[The exceedingly gloomy analysis of the Gulf oil-gusher that ran here yesterday elicited many interesting comments.  Generally speaking, and much to our surprise, readers did not reject the author’s doomsday thesis out-of-hand. We are airing Erich Simon’s article for a second day in the hope that it will generate further, enlightening discussion.  The environmental health of the planet may hang in the balance, as many seem to understand.  As of this moment, however, no one can say for certain that the “fix,” a relief well due to be completed by August, will save the day for Mother Earth.  RA ]

With U.S. military Insiders (BP shills in tow) now close enough to peer over the Continental Shelf, down the sloping, innocuous, white sandy overlay into millions of years of sediment covering who-knows-what, they are still unable to see further into the miles of drill casings inside the ‘relief’ bores – unable to look into the fiery bowels of a sleeping enemy whose size and power once unleashed can turn humans into frozen statues. Meanwhile, the latest qualitative, operational drivel continues to escape both sides of BP’s mouth.

Here they are, the Masters of Deep-Earth Exhuming, standing mere feet across a line from their target, and nothing is slated until August under the auspices of a “delicate” operation. Is drilling into the side of a hundred million atomic bombs…delicate? After all, the reddish-black oil confluent pumping like smoke out of the sea floor bears a striking resemblance to Black Smokers, which are vents from volcanoes lurking beneath the ocean bottom, the deepest on record just adjacent to the Deepwater Horizon Disaster, in the Caribbean. Meanwhile, while the military/BP contingent sits around scratching its behind in frozen inaction and awe of forces beyond their comprehension, weather conditions are only to get worse, much worse, with hurricane season already moving in, and with the Deepwater Horizon Chernobyl continuing to gush toxic oil and gas from more and more fractures and at ever-increasing rates.  Why are they waiting until August? How about September, or October. Or never?

Because nothing is known about the Gulf volcano buried under the serene, sandy quartz accumulations, the former peaks of the Appalachian mountains eroded and deposited atop the Deepwater Horizon energy cauldron over-filled and boiled over from their origins when the continents broke apart, long before our oldest maps and subterranean modeling.

And as to our recent understanding about what might be “down ‘there,” promulgated by the Deepwater Disaster itself, no critical information has been forthcoming. Even the most important of all questions has been masqueraded and shoved from view, replaced by mundane distractions like financial recompense and saving the turtles and beaches. Nothing has been released about the test results on the enemy, the invading oil (its antiquity, or composition), or types of chemicals or gases streaming out from the inter-continental floor, that would give some measure of the threat and character of the enemy… now that the Planet has crossed the socio-demographic Threshold Event to the coming end of civilization as we understand it… and in like manner, neither are the circumstances being revealed of the enemy’s escape, how much longer before this thing doesn’t only ‘trickle’ forth but bursts.

‘Top Kill’ Fiasco

All this suggests that like the ‘top kill’ fiasco… where the BP/military mockery failed so miserably to contain the Beast below that was so powerful that it exploded their best touted efforts right back right into their ‘two-timing’ faces and worse still, evidence suggests that all measure at containing the pressure at the ‘top kill’… the sea floor… caused the pressure to blow out of other places… out the sides of the (shredded) steel casings and liners… at points all along the 3 1/2 mile bore into whatever hell is now unseated. Speculation has it that the military actually opened the leak wider at the surface because the oil was popping outta so many cracks in the sea bed that to do otherwise would have invited the dreaded ‘geologic event’!

The public should prepare itself for similar failure come August, if indeed the military has any intention of attempting to drill the final feet of a “relief” well into an enemy that has proved itself beyond the harness of modern technology. The military is the military. The military lies.

No official has ever discussed any details about what is going on at (or beneath the sea floor) except for the (preposterous) mention to cement the surrounding, cracking sea bed early on (indicating an obvious breach of sea bed integrity across the deep terrain from the initial Mega-explosion). Since then any reference to the sea floor is off-limits… same as with the test results documenting whatever potpourri is gushing outta the sea bed at greater and greater rates… keeping the public in the dark about the speed at which the monster underneath is moving upward… breaking its chains of history.

