Oil spill and the Everglades.

[vivian]

Hard to imagine this is happening and may affect our beloved Everglades. Would love to hear members thoughts, plan of action if any.

[toofaraway]

Reagan's plan to open all federal waters, within 6 miles of the glades, spurred me to become politicized in 1984. With 6 other students and a part time lobbyist I helped lead the first campaign in the state to keep oil drilling away from the coast with the Florida Public Interest Research Group (FloridaPIRG). Great campaign and at least we bought some time (26 years). My fingers are crossed that the spill misses the glades coast. We can't afford to have oil in the taproots of that great nursery. BTW Reagan had Carters solar panels taken off the White House roof in his first week in office.

Plan of action has got to be supporting alternative energy. Wind power is happening big time where I live in WA State, guess who's a major player? FP&L if I'm not mistaken. Energy policy is the single most important issue in our nation and it has been ignored (at least solar and wind) for generations since Carter. Politicians need to feel the heat to spend $ on Alt energy R&D instead of continuing to throw huge subsidies to Petrochemical mulitnationals.

TFA

[Juan Estevez]

I just can't imaging that after years and years of trying to get everyone involved in the Everglades restoration project something like this oil spill can ruin it all.

The only positive thing about this spill is like a wake-up call, more than ever we need other sources of energy not in 20 years but now. What I hate the most is how major issues become politicize and people take sides, lots of people just support their political party views and don't think what is better for them or their country.

BTW; I heard that the Florida Trail Association is making a list of volunteers in case a clean-up is needed in the area; does anyone has more info on this?

Juan

[vivian]

Juan, I got this contact address from the FTA to volunteer:

[e-mail]

I've asked them for information and put my name in the hat for clean up work.

[yakmaster]

remember the days....

"NO VALDEZ IN THE KEYS!"

Now 100 valdez's just drift over!

[Wayne Wells]

Rest assured, the concern over this transends poitical parties.
I work with a whole crowd of "good ole boys" who are extremely concerned about this leak in the gulf. I think everyone is getting quite frustrated with what constitutes a "slow motion disaster" in my opinion.
Folks that tend to disagree with each other about many things are in total agreement that they want to know why this has happened, and what is going to be done to prevent it from happening again.
I think that "drill baby drill" has lost its appeal as a rallying cry.

[toofaraway]

Maybe it takes a major disaster to transcend politics and move the leaders of this country to agree on an aggressive clean energy plan, but it won't happen unless people are energized and activated. It simply won't happen on it's own. We'll see more nuclear plants opened in FL (the Sunshine State!) before we see significant new solar/wind/hydro if the people let the corporations influence congress. If you live in FL you need to force your electeds to push for strong solar and wind power initiatives. It's ALL about politics, sorry to be the bearer of that news but it's true. Especially in FL who helped put Bush/Cheney into power.

[Wayne Wells]

If you haven't seen these. They are informative.

http://bp.concerts.com/gom/kentwells_update24052010.htm

http://www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_internet/globalbp/globalbp_uk_engli...

[Jared E]

I am amazed and extremely concerned about this situation. BP has totally screwed up and the government is only interested in "Who's a** to kick". There will be plenty of time to sort out who's gonna pay (BP) and if anyone is guilty of criminal negligence (BP). Why doesn't the government looking into minimizing the damage, i.e. more skimmers, oil vacuum technology or any number of ways to prevent this disaster from becoming a decade long catastrophe. I don't see anything positive happening with BP or with the federal response. I'm not expecting the feds to plug the well in a day but at least get all hands on deck and protect our beaches. I really hope I'll be able to do some camping trips this next season with out the beach sites being littered with tar balls. Until then we'll pray for the best and be ready to help when needed. If I have to spend a camping trip cleaning up tar balls I'm willing to in order to help the park.

-Jared E.

[Wayne Wells]

I think most people miss some important aspects of this disaster. While BP finds themselves in the crosshairs, it seems fair to say that this is an industry failure. Were it a BP exclusive failure, some other company would have been able to step in to the breach and stopped the leak. The complete inability, BY ANYONE, to get the leak stop should be ample evidence of the industries lack of preparedness to manage a subsea leak. The rig could just as easily have been owned by Exxon or Shell.

EVERYTHING was predicated on the proper funtioning of the Blowout Preventer and associated equipment. The functionality of this equipment seems to have been a collective belief shared by everyone in the industry.
There was NO PLAN B.
To go back to my industry-wide point, had this been only a BP failure, an Exxon or Shell or one of the other major drillers could have, and would have, shown up and rescued the situation.

To find that the entire global petroleum industry had, and have, no plan to manage the failure of a deepwater well almost defies comprehension. To think that not only an entire ecosystem, but potentially a significant segment of the northwestern hemisphere via the Gulf Stream, is expected to rely utterly and entirely on a set of valves that is completely inaccessible to direct intervention in a crisis flies in the face of common sense.

Beyond that, we get to the statistical aspect of the failure. We aren't routinely wrecking oil rigs, such that one can say that the last 100 or 1000 subsea blowouts worked flawlessly and that the odds finally caught up with us. We find ourselves in just the opposite set of circumstances. We've had a single crisis, and the equipment and associated processes, both the mechanical systems and people systems, have failed completely. This doesn't bode well for the future reliability of the deepwater drilling safety systems as they are currently structured.