleans. And it would come ashore as a very strong category 1 storm (max sustained winds of 90mph. They're anticipating strenghtening as it churns into the warm open waters of the Gulf.

Guess that New Orleans will see whether the Corps and the levee boards got their acts together and made sure that the levee system around NOLA will pass the test.

Forecasters are also predicting that the storm could drop up to 15 inches of rain locally. That's a tremendous amount of rain, and while the area inland is suffering from drought conditions, that kind of rain in a short time will mean flooding is expected and that runoff will not recharge aquifers and parched lands sufficient.

As with any storms along the Gulf Coast - the trick will be trying to figure out the storm surge. The storm surge is what did in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina and much of the Gulf Coast shore communities from Biloxi to past New Orleans. This storm isn't likely to produce that kind of storm surge, but it's best to be prepared and have an action plan ready just in case local governments call for evacuations from low-lying or flood prone areas. Some localities have already called for evacuations near the Louisiana coast.

Several governors have already declared states of emergency, which allows them to better coordinate activities and emergency responses.

Developing: Oil Rig Explosion In Gulf of Mexico

Right now, details are scant, but apparently there was some kind of explosion at another oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico and Coast Guard and other rescue helicopters and craft are on route to a rig located south of Vermilion Bay.

UPDATE:
This is a map of the general vicinity.


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UPDATE:
Reports seem to indicate that rig workers were in the water but were accounted for. The report was apparently called in by a helicopter in the vicinity of the incident 80 miles south of Vermillion Bay; no word on whether it was a production platform or a drilling rig.

The platform involved is called Vermilion 380 (corrected from 398), and owned by Mariner Energy.

UPDATE:
The platform is located in 377 2,500 340 feet of water.

The explosion sparked a fire aboard the oil rig, owned by Mariner Energy. It occurred west of the site of the April blast that caused the massive BP oil spill.

A commercial helicopter company reported the blast around 9:30 a.m. CDT Thursday, Coast Guard Petty Officer Casey Ranel said. Seven helicopters, two airplanes and four boats were en route to the site, about 80 miles south of Vermilion Bay along the central Louisiana coast.

The Coast Guard said initial reports indicated all 13 crew members from the rig were in the water. One was injured, but the others were said to be OK and awaiting rescue.

The platform is in about 2,500 feet of water, the Coast Guard said, and was not currently producing.

UPDATE:
It looks like MSNBC corrected the depth to 340 feet. The platform was still burning several hours after the initial explosion.

The Department of Homeland Security said the platform, known as Vermilion Oil Platform 380, was owned by Mariner Energy of Houston. DHS said it was not producing oil and gas but the company in a prepared statement said that during the last week of August, production from the facility averaged about 9.2 million cubic feet of natural gas per day and 1,400 barrels of oil and condensate per day.

Company records show that the platform and rig is in 340 feet of water.

Oil Continues Gushing From BP Well as BP and Government Struggle With Spill's Effects

What's billed as the world's largest oil skimmer is currently being tested in the Gulf near the spill site - and we may know today whether the Coast Guard and other government agencies and BP will sign off on the A Whale going into full operation.

The ship, which swallows water with oil then separates it, can skim about 21 million gallons of oil a day. That's at least 250 times the amount that modified fishing vessels currently conducting skimming operations have been able to contain, according to Taiwanese company TMT shipping, which owns the vessel.

Meanwhile, BP said Monday that the cost of its response to the Gulf oil disaster now totals approximately $3.12 billion. That includes containment, relief well drilling, grants to Gulf states, claims paid and federal costs, the oil giant said.

A total of about 550 skimming vessels were out in the Gulf on Sunday, according to a spokeswoman for the Unified Command Joint Information Center in Houma, Louisiana. But with oil still pouring into the sea at a rate of tens of thousands of barrels a day, federal authorities closed a new section of the Gulf off Louisiana to fishing on Sunday.