Numerous Geysers

According to BP CEO, Tony Hayward, “you can’t see down inside the broken well bore…”, giving him carte blanche to stonewall the subject of what’s going on below the sea bed. And this anachronism in an era where technology can discern just about anything, certainly geologic substrata? The initial sea bed pictures showed four or five Geysers comparable to the size of the initial well bore explosion but those have been removed from public domain. Further evidence of the cracking sea floor (described by all geologic reference as “weak bedrock”) is closed for discussion, even in the highest court of We The People, those nightly replays on the CSPAN television broadcasts… those theatrical, public pandering, Congressional, Deepwater Horizon investigation inquiries and testimonials.

Why isn’t the military intersecting the broken well a (generous) distance below the sea floor (like a half mile, or a mile, or even two miles… far atop the Monster Reservoir instead of at its doorstep?) and injecting mud and cement the rest of the way down to bring expeditious and quick end to this freak of nature? More than enough distance below the failed ‘top kill’ if the military were being truthful when they claimed how they could “kill the spill” at the level of the sea floor? It certainly should be no problem then to intercept and halt the flow of gas and oil a half of a mile lower… unless ‘top kill’ was never a viable alternative, but only a public appeasement cover story, and unless the pressure is so freakish that there is no stopping it at a half mile down, or one and a half miles down… or all of the way down….

Why Drill to 18,000 Feet?

Stopping the oil gusher (not “spill”, not “leak”)… GUSHER… at the sea floor with a ‘top kill’ was never the military intention, in fact quite the opposite… they made the hole bigger, venting out even more oil… (the Gulf is turning BLACK) because if they would have capped the GUSHER at the sea floor, assuming they had something large enough to do the job… a blowout preventer about the size of the New Orleans Superdome… then the 3 1/2 miles of well casing and liner all the way down below would have simply blown apart… more than from the initial blast, forcing underground off-shoot currents of oil that would have shot out in all directions up through weak bedrock and pushing their individual ways through the sea floor where they would have fountained black geysers all across for miles around, tearing the terrain to pieces and turning the Gulf black right in front of a horrified public. And judging by the four or five other geysers already at play (who knows how many now?) from the initial mishap… there are reports of another oil “leak”, seven miles from the source.

This is why the US military is going to go all the way down the entire 18,000+ feet (3 1/2 miles below the ocean floor)… ALL THE WAY TO THE DOORSTEP OF THE RESERVOIR ITSELF. And for such a suicidal option to even be attempted can only mean one thing.

They are going to attempt to drill into the point of maximum pressure, close by where the August 20 explosion blew up in the first place. They are (or so they claim) going to attempt to drill into a 7-9 inch “plate sized” well casing (actually, the company ran out of steel casing they used “liner” down there…) that is funneling an unfathomable, unquantified, pressurized “anomaly” (this is the word used to describe the Gulf Monster by BP CEO, Tony Hayward, in fact… his only word to describe exactly what it is that went bang)… this “anomaly” is a gaseous, pressurized, focal point perimeter to Pandora’s Box.

Niagara Falls Through a 9” Pipe

Why? Isn’t it entirely likely… probable in fact… that at that particular puncture point into the reservoir balloon that the rock environment supporting the liner… channeling something akin to the likes of Niagara Falls through a 9 inch pipe… that that liner is already exploded (remember, according to BP CEO, Tony Hayward, nobody knows what is down there because nobody can even see down past the obliterated well head…) and so supercharged with volatility (geothermal flux) that nothing is capable of injection… no mud, no cement, no slurry, no nothing… but quite the opposite, isn’t that only opening a new avenue for ejection? Another explosion?

There simply is no reliable casing with which to make contact. At best there is a collapse of rock from the first explosion of unknown size and proportion rotating pressures that are so extreme it is flaring gases miles above in ways that the industry has never before witnessed. No drilling effort has any chance of success in succumbing this unknown situation. Not a modicum.

