Tag: Gulf oil spill

Report from New Orleans

Posted on | by elissaheyman

I’ve been traveling, and am now settled back in Santa Fe but still have Louisiana on my mind. Nothing like writing about it to get it all out! I hope you’re interested in “what I did on my Summer vacation”…

I went to the first weekend of Jazzfest in New Orleans, which has a new advertising campaign and marketing slogan, “You’re Different Here”. They mean that when you come to New Orleans, it’s as if you have a fun twin and they take over.
But before I launch into that, I want to make sure you’re aware of a June 29th intuition class in Santa Fe at Estrellas Moroccan Spa, details on my website and in the upcoming newsletter.

Report from New Orleans: After a soul-satisfying week of food, music, and balmy tropical weather, New Orleans, unless I’m wearing rose-colored JazzFest glasses, seems to have come roaring back to life after Katrina and the Gulf oil spill. Surprisingly, everyone’s eating the seafood like nothing ever happened. I wondered on the plane coming in, what it was going to be like to be in New Orleans and not eat seafood–and that was the last time it crossed my mind. Just like everyone else, I went right on eating what tasted good, feeling incredibly lucky to be scoffing down the shrimp and grits on the Jazz Fest fairgrounds, the seafood gumbo and crawfish etouffe from Li’l Dizzy’s, and fried soft-shell crab.

I talked to one local who surmised that eating the seafood post-spill would show up a few years later through various ailments and symptoms, but he hasn’t changed his eating habits, either.

I’m having a hard time adjusting to the harsh realities of life anywhere else. Every night was party night in the Marigny district–Frenchman is now a mini-Bourbon Street, with funky brass street bands, pop-up Mexican taco carts, and music pouring out of every door.

Beyond the annual Spring wonder of JazzFest, New Orleans seemed a lot more established than last year. I sampled a little of the alternative healing and lifestyle scene, dropping by Maypop, a new herb store that provides a free Thursday night clinic for stress-release acupuncture, a service that began during Katrina . Voudoun author Sallie Ann Glassman’s Botanica is now operating in its new location on St. Claude, one of a number of alternative healing centers coming to that complex. (…I thought they should have a Healing Arts Fest there like Jazz Fest, featuring practitioners from all over, with healing foods and music.)

The biggest and best change in New Orleans since Katrina, a number of residents told me, is the improved education system. (My temporary neighbor in the Bywater was a yoga teacher at a charter school, and her students were six and seven years old. )You can read all about its transformation at www.newschoolsforneworleans.org, a very exciting website for any city. Everyone seemed to think that this new positive development was going to change the fate of the city.

In a teeshirt shop on Decatur, I realized why improving public education is so important. I had struck up a conversation with the shop owner, a friendly, funny guy. He was telling me about the history of New Orleans, and before you know it he got onto the subject of black people and slid off Friendly Road into a stunningly raw rant about thieving black teenagers who were ripping him off “…because for six generations, they haven’t held a job!!!” It didn’t seem the right time to mention it, but that’s because New Orleans didn’t invest in public education for thirty years; the schools didn’t turn out students with enough education to be employable, and this inevitably led to a high crime rate. It sounds like all that has a chance to change.

Until next year, because who could resist going to JazzFest, and the American city with the most magical spirit, in 2012?
P.S. I learned one reason it showed up in the tarot that the spill was somehow a boon to the economy: I heard that every restaurant worker and person in the service industry in New Orleans was eligible, and many received, thousands of dollars from BP, up to $25,000–so for awhile there was cash floating around.

Elissa Heyman, Psychic Counseling and Healing, in person/by phone, Visa/MC, Santa Fe, NM 87501, elissa@elissaheyman.com, 505-982-3294. Please call for further information or visit http://www.elissaheyman.com

Engineer’s alarming report about the Gulf Oil spill

Posted on | by elissaheyman

I found this on a site I was on, what do you think?

07/06/10 at 08:48:09
” Hello to everyone Yesterday my friend who is an expert engineer in deep water drilling for a major oil company (no not BP) came back from a 3 month drilling trip and I got a chance to sit down with him and get his opinion about what is really happening at the deepwater horizon site. The stuff that he told me just blew my mind. Since he has to remain anonymous I’m going to relay information to you guys the best I can.
First thing I showed him the live feeds that everybody is watching of the wellhead spilling oil and he says that whatever it is certainly is not a deepwater horizon site. The pressure is supposed to be at least 30-50 thousand psi and that’s why the explosion happened (standard drilling equipment is certified up to 15000). So that little funky cap would be blown off as soon as you just stick it into a stream of that pressure. At one point there is a fish swimming through the oil current with that pressure it would be torn to pieces (water jets are used to cut metal at much lower pressure). So he and other engineers he works with are certain that that live feed is FAKE (it can be a video of several other either depleted or leaking wells as it turns out there is quite few of them).

So I asked him what according to him is going really on ? They assume based on total media blackout that the wellhead is gone and there is just raw hole in the ground spilling oil uncontrollably. The hole is growing bigger because it’s constantly grinded off with the immense pressure of the flow. That is opinion of a guy that worked in deepwater drilling for last 15 years.

So I asked him about possible scenarios how it can play out (no matter if there is the wellhead or not), and here they go :

1. There is absolutely ZERO chance that the flow can be stopped at that pressure with any other method than nuking it (that’s why Russians used it because nothing else worked) so either that or let it run dry. Both options are very bad but the other ones are even worse.
2. There is about at least 30% chance of the seafloor cave in. In other situations it does not happen because drilling is done at much lower depths so the weight of the water above an emptied reservoir is not big enough to crash the seabed. In this particular case the well is so deep that the total mass of the water resting on top of that cavern is billions of tons. When the pressure drops to a critical point the huge amount of weight resting on top of it can make it cave in.
3. The chance for methane explosion is about 15% but still should be consider a real factor especially because of the very uncommon mix of 40% methane in the flow. That means that the amount of methane in the reservoir is huge and in case of explosion it could be an E.L.E. (Extinction Level Event) especially if we try to nuke it as it was never done before with anything even remotely close to that level of gas.

SO LET’S SUM IT UP. WE ARE LIED TO AND THE SITUATIONS IS MOST PROBABLY MUCH MUCH WORSE THAN IT IS BEING DESRIBED. MY FRIEND ADVISE TO ANYONE LIVING ANYWHERE CLOSE TO THE SHORE TRY TO RELLOCATE A SAFE DISTANCE FROM THE SHORE (AT LEAST 50 MILES BUT HE ADVISES A HUNDERED). DO NOT WAIT UNTIL THE LAST MINUTE BECAUSE IF SCENARIOS NUMBER 2 OR 3 PLAY OUT THE WARNING TIME THAT YOU’LL HAVE IS GOING TO BE 5-10 MINUTES SO PRETTY MUCH ENOUGH TIME TO JUST S&*T YOURSELF.