The A Whale could do in a day what an entire fleet of skimmers has been able to accomplish in weeks. So what's the holdup? Well, the ship doesn't separate all oil from the water. A small percentage does get through. That should be no excuse for the skimmer to go in operation since the sheer volume of this disaster demands using extraordinary means to help control the hundreds of millions of gallons of oil that have harmed the Gulf.



BP says that it's spent more than $3 billion trying to contain the spill and to shut down the oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico. That is a fraction of the cost to the economy around the Gulf Coast effected by the destruction of sensitive wetlands and ecosystems, and the loss of jobs and livelihoods throughout the Gulf Coast.

BP's Top Kill Appears To Be Stemming Oil Flow Into Gulf; UPDATE: Top Kill Halted

It appears that British Petroleum's efforts to seal the leaking wellhead with a top kill of mud is working. Once the pressure reaches zero, the mud being used to stem the flow will be replaced with concrete, sealing the well.

Once engineers have reduced the well pressure to zero, they will begin to pump cement into the hole to entomb the well. To help that effort, he said, engineers are also pumping some debris into the blowout preventer at the top of the well.

Allen said one ship that was pumping fluid into the well has run out of the fluid, or "mud," and that a second ship is on the way. He said he was encouraged by the progress.

"We'll get this under control," he said.

Allen also said that later today, an interagency team will release a revised estimate of how much oil was flowing from the well into the Gulf before the "top kill" effort began. The Coast Guard has estimated the flow at 5,000 barrels a day, but independent estimates suggest that it was much higher – perhaps tens of thousands of barrels a day.

They're busy pumping mud into the damaged wellhead so as to choke off the flow and will continue doing so until they think that they've stemmed the flow - and will then replace the mud with concrete to cap the well. If this works, it will stem the flow of new oil into the Gulf, but doesn't do anything to deal with the ongoing mess from the millions of gallons that have already flowed into the Gulf.

In the years since the Exxon Valdez, how come scientists and researchers haven't come up with better ways to deal with oil spills than containment booms and skimmers? Is there no better technologies that can clear the oil spills? Dispersants are being used in some areas, and the federal government doesn't want them used because of the toxic effects, even as they were previously approved. Other areas have seen crews burning off the oil, which exchanges one form of pollution for another (and which leaves one wondering whether it would have been better to leave the Deepwater Horizon burning so as to minimize the spill damage in the Gulf rather than attempt to fight the fire that ended up sinking the rig and damaging the riser and related parts to cause multiple leaks down to the wellhead.

Out of disasters come the opportunity for new tech and techniques to deal with such messes. Let's hope that the oil industry gets the lesson and that Congress does the right thing too (and on that I'm not hopeful).

Congress should do what it should have been doing all along in increasing the liability caps for years to account for inflation - and required that not only that skimmers and booms be present in the Gulf, but that BOPs and other shutoff technologies be better tested and required. Moreover, special consideration must be paid to deep water drilling sites, where the pressures and technologies must be much more robust than surface or near surface sites.

UPDATE:
Even as the good news about the top kill continues to filter in, reports of discovering another undersea plume of oil from the well show just how difficult it is to get a handle on the amount of oil that leaked from the damaged well.

The discovery by researchers on the University of South Florida College of Marine Science's Weatherbird II vessel is the second significant undersea plume recorded since the Deepwater Horizon exploded on April 20.

David Hollander, associate professor of chemical oceanography at the school, says the thick plume was detected just beneath the surface down to about 3,300 feet. He says it's more than 6 miles wide.

The report also indicates that the plume may be the result of using dispersants on surface oil.

UPDATE:
The head of the Mineral Management Service that has oversight responsibilities for offshore wells resigned. Earlier reports had indicated that she had been fired, but it's clear that there was pressure for her to be canned.

UPDATE:
BP has halted their attempt at a top kill because pressure flows indicate that there are additional leaks that have to be stemmed before they can seal the well. That's not good news and can delay shutting down the flow. It means that the oil continues to gush into the Gulf of Mexico and add to an already estimated 230,000 barrels that have done so thus far.