Fail update
Remember Bobby Jindals brilliant plan to bulldoze sand out into the Gufl? To form berms to keep the oil from getting ashore?
He was all angry at the Federal Government for taking too long to give him approval to go ahead. Turned out the pesky feds wanted to, you know, find out if the plan had a hope in hell of working before approving hundreds of millions of dollars in spending.
But Jindal waged a PR campaign about how HE was actually going to DO SOMETHING, but the Feds wouldnt let him. So he got his approvals last month, even though experts were chiming in that the plan wouldnt work. Turns out
the experts were right. The plan is already failing.
Our sister blog, Red Green And Blue, published a piece from one expert: Robert S. Young, an authority on shoreline geology at Western Carolina University. His take:
The White House has announced that this project is now moving forward, despite serious concerns among coastal scientists, including myself, that it will not be effective in keeping oil from the coast, could do more environmental harm than good, and would be extremely expensive.
We got an update from Young this morning, with pictures.
Heres what he says:
Just thought that you might be interested in knowing that the attempt to build artificial sand berms off the Chandeleur Islands is meeting with as much difficulty as we predicted. Please see the series of photos attached.
The last image is not simply a high tide. There is a clearly visible erosional scarp.
They will never get this project completed. We will be conducting an overflight of the area again this week.
Here are the pictures:
initial berm, taken June 25
The same berm on July 2, already heavily eroded
Going, going... the same berm on July 7, nearly washed away
So Jindal got a couple of days of splashy headlines to prove he was doing something, most people will never see these pictures, and when he appears in the media hell take credit for this great success he engineered.
Oh, and as Jed Lewison points out at the Daily Kos:
Meanwhile, its worth noting
that the contract to build Bobbys berms was awarded by Jindal to the number three contributor to his congressional campaigns.
http://faildrill.com/2010/07/13/jindals-berms-all-washed-up-already/