The "Up to the Minute" BP Livefeed Discussion Thread

reply to post by Tunatarian


Well said, sir! (sir? madam? either way, no offense meant).

I love the Ocean Intervention III Rov 2 picture right now....
The spooky "noose" waving in front of our faces!
Some kind of foreshadowing? I hope not!

Thank you all for this thread, and its content,
its been very interesting to follow this along with you!

reply to post by Tunatarian


You're right Tunatarian.

Sorry man, I got my feathers ruffled by the wrong "tone". I Don't think I went off the rails though.

I'm off to bed. Night y'all. It's back of 3 here and I can't do it no more.



[edit on 2/7/2010 by Thistled]

reply to post by SaganTool


Hey SaganTool, looks like we're locals.

I just watched the Ocean Intervention ROVs for over 1/2 hr. If I get what's going on they just descended together and are now making their way over to the site of the BOP.

reply to post by MotherofBlessings


No offense taken!

It is sir though, not because I deserve the title, but merely because I'm a male.

This whole thing is difficult for everyone, but the reason we're all here gets distorted sometimes.........myself included!

I asked a simple question a few pages back and got nothing but sarcasm.....at least that's the way I took it. My mistake? Quite possibly, but it defeats the purpose of the thread to not be working together on this.

What I got from the response was - Don't ask the obvious......everythings taken care of here!

All I said was......."Enough said. thanks for the info."

What I should have said........isn't worth repeating for the better good of the thread.

Most of us are here for the same reasons.............we should ack like it!!!!!

reply to post by LookingIn


Yes, it looks just like that, they are teaming up for some midnight undersea adventure! Its very interesting stuff, and I am glad there are people who are monitoring all of this. The more eyes on this catastrophe the better. Glad to hear that you are close by eh, I just started on this site myself, and I love it!

Although I have not watched the feeds constantly, it seems to me that when an ROV approaches the BOP, it will always keep its cameras in a "head down" position, then pan up to the stack. Can anyone confirm this for me? Are they trying not to let us see the stack above the BOP?
Many thanks!

reply to post by SaganTool


I don't think there's any attempt to hide stuff. I don't know for sure but it's likely SOP for navigating close to the seafloor.

reply to post by LookingIn


Yea, most likely.
BTW... The BOA Deep Sea ROV I is wandering around the sea floor. By comparing the coordinates, some distance away from the BOP. Is it looking for the"cracks" or "bulge" I have been hearing about? Thanks for your thoughts!

reply to post by SaganTool


No idea. If I were to guess it would be adding to ignorance rather than denying it!

Not sure if the feeds or telemetry from the ROVs have a GPS coord in them but I'd love to see it overlaid on a Google Map so we can visualize the relative locations of each one, especially if, as you say, some of them are wandering around looking at other areas of interest.

reply to post by LookingIn


That's odd - BOA Deep C 1 is showing seafloor on the monitor but its depth is indicating 1530, whereas all the others on the bottom show 4930'ish.

Maybe it's in yards or metres?

reply to post by LookingIn


Yea, I was comparing the E and N coordinates of the wandering rovers to the e and N of the stationary BOP rovers. I know absolutely nothing about the relative distances (lets say in meters) with the (assuming) GPS data displayed on the feeds.
Your thought about a Map overlay is an awesome idea! I'm going to research that one. I'm thinking it could be done quite easily if you had a way to constantly feed the ROV data into a map program. HMMM!

[edit on 2-7-2010 by SaganTool]

reply to post by LookingIn


1530 M = 5000 feet ish.... according to my calculator..
i wonder if that rover is Canadian...lol

I don't have a solid answer to that, but I think it might be this way. BP's top priority is not to keep us fully informed but adequately informed enough to deflect criticism from people like Congressman Markey or the involved public. They're doing as little as they have to do that way and not as much as they can do. This is a company, like all companies who grow to that size, whose primary business is to make money - generate capital. That's capitalism and both it's strength and it's imperative. Marx would add, it's downfall. I think the first two or true and the third's still open to debate. The first feed was only put online when Markey demanded it be. The rest of the ROV camera feeds followed within a week when no doubt people in their marketing department said, "hey we got a bad problem here developing and we're going to lose public acceptance if we don't move to interdict it.

That's kind of cold reasoning on the issue, but it's consistent with other companies who have faced public relations disasters. The people on site just don't have the time to worry about our understanding, that's left to corporate. The guys and maybe a few women (oil drilling is a notoriously strict division of gendered labor) are working round the clock to stop this thing. We don't know what else they've been ordered to do or why.

I don't know what questions were asked in my absence on the ROV, top hat, BOP or relief well efforts, so I can't answer them. If someone wants to repost questions, I'd be happy to try. I'm not as burned out, nor is it as late here on the west coast of the USA, so I'm not short on reserves or on my emotional threshold right now or for the near term. Ask away or direct me to where your original post was. I'm not the most (not nearly) expert person on a lot of this, but I'll try.

reply to post by ghostpigeon


Sorry GhostPigeon ... who are you replying to?

Are you answering my question about who is coordinating the ops of alll the different ROVs and how C&C works for an operation like this?

Also wondering - it's hard to determine scale on these feeds. About how wide is the plume?

Thanks...

Funny how the Ocean Intervention III Rov2 camera is down, but you can see him/her working behind and too the left (in the light) of the BOP in the Skandi ROV II picture. Just before OI III cam went down, it was holding on to that coat hanger "thingy", like it was about to pull it out or something. Sneaky little devil!

[edit on 2-7-2010 by SaganTool]

[edit on 2-7-2010 by SaganTool]

Looks like OI III 2 and Skandi 2 are trying to do something together right below where the plume is.

Ummm, the first cam on jnog.com has a picture on pic labeled "channel L" which is showing an extraordinarily bright yellow... something... flowing through. Channel L is not any other feed we are used to seeing.

Anyone else seeing this?

Edit: on closer look, it's "channel 1". Still phosphorescencing something fierce, it appears. I just showed it to the techie hubby, who thinks it is some sort of LED read out. Possible, I have never seen a picture in picture view before. It might be a 2nd camera attached to the same ROV, hence the "channel" designation. What is without doubt, however, is that those bots are certainly up to something tonight!

[edit on 7/2/2010 by DeathTribble]

[edit on 7/2/2010 by DeathTribble]

reply to post by LookingIn


sorry lookingin, I may have replied to the wrong post. I'll go back and check. I think I was mainly talking about what we're being shown or not shown and why and it looks like your post from your response to me. I know that earlier the plume was much wider than the top hat that was supposed to be catching it and for a time they took the top hat off to clean it out, or shut it down anyway. Best case scenario they were, and I assume still are only catching 40-60% of the oil, but this thing has changed quite a bit in 24 hours. I still can only assume we're being shown minimally what they feel they have to show us for both corporate reasons and because they're not hiring on people specifically to keep us informed in real-time. That's why they have a spokesman and a new section on their website to put out what they want put out when they have to. Once again, that may or may not be nefarious because in big corporate thinking, it's just the way things run. Costs when you're forced to pay them and not until.

reply to post by LookingIn


Ok, I see what you're saying and why you're asking. I can't answer that and have been puzzled by the numbers too, so hopefully someone else knows. Sorry for the misplaced post on this, but it's not totally off topic, so I'll keep it up. As far as your question, that's part of the problem with our end of the feed; we're just not privvy to a lot of this and part of that is our own ignorance.