Never mind that 99% of myopic America… hapless, grazing Sheeple already raped and pillaged by their very own Wall Street/US Government cabal… continue to go about their daily routines under the guise that these wells (“relief” or otherwise) are slated for production (with hat tip by the establishment and occasional horn blow to prod them outta the way) when in fact these wells are NEVER going to be deployed into production… they are going to (try and) be capped, sealed and buried as far from public view as possible… BP’s so-called “ANOMALY”… it begs the question, WHY?… and the even bigger question, WHAT HAPPENS IF THE RELIEF WELL FAILS… MORE PROBABLE THAN NOT given how little is known about the entire panorama, not the least of which is the short work that this “anomaly” made of the “ultimate industry fail safe”, the Blowout Preventer (BOP), which was not the victim of shoddy manufacture per the ongoing propaganda play act, but rather the victim of an encounter with such extreme force that nothing manmade could ever have withstood such an event! Never.

Three Types of BOPs

There are three different kinds of blowout preventers: pipe rams, blind rams and shear rams. The Deepwater Horizon was outfitted with all three. It was the strongest, most redundant blowout preventer every manufactured. It was deepwater incarnate. That is why there was no back-up, they didn’t need it. And it would not have mattered in the least.

The pressure of first contact into the reservoir was so incredibly extreme… one tiny drill bit that blew open a shock wave that cannoned through 3 1/2 miles of rock and another mile of water… blowing to bits every thing along the way, which is why there is nothing to drill into for relief or anything else… pulverizing the liner, casing and every one of the “ultimate industry fail safes”… until it reached the ocean surface, where it blew to bits the largest oil rig ever brought to bear, and after sending it skyward in an explosion of such magnitude that it was visible from outer space sent it straight to the bottom of the ocean… so how does a repeat performance by drilling a second pinhole through the skin of the “anomaly”, but from a different angle, going to accomplish anything other than catastrophe?

Why? For turtles, pelicans, oysters and beaches. Hardly. That’s a distraction to what’s really at stake… the unfolding ‘geologic event’.

Hayward’s Admission

This fact comes directly from the mouth of BP CEO, Tony Hayward, in his recent testimony in front of the latest Congressional, all-show-and-no-go inquiry just last week when he iterated about how there are forces (out in Nature) that are far and above the capabilities of the oil industry’s ultimate fail safes and that this incident compels an end to all oil drilling pending redesign at the industry level of the Blowout Preventer on an order of complete overhaul. This is serious stuff indeed!

And no doubt the groundwork for BP’s defense… not to mention their coy and detached demeanor… and lackadaisical approach to clean-up efforts in the Gulf that by all quiet agreement will remain a toxic cesspool until the end of time… because this circumstance falls into the category of Providence and Act Of God… how big an act remains a military secret, until such time as it isn’t and right now there is not much intention to ending something that can never be ended… only contained and managed to buy time.

The deepwater drilling moratorium and cordoning by military blockade is to prevent any further discovery of the deteriorating sea bed situation and the incipient ‘Geologic Event’. Similarly, the failure to move troops or National Guard into the Gulf area for ‘clean-up’ is not just because the Gulf is a lost cause… but because of the pressure cooker of public rage that is going to confront any ‘invasion’ by men in uniform carrying guns as final clarification of keeping them in their places.

Blown to Shreds

With the military drilling the relief wells to the bottom of the drill bore… to the very end… the actual source, the entire steel well casing and liner further down being obliterated, blown-to-shreds from the force of trapped gas… the entire well is most likely blown all to hell all the way up and down its entire length by a reservoir that is continuing to pump ever greater amounts of gaseous black and red. Tony Hayward mumbled under his breath in his latest testimony about how the reservoir itself was “small… only 50 million barrels” (to which one Senator, after some quick math, suggested taking no further action, because at the present rate of rupture come August most of the oil would be leaked out anyhow).

Here again, while Tony Hayward knows nothing of what’s under the sea floor by his own admission he sure knee-jerked a 50 million barrel appraisal with no hesitation. In fact, the amount of oil (in pockets measured in 2-2.5 BILLIONS of barrels…) under the Gulf of Mexico is on the order of 50 BILLION barrels.

In Six Months…

There are between 5,000-10,000 oil drilling rigs (3,600 is the official number) clustered in the Gulf that have been pumping everyday for decades. And all of them (except for 33 ‘deepwater’ rigs under Obama six month moratorium… NOT FOR SAFETY SAKE but to keep at bay any errant, ‘crime scene’ videoing, deepwater, ROV cameras… in six months either IT will all be over or else the moratorium will be extended), the vast majority of rigs are in 500 feet of water or less, that is, a mile above the Deepwater Horizon well, which itself is drilled down another 3 1/2 miles. The gravitational press from that kinda reservoir overhang (and underhang) is pressure and volume that makes a mockery of Tony Hayward’s (mumbled) 50 million barrels, and an insult to the only report he claimed to have received of the whole episode, according to his testimony, that they had made “a discovery”.

