[HN Gopher] A massive oil spill in the Pacific Ocean reached the...
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A massive oil spill in the Pacific Ocean reached the Southern
California coast
Author : amelius
Score : 143 points
Date : 2021-10-03 18:53 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.npr.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.npr.org)
| spicyramen wrote:
| Yes, was very disappointed as they closed the airshow.
| lefrenchy wrote:
| This comment is just too on the nose, chef's kiss.
| userbinator wrote:
| It'll just slowly go back into the ground where it came... I find
| it funny that a lot of self-proclaimed "environmentalists" who
| love to espouse the benefits of using "natural" stuff get
| outraged by things like this, as if oil wasn't a naturally
| occurring substance.
| foxhop wrote:
| It floats on top of water and kills life.
| Zamicol wrote:
| Tragic.
|
| I hope in the future humanity is better with mycoremediation.
| bigdict wrote:
| I first parsed this as my-core-mediation.
| mch82 wrote:
| @SupervisorFoley on Twitter is a member of the Orange County
| Board of Supervisors & providing useful updates for anyone living
| in the area.
| labster wrote:
| Couldn't happen to a more appropriate group of people. It's just
| deserts for decades of opposing environmental policy. I hope the
| residents of Huntington Beach are so inconvenienced that they
| have to relocate to their second homes in Texas.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| This will reconsider nothing and just find a way to rob state
| coffers to pay for cleanup. Basically every calamity that
| befalls rich coastal residents is handled like I described. Why
| will this one be different?
| labster wrote:
| Of course it won't be different. But I'd rather it happened
| in Huntington Beach than Venice or San Pedro, because the
| people there actually deserve it.
| pine390 wrote:
| Perhaps you should seek out a therapist in order to process
| your violent tendencies and the subconscious traumas that
| could be leading towards such behavior.
| sva_ wrote:
| Some video of oil at the beach
|
| https://twitter.com/alschaben/status/1444664303269728257
| anoplus wrote:
| It is deemed to be repeated, as long as most people are too
| indifferent to push this kind of unjustified environmental damage
| to the headlines
| gruez wrote:
| But oil spills have been trending down over the past few
| decades, even as oil shipments have increased:
| https://ourworldindata.org/oil-spills.
|
| You're right it won't go to zero, in the same sense that
| airplane crashes won't ever go to zero. however that's because
| it's really hard to prevent all airplane crashes/oil spills,
| not because people are "too indifferent".
| belorn wrote:
| Airplane crashes will continue as long as people use air
| travel, which is unlikely to ever change. The best we can do
| to prevent airplane crashes would be to build in enough
| security in airplanes so that enough amount of systems has to
| fail before a crash can occur, including eliminating human
| failure and cascading failures.
|
| Oil spills will also continue as long we extract oil from the
| bottom of the ocean (and to a degree land). In contrast to
| airplanes however, we should have a future where we stop
| extracting it from the earth. In order prevent climate change
| we need to stop today, and every day we continue to pump it
| up we are stepping further into catastrophe.
|
| We can have a future were electric planes flies in the sky.
| We can't have a future were we continue pumping up more oil.
| The oil need to stay where it is.
| burkaman wrote:
| This spill was from an oil rig, not a tanker. Do rig and
| pipeline spills follow the same trend? Haven't found data on
| rigs yet, but pipeline spills do not.
|
| Pipeline incidents have been roughly constant over time: http
| s://portal.phmsa.dot.gov/analytics/saw.dll?Portalpages&P...
|
| Edit: Also, the data you referenced comes from an
| organization that's run by oil companies and tanker operators
| (https://www.itopf.org/about-us/the-board/). I doubt they'd
| just fabricate data, but they are incentivized to massage the
| definition of what counts as an "oil spill from a tanker". If
| I were relying on this data I'd probably want to find an
| independent source.
|
| Edit 2: NOAA data of all spills does not show a downward
| trend: https://incidentnews.noaa.gov/raw/index
| gruez wrote:
| >Pipeline incidents have been roughly constant over time: h
| ttps://portal.phmsa.dot.gov/analytics/saw.dll?Portalpages&P
| ...
|
| I couldn't get the link to work. If it's flat, but the
| amount of oil being transported is up, isn't that still a
| decline?
|
| >Edit 2: NOAA data of all spills does not show a downward
| trend: https://incidentnews.noaa.gov/raw/index
|
| I fed the chart into excel and generated a graph:
| https://i.imgur.com/QKu2Yly.png
|
| looks like even though incidents (orange line) is up, the
| amount spilled (blue) is down.
| burkaman wrote:
| Sorry about the pipeline link, it's ALL REPORTED INCIDENT
| 20 YEAR TREND on this page:
| https://www.phmsa.dot.gov/data-and-
| statistics/pipeline/pipel.... I don't know if amount
| transported by pipeline is going up.
|
| I appreciate your optimism. The downward trend in amount
| spilled is nice to see, but that value is unknown for
| nearly half the entries, so I wouldn't read too much into
| it. I'm not saying it's impossible that things are
| getting better, I even think it's likely, but it's
| certainly not at the same level as airplane safety, where
| everything that can be done is being done and crashes are
| incredibly rare. It is trivial to find examples of the
| oil industry failing to do the bare minimum (here's one
| recent report, the first thing I found:
| https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-21-293). I'm very
| comfortable stepping on a plane, but I would not be
| comfortable living next to a pipeline or making a living
| fishing next to an oil rig, and I think the statistics
| back up my feelings.
| cptskippy wrote:
| Southern California has considerable oil and natural gas
| seepage off shore. Many of the oil rigs aren't drilling but
| simply harvesting the seeps.
|
| They passively collect 100-150 barrels a day from the Coal Oil
| Point Seep Field.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_Oil_Point_seep_field
|
| The oil in question was not from a seep however. It came from
| the processing platform Elly that supports two other drilling
| rigs in the Beta field.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| Seems like the "massive oil spill" from the link is
| equivalent to half a year of natural seepage from this single
| seep field.
| dmckeon wrote:
| More like a month, at 42 gallons per barrel.
| cptskippy wrote:
| I have no idea how a surface spill compares deep water
| seeps but the seeps have been happening for hundreds of
| thousands of years.
|
| Not sure where I am going with this but I just thought it
| was interesting.
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(page generated 2021-10-03 23:00 UTC)