A summary of today's "progress"ive failure

Video captured by yours truly of today's mesmerizing footage is below, and on you-tube (with sequenced screen grabs here). Witness large burst at around 8:05am ET, and then the sky is falling...Some people say it's just the ROV moving up and into the plume.

Update: (If that's so, the question obviously becomes: Why? Was the ROV blown off the mark or did someone move it away. It sure looks like the former, as the camera appears to be moving and panning, spasmodically, and without clear purpose amidst the flying chunks of cement, etc. if not out of control entirely, before eventually going dormant and just sitting, focusing on nothing for nearly an hour. Of course as we now know there was quite a bit of ROV activity/frantic disassembling going on just after this, thanks to other cam. And then later the announcement of complete failure.) /Update.

In addition to the very learned musings at The Oil Drum (many there are quick to respond to my alarmist post about an "explosion" in asserting it "wasn't quite as bad as all that"), CNN (of all places) has a decent video summary (beware the music) of today, Friday, May 28th's "top kill" operation. I won't claim any credit, though I did email their "tip line" this morning about the possible blast/rupture and madly flying/falling debris. BP only knows what any of it means, and as usual they're quite loudly not talking. The ROV's seemed to be busy taking stuff apart, once the dust settled. The bottom of the ocean still looks like a war zone. This site has more. Someone else, with apparently about as little technical understanding as my own, thinks the procedure today may have blown up and backfired dramatically.

CNN's live feed–allegedly independent from BP's–is here. The thing appears currently to be gushing out of control, noticeably more so than last night.

In any case, BP well-timed this action to occur just before Memorial Day weekend, with no time to ask questions (so the vague myth of "success" and "going according to plan" lingers). Bad news is surely coming. Rumors are they've already started on contingency plan F (or is it G), to be announced as the next "positive news" whenever forced to (again, see The Oil Drum).

Not to mention the discovery of yet another monster underwater plume approaching shore, the edge of which remains too distant to even locate.

Our moderate Republican President flew in; BP manufactured a nice photo-op.

Junk shot/explosion 8am ET (video updated)

Captured from the live cam around 8am ET:


Truly captivating....and destined to be hardly seen by anyone (let's change that). Someone needs to explain what's going on here.

The camera begins to move around the 2:20 mark, and then pans dramatically upwards...of what exactly follows nobody seems to be very certain. Eventually the camera just sits focusing on nothing but the dark, thick water (if it can still be called that) for approximately 45 minutes. Which seems odd. Update: See CNN's independent cam highlights (and this post) for what may have really been going on as BP's cam goes dormant, some kind of frantic dismantling...

The New York Times details the true halting, depressing truth about the "top kill" operation's majority failure thus far (thanks to several anonymous insiders).

This series of videos comes from a one hour+ live feed section I captured from this morning, afraid the entire 'event' would be ignored. I broke them into 10 minute sections, converted and posted to you-tube:




There are more on you-tube (and I have more screen grabs from the better quality live feed–prior conversion–if anyone is interested) or would like a copy...