Ron Zappe, founder of Zapp’s Potato Chips, dies of throat cancer at 67

… his four companies went bankrupt during the 1980s oil bust and he moved from Houston to Louisiana and started a potato chip business.

… Mr. Zappe bought the former Faucheux Chevrolet dealership in Gramercy where he began making a thicker-cut, kettle-fried potato chip cooked in peanut oil.

I’m sure there’ s a moral in there somewhere, but I’m too busy stuffing my face with Cajun Crawtators. Have I ever told you about the time someone said these chips tasted like kettle chips with barbeque sauce and some old bay seasoning thrown in and I confiscated their bag? Heresy.

XKCD nails how I feel about media coverage of the oil disaster to date. If one of these talking heads, including politicians, were to ask a question or make commentary that didn’t sensationalize or relate back to a major party member’s re-election potential, the whole institution of Big Reporting would come apart at the seams, right?

Speaking of reporting, let’s get something straight:

True = efforts to kill/seal the well, i.e. Top Kill have failed
True = BP will not attempt the installation of a second blowout preventer.
False = efforts to contain the well are off the table until a relief well reaches the target in the reservoir in August.

Right now, as we speak, the portion of the riser above the existing blowout preventer is being sawed off (what you might see referred to as DSAW) for a nice clean attachment to a Lower Marine Riser Package cap, after the longest section of the riser away from the BOP was removed last evening. So, stop forwarding and/or retweeting the Bloomberg story and confusing yourselves and at The Oil Drum and Alexander Higgins’s blog instead.

In fact, for the very latest discussion of the current pre-LMRP video footage with engineers and scientists, The Oil Drum has been hosting a live webchat at webchat.freenode.net. Enter a name and #theoildrum as channel to join.

Live discussion of the video feed at FreeNode (Channel name: #theoildrum). It’s like watching the ADD-addled love child of Fark and the First Draft Crackvan, but stay with it. Like scattered tarballs from the oil volcano, bits of some of the most reliable information on the (pre-)LMRP operation make it to the surface.

For the best explanation of what BP is attempting this go-around, read this updated The Oil Drum post, complete with labeled diagrams of the riser-cutting process in preparation for the Lower Marine Riser Package cap. Yeah, the process that’s going to send a lot more oil gushing into the sea before they successfully (please) lower the LMRP cap onto it. Forgive me if the current plan is prepared for this contingency, but what if the LMRP cap procedure fails and the flow rate of oil into the ocean is then increased as a result of cutting off the kinks in the riser? They then figure out how to cap it again? With what?

Someone’s making anagrams of the words Lower Marine Riser Package Cap.

Six weeks. Day 43 of Oil Spill. And the first day of the Atlantic hurricane season.

America, read this AP editorial in its entirety: After ‘top kill’ fails, a dispiriting summer of oil, anger is ahead for Louisiana. It summarizes the whole situation to date rather nicely, including the fear and burning questions many have:

… Perhaps most alarming of all, 40 days and 40 nights after the Deepwater Horizon blew up and began the underwater deluge, hurricane season is at hand. It brings the horrifying possibility of wind-whipped, oil-soaked waves and water spinning ashore and coating areas much further inland. Imagine Katrina plus oil spill.

… As BP and the government chart the way forward, there remain prominently unanswered questions along the way.

How involved has the Obama administration been, how involved should it have been, and how much control should BP be given for events that are of public interest and happening in public places? Why have BP, scientists and the government been unable to accurately capture how much is actually leaking, the extent of damage and figure out how to fix it? And what can be done now to prevent even more of a disaster from unfolding, and to ensure transparency as decisive steps are taken to fix what’s broken?

No, I am not asking that the Federal Government intervene given that they know Nothing about drilling or even comprehending an exploration plan, much less cleaning up a multi-million-gallon spill like this. Instead I ask over and over again until I’m blue in the face:

1) Why were other companies not given the responsibility of stopping the leak and cleanup weeks ago?

2) Why is Tony Hayward still talking? Where are his handlers?

With officials now describing this as “probably the biggest environmental disaster [the US has] ever faced“, Hayward’s foot-in-mouth moment hasn’t exactly come at a great time. Sympathetic as we are to the pressures of running a huge organisation embroiled in a crisis, the same probably goes for the 11 rig workers who died in the explosion, not to mention all the fisherman who are losing their livelihoods.

3) Will the drilling moratorium add safety precautions that have not already been enacted by other companies in the wake of this disaster? I doubt anything new is required, just following rules and precautions already asked for in the current guidelines.

4) Who is on the new Oil Spill Commission, why and what are their qualifications? Can we get some transparency from government and BP now?

This is all something President Obama can make happen now without a geology or mechanical engineering degree or even a (useless) oil czar.

Meanwhile, the BP spill impacts Plaquemines Parish hurricane plans. Have I told you how much I love Billy Nungesser? Is he on the commission?

Update: Someone please jeezus make Tony Hayward stop already. And keep reading The Oil Drum because it’s the only clarity I’ve found over this whole affair in the last few weeks.