Tony Hayward told Congressional investigative eunuchs that all that was reported to him about the Deepwater Horizon well disaster on the day it happened is that they had made a “discovery”. Was is simply a mundane oil discovery? Was it a large oil mother load? Was a pressurized Hiroshima? If he knew the details of “the discovery” then he stonewalled. Did he know? Of course he knew! Then there are no good reasons why he would stonewall on this point.

Today gas and oil and all manner of undocumented subterranean effluent is exploding up through ever-increasing numbers of well-sized holes (beyond the four or five in the opening days) replete with cracking fissures stretching in all directions fueling torrents of clouds of ghastly carbonation… and the sea bed is so compromised that whatever is remaining of the operational structure of the mine… on the sea bottom… the BOP and the riser… are leaning over as much as 15 degrees. The BOP weighs some 40-45 tons while the riser package weights more than 450 tons!

Unprecedented Flow Rates

Any time now the BOP and riser could fall over. Any day now the BOP and riser might simply disappear into the ocean bottom, into a sink hole sand blasted and pressure washed open by such incredible flow rates that the rates have never before been documented in any United States well with the exception possibly of Prudhoe Bay but even that is today a guess since no one knows how much is exploding out in the Gulf, except that it is greater amounts everyday… so much that from the beginning there was no known technology to harness this kinda of pressure and turn it into a functional well.

So that what they are now going to attempt (in August… which sounds conspicuously like a line in the sand, based on extrapolation of the present rate of sea bed erosion across weak bedrock breaking apart across wide swaths, overlaid with millennial sediment)… the US military/BP contingent are actually going to toy Mother Nature a second time and drill straight into the pressurized cavern underlying the Gulf-Mississippi delta, containing a reservoir of gas (and oil) estimated by some scientists to be the size of Mt. Everest!

Billions of Barrels

And inviting eruption on an unprecedented scale… BILLIONS… BILLIONS of barrels of oil through new piercings… and further out-rendering of all manner of gases… especially methane…, ocean altering chemicals and every other manner of pressurized contaminants accumulated over hundreds of millions of years… destroying not just the Gulf (at least one-third dead already in seventy short days!) but the ocean currents will change their temperatures so critical in effecting climate, and the planet’s atmosphere… a significant outgas of methane or unleashing of carbon dioxide would push the limits of global warming or even usher the next ice age.

Why are the BP shills claiming that they are taking time to “home” in with the first relief well using delicate magnetic ‘feelers’ when the second relief well is nowhere in position? So which is it… buying time to hit the 9 inch plate-sized target, or buying time to get a second relief well in place… or stalling for time to push the whole insanity further out into the future… they can’t even get their stories straight.

The US military (and BP puppet contingent) has no idea of what they are doing. They didn’t from the start and they don’t know now. August and relief wells? This latest feigned remedy is stretching the disaster out for as long as is humanly possible given the level of public frustration boiling over behind media obfuscation and the pace at which the oil is overtaking the environment and impending ‘geologic event’. Meanwhile local residents directly affected are coming together and protesting more and more with every passing day. The indigenous population is dying, their lifestyles, their livelihood, their food source, their health, their communities, their whole worlds are being overtaken by poison. No amount of money can ever assuage this. Not a pittance.

Stock Market Blues

This is evident in the stock market of late. The week leading into holidays is subject to an increase in the indices, the most famous being ‘the Santa Clause Rally’. There was no Independence Day rally this year, in fact the markets sold off sharply. Also, at quarter end… particularly the June and December bi-annual closing quarters… mutual funds go in and buy stocks and lift the markets to make their numbers look good when reporting to investors. It is called “end-of-quarter window dressing.” There was no such thing at the end of this June, quite the opposite.

