THIS IS THE PROPOSED PLAN IN FRONT OF THE NORWALK PLANNING AND ZONING COMMISSION TO BE ERECTED IN THE FILLOW STREET NEIGHBORHOOD.  WE WILL KEEP YOU APPRISED OF PUBLIC HEARINGS ON THE MATTER.

Here are the song titles that deluge my mind in August- It Happened In Monterey.  Fly Me to the Moon.  Come Fly With Me. It's Nice to Go Travelin'. The fact that they are all Sinatra hits may or may not be a coincidence.  Frank Sinatra lived his life on the road, when he wasn't ensconced between gigs in his home in Palm Springs, decorated in his favor color of orange. He used to say that orange made him happy. Who am I to argue?  When he sang, he made me happy. Those records still bounce; they still fill the air with the sense of possibility.  What's around the corner?  Who will you meet at a romantic rendezvous?  What adventures lie ahead?

I live in a beautiful place, a town called Westport, in the lovely state of Connecticut. We are blessed to live here, in a town that many still turn to as a vacation destination. Nevertheless, when summer comes, I need to change my scenery, lovely as it is.    I must get away. Those Sinatra songs beckon in my mind.

Since June, I have been to Cape Cod, the Hamptons and Lake Placid.  I had never been to Lake Placid before, and it struck me, as we left our inn last night, just how different all three vacation venues are.  Think Cape Cod- you see beaches, dunes and lobsters.  I don't even eat lobsters, and I see lobsters. Hamptons? A scene straight out of The Great Gatsby, complete with modern day hedge fund tycoons competing from behind  those hedges to see who has just finished the latest, biggest monstrosity on the block.   Tut, tut, how gauche. Tut, tut, mine is better than yours is.   Lake Placid caused me to invent a new Jackie Mason joke, with apologies to Jackie. " A Jew and a gentile are pausing to consider where they will ride their bicycles. The Jew says, "That road looks good.  Nice and flat, no bumps in the road."  The Gentile says, "That mountain looks great. All peaks and valleys."  And there you have it. I was the Jew in Lake Placid, land of the great Whiteface Mountain, and many, many lesser hills.  My husband, on the other hand, was the gentile, metaphorically speaking.  He had a blast cycling, I had the greatest of fun walking, doing yoga, and inhaling that fabulous air. 

I store up those images of mountains, lakes, dunes and beaches. They sustain me when life gets too hectic and too commonplace, when getting away becomes something I do in my mind, rather than in my car.  May you too enjoy your summer changes of scenery, whatever they are.

 

New Orleans, Louisiana (CNN) -- Marking four days since a sunken well in the Gulf of Mexico stopped gushing oil, the federal on-scene coordinator warned Monday that responders should not get too comfortable.

"With an operation like this, your biggest enemy is complacency," said Coast Guard Rear Adm. Paul Zukunft.

Testing on the recently capped well will continue until 4 p.m. ET, officials said Monday.

On Sunday, Thad Allen, the federal government's oil spill response director, said that testing had revealed a "seep a distance from the well." But the federal government said Monday it had received satisfactory answers from BP regarding the seep, so testing of the well could proceed.

Allen said Monday that a federal science team and BP representatives had discussed several issues during a Sunday night conference call, including the seep and "possible observation of methane over the well."

"During the conversation, the federal science team got the answers they were seeking and the commitment from BP to meet their monitoring and notification obligations," Allen said in a statement.

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Allen ordered the company to notify the government if other seeps were found.

"When seeps are detected, you are directed to marshal resources, quickly investigate, and report findings to the government in no more than four hours," Allen said in a letter to BP Chief Managing Director Bob Dudley released late Sunday.

On Monday, Allen noted that he had alerted BP on Sunday to "a number of unanswered questions about the monitoring systems they committed to as a condition of the U.S. government extending the well integrity test." After the conference call, he said he authorized BP to continue the integrity test for another 24 hours.

