My good friend Chris Johnson is not only a marine biologist but one hell of an intelligent guy. I have absolute faith in his expertise and, if this is what he says needs to happen, I believe it and I hope you do too. Please read:
It is time for a new CJ Rant, not because the calendar flips, but because sometimes you hit an absolute brick wall. (Punctuation problems- see below).
Some of you know that I have some areas of expertise. These do not include tips for hair management, because I have little and notice it less. I am very expert in water chemistry and pollutant impacts. Im really pretty good at this stuff. Some people consider me the best at this stuff and they pay me to fix their water chemistry problems.
50 days in, and I have played by all of the rules. I have fed every back channel with polite requests for information, followed every detail and I am dumbfounded at where we stand, with respect to the Deepwater Horizon leak.
As a society, we are missing something that is purposely being obscured, in my opinion. I beleieve it is purposeful, because I am an expert and this issue, so late in the game, is given no traction. That is not accidentally possible.
There are abundant means that I can detail, for vastly reducing the impacts from the oil, to the Gulf of Mexico. I cannot speak to the leak itself, nor the cause of the leak, though I remain informed. Oil is being hosed into the Gulf, even with attempts to reduce the rate, without significant efforts being employed to reduce the impacts from the oil, itself.
This is being done, in my opinion, purposefully.
You have all, or some, seen such plans as straw, or Kevin Costners centrifuge boats, or the Saudi distillation ship discussed, yet none are being implemented. All that is used is Skimmer technology, scooping oil off of the surface of the Gulf. Does that strike anybody as curious?
I assure you, I know these other (beside Skimmer), technologies well and they work just fine, for what they do. Which is fine, and should be done. However, we cant use them.
We cant use them, because of the Clean Water Act. You see, even the best of these methods only claim they will clean water at a rate of 99 percent and my personal experience with them is that they are lucky to achieve 90 percent, in actual field conditions.
However, lets pretend we can get a 99 percent rate of clean water discharge, or even a 99.5 percent rate of clean water discharge, for the sake of discussion. You must envision this process, for that is what it is, as a process that discharges huge volumes of water into the Gulf.
Under the Clean Water Act, you cannot discharge water into the Gulf that has a concentration of TRPH, Total Recoverable Petroleum Hydrocarbons, of greater than 5,000 parts per million thats 0.5 percent. Under the Clean Water Act, you cannot clean 99.5 percent of the oil impacting the Gulf of Mexico out of the water, because you cannot discharge the relatively clean water back into the Gulf.
I honestly believe that I have done everything I can personally do to mitigate this issue, so that well-meaning people can attempt to clean up the environmental side of this mess, at a rate approaching 90 percent, or above. There is math involved, but it is simple. There is politics involved, which is not so simple.
It would take nothing, not the expenditure of a single tax dollar, to suspend the Clean Water Act standards, for the purpose of this clean-up effort. I am aware that there are people that dont want to create that precedent, but those people are not important to me.
I have tried to back-channel this in a polite and circumspect fashion. I have, after 50 days, no hope left that that will have any timely impact. I have already tried well-placed emails, phone calls, etc. There is a brick wall, possibly due to filtering crackpots.
This is not a federal effort. If this were a federal effort, it would wind up costing vastly more, but I would be on the inside. This is a split effort and my voice has no traction. Under a unified effort, I promise, nothing would get done without other people in charge hearing my misgivings, every day, many times a day. I can be that annoying, when advocating the numbers and facts. I never quit and I am not quitting now.
There is nothing I wont try, when I am trying to fix an environmental problem. Rule Number One, fix the leak. Well, please quit with the obvious ideas that everybody is working on. I get drawings everyday of efforts and am pretty sure that people that know what they are doing are working on that.
Heres a simple, implementable, idea. Fix what you can. In the absence of action by the federal government to temporarily waive the Clean Water Act standards, we are going to have dirtier water.
My keyboard has been acting up and I apologize for my lack of punctuation in this post, but hope that does not detract from my seriousness. Tonight, I cant use apstrophes, or semicolons.
We need federal leadership to allow simple action that would greatly improve upon the situation in the Gulf. No private citizen can make those improvements in the action in the Gulf, legally, in the absence of federal leadership. The lawyers are already swarming.
Please, help me to get this message out, 50 days too late. I am personally stunned that it has taken this much effort, still is taking this much effort, to get the people in charge to notice and rectify what should be a simple standard waived, on a temporary basis.
Most people that read my posts understand that I am a marine biologist that cleans water. Please imagine what it must be liike to be a marine biologist that cant clean water, because a technicality in the rules prevented me from doing so. There are thousands of people, just like me, that face federal prosecution, were they to discharge water into the Gulf that is only 99.5 percent cleaned.
The federal government does not clean water. The federal government enforces standards that people that clean water must adhere to. In my experienced opinion, that standard, for this event should be reduced from 99.6 percent to around 90 percent. Whom amongst us, during this event, doesnt think that a reduction of the impact by 90 percent would be good? If, on a good day, that gets up to 99 percent, is that bad?
Unfortunately, you have to achieve 99.6 percent, and prove it, during every minute of your effort.
I swear I am not making this up, as stupid as this sounds. Please help me get this out and please deamnd a fedrally declared waiver of the rules, without fudge. There is no reason for preventing water from being cleaned, except that you must have somewhere to discharge the huge volume of cleaned water. You cant imagine the problem, even if you have a lab onboard, of documenting that you have 99.6 percent cleaned water Your ship is full. You await permission to discharge water.