Government insiders know that come August there is no possible chance that BP or anyone else is going to plug the Gulf monster… the South Eastern economic quadrant of the United States (of Corruption) is destroyed forever and those southerners are condemned to live, breath and drink smelly, toxic, carcinogenic oil, the likes of which their own government is keeping secret (the government did the same thing when the radioactive cloud from Chernobyl descended on the school children playing on their swing-sets in the city of Kiev… the government camera men wore radiological hazmat suits, the levels of radiation melting the film in their cameras… while the children swung obliviously in the background, it is no different in the Gulf).

Riots Coming

The only thing that is going to come in August will be a eulogy to the Gulf of Mexico, rioting on a scale that will invite the National Guard (printing money absent the Means of Production in fish, oysters, shrimp, finfish, breathable air, potable land and water… will accomplish nothing to remedy this!). The Gulf residents can not afford relocation and besides, no other (saturated and bankrupted US) community has the resources to absorb even ten percent of them, with panic coming up the Eastern Seaboard as the oil pushes up into Myrtle beach, where elevated, dissolved benzene levels suggests it already has… with the tar balls not far behind…, and after that, the Atlantic Ocean will begin its death of a thousand cuts as the oil moves up the Gulf stream, joining the floating garbage off New York and contaminating much of the world’s seafood.

Evidence of the coming failure of the Gulf relief wells is in the last sentence from the latest USA BP propaganda article: “The weight of 18,000 feet of the ‘drilling mud,’ as it’s called, sitting on top of the well should, it is hoped, be enough to stop the oil from coming out of its reservoir.” This assumes that there is 18k feet of “mud” already pillared inside the well casing (and that the casing has sufficient integrity to house and hold the mud in any meaningful proportion, which according to BP CEO, Tony Baloney, they can’t even look down inside there to see what’s left of the bore, so logic would dictate that after the worst explosion in the history of oil drilling the liner is vaporized).

The ‘Anomaly’

Before BP can even make such a claim about an 18k foot column of containment mud, it has to achieve an 18k foot column of containment mud. Their drills have to withstand and absorb the initial explosion of drilling into the “anomaly”… they couldn’t do it the first time and nothing has changed… so why do they think they can do it a second time…, and then keep it all at bay while they (furiously) pump that mud up the length of the conduit, carried along by the force of rising gas that will most likely vaporize the slurry as fast as they are pumping it in. In fact, there are no technological ‘pumps’ capable of withstanding this kind of eruption… they can’t pump… they gotta BLAST the mud up into the pipe… and it’s just gonna get lost in all the cavities along the shredded steel casing left over from the initial blast, not to mention how they plan to contain it all when it comes blasting up outta the sea floor with a BOP and riser package that are leaning twice as much as the Tower of Pisa!

To these obstacles the company is saying absolutely nothing. Everything that they have been stating is in ‘end-result’ terms. It should be obvious even to the unscrupulous BP engineers… and their half-witted US military counterparts who are impotent to the whole solution or else they would have stepped in from the very first day and taken control… that as soon as they puncture the source of what exploded all the way up five miles… then the whole attempt is going to blow up right in their faces.

Sounds Like a Ploy

Which is why this whole thing sounds like a ploy… to stall the public before they panic at not just the end of their way-of-lives but their health and ultimately their families. And by drilling down so far, into the monster itself… rather than intersecting the bore from much higher up the casing, where one would think that the ‘situation’ is at least quantifiable, this makes little sense unless, in fact, they fully comprehend the high risk gamble involved in what they are about to do come August, and want to ‘manage’ it at the furthest point beneath the earth as possible… to escape the rumble earthquake of failure (unlike the eleven souls who could not), in which case then this entire attempt sounds like one last-ditch effort against a foe that is capable of destroying much more than the Gulf of Mexico… and if the sea floor gives way then a geologic event could in a matter of days empty a reservoir that by some scientific measurement is the size of Mt. Everest!

A piece the size of Rhode Island could belch up from the fragmenting sea floor and the Gulf States would be storm-surged and buried under thirty feet of oil….

We seem to be in a fight to save the planet’s oceans against an eruption that is only becoming more unstable by the day and will continue to do so until the time when it is either stopped (August?) or achieves equilibrium… an outgas emptying of the pressure of the underground Mega-reservoir and along with whatever is pent inside.

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