A giant oil mat, nearly an eighth of a mile long, is washing up west of Cotton Bayou in Orange Beach, Alabama, according to a local television news crew.
BP clean up contractors came to the scene when they were notified and brought in heavy equipment to remove the oil. A clean up crew supervisor told WKRG News 5 the tar mat was “submerged,” and wasn’t visible until the incoming tide pushed it on shore.
“When we arrived, we could smell the petroleum product hundreds of feet away,” broadcast reporter Pat Peterson said. “Workers covered their mouths and noses and coughed because of the overwhelming smell.”
This is going to come as a shock to all my friends in New York, Washington, D.C., on the West Coast and the Gulf Coast. But it’s true.
I have unearthed the secret plan on the part of the Alabama Democratic Party to lose the elections in November — on purpose.
Their thinking goes like this.
The economy was already on shaky ground even before the BP oil disaster due to some poor decision-making on the part of Republicans and conservative Democrats, who thought all the answers should be left in the hands of CEOs at multi-national corporations and that government should just step out of their way.
Now due to the oil disaster in the Gulf, the economy along the coast has completely collapsed, and that has dried up one of the chief sources of revenue for state government in Alabama – lodgings taxes from all the hotels, condos and beach houses from Dauphin Island to Fort Morgan to Gulf Shores, Orange Beach and even Foley.
Also, since Alabama’s Republican governor has been on a Buford Pusser-style crusade against bingo, closing casinos and shutting down mom and pop video poker shops across the state, a major source of revenue for some counties, that has left even more people out of work than before the Bush recession caused unemployment to rise to record levels.
Despite persistent denials from BP officials, thousands of pounds of weathered oil is being pulled from under the surface of Pensacola Bay every day, according to the Pensacola News Journal.
“During more than a dozen interviews last week, BP officials and spokespeople for a number of government agencies working on the Deepwater Horizon Oil spill response denied knowledge of oil in the bay,” the paper reports.
But on Friday, Coast Guard Lt. Stephen West with the Incident Command Post finally confirmed an area of oil a quarter of a mile long and up to 50 to 60 feet off Barrancas Beach at Pensacola Naval Air Station, and admitted that buckets of sunken oil were being pulled up in another area of Pensacola Bay, near Fort Pickens at Gulf Islands National Seashore. Then on Saturday, Scott Piggott, who heads the Escambia and Santa Rosa cleanup operation for BP, said cleanup workers began noticing the submerged oil at Barrancas Beach.
The petro porn vanishes from the boob tube, and attention drifts.
Almost three months of oily gushing from BP’s broken well at the bottom of the Gulf ends with a new spire of complex plumbing bolted atop the failed parts and squelching the spout. The submersible robots, which provided the geyser videos, will now be looking for lesser leaks. If any appear in the seafloor around the wellhead, the pipes lining the well are ruptured somewhere deep in the borehole, and oil is urgently searching for fissures it can ream into an eruption. No new plumbing could cork that.
Such seeps would be a signal to relieve the pressure by opening valves on the new cap and letting oil flow directly from the well again. But it wouldn’t squirt promiscuously into the water as before. Some would be piped to tankers on the surface, some would rise loose and be collected by a waiting armada of skimmers and suckers. Drilling would continue on the two relief wells, until they intercept the original well, which they plug with pumped cement, sealing the leak forever.
The drama ends and the audience departs.
Unless it doesn’t end.
On the evidence to date, success is a prelude to failure. So many promising gambits have faltered that none seems reliable now. And even a plugged well may be a ticking bomb.
The forecast for the Gulf Coast calls for winds out of the east-southeast to southeast at 10-12 knots into Monday, according to the latest NOAA forecast.
Ocean models show a west to southwest current in the vicinity of the source of BP’s oil spill 50 miles out into the Gulf. Under these current and wind conditions, the oil and chemical plume will continue to tend westward towards the Delta. Breton Sound and the Chandeleur Islands also have a potential for more shoreline contact.
During the Bush years, we specialized in covering the politicization of the U.S. justice system as much as any news organization. Our archives are about the most comprehensive for anyone researching the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, and the original case against Richard Scrushy, which Glynn Wilson covered for The New York Times.