"I restated our firm position that this test will only continue if they continue to meet their obligations to rigorously monitor for any signs that this test could worsen the overall situation," he said. "At any moment, we have the ability to return to the safe containment of the oil on the surface until the time the relief well is completed and the well is permanently killed."

In his letter Sunday, Allen gave BP 24 hours to provide the containment plan and schedule that the company would put in place if testing was suspended.

BP's statement Monday said the company was carrying out extensive monitoring activities around the well site. Allen did not provide further details about where the leak was spotted or how big it is.

Some seepage from the ocean floor is normal in the Gulf of Mexico, according to University of Houston professor Don Van Nieuwenhuise. When asked by CNN meteorogist Chad Myers, "Do 40 million gallons of oil naturally leak into the Gulf of Mexico every year without wells even being there, just in cracks in the surface, " Van Nieuwenhuise responded, "I don't know what the actual number is but that sounds about right. All over the Gulf of Mexico, you have formations that actually leak to the surface."

"A lot of oil that's formed naturally, by the Earth, ends up escaping or leaking to the surface in the form of natural seeps and yes, there are a lot of these all around the world," he said.

Allen said Sunday that testing would determine whether keeping the well capped would be the right solution. Pressure testing results in the well have been lower than expected, he said, which means oil could be leaking out from below.

"While we are pleased that no oil is currently being released into the Gulf of Mexico and want to take all appropriate action to keep it that way, it is important that all decisions are driven by the science," he said. "Ultimately, we must ensure no irreversible damage is done which could cause uncontrolled leakage from numerous points on the sea floor."

Pressure inside the well "continues to rise slowly," BP said in a statement Monday.

BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles said Sunday that the recently recapped oil well could remain closed until the relief well is completed if tests remained favorable.

"No one associated with this whole activity wants to see any more oil flow into the Gulf of Mexico," he said.

Rep. Ed Markey, who has been a vocal critic of BP's response to the gusher, said Sunday that the company could have another motivation for wanting to keep the well capped.

"If the well remains fully shut in until the relief well is completed, we may never have a fully accurate determination of the flow rate from this well. If so, BP -- which has consistently underestimated the flow rate -- might evade billions of dollars of fines," Markey, D-Massachusetts, said in a letter to Allen released Sunday.

Using ships on the surface to collect 100 percent of the gushing oil would allow scientists to calculate the flow rate -- a figure that the government would use to determine how much to fine BP, Markey said.

That contradicts what Allen said on July 9 -- that once the well was sealed, scientists could get the most accurate flow rate to date based on the pressure in the well.

No oil has gushed out since Thursday when BP closed all the valves in a new custom-made cap that was lowered into place earlier in the week.

That lull in oil flow has jump-started the federal claims process. Kenneth Feinberg, the man in charge of disbursing the $20 billion in funds BP is setting aside to resolve Gulf oil spill-related claims, said Monday that now that the oil leak has apparently been stopped, it will be a lot easier and quicker to get a handle on the universal claims.

At a question and answer discussion in Washington, Feinberg said it has been difficult to come up with a budget because officials did not know how pervasive the spill would become. "Now that the oil has stopped, with my fingers crossed, we will quickly come up with an overall budget," he said.

Feinberg said the fund was being established by BP with the support of the Obama administration as an alternative to years of protracted litigation, and said the challenge is to make the reparations process attractive enough so people will voluntarily seek compensation from it.

Meanwhile, oil skimmers continue to clean up the contaminated Gulf. Since June, the number of skimmers has quadrupled, Zukunft said.

In addition, BP also plans to conduct tests known as ranging runs on one of its relief wells, which company officials have said could intersect the ruptured well by the end of July and provide the permanent solution to the leak. BP then plans to pump mud and cement down to kill the ruptured well.

Engineers and scientists have intensified monitoring of the well, poring over images and data collected by robots, sonar scans, and seismic and acoustic examinations. A government ship is in the area, fitted with equipment for detecting methane gas, which would be an indication of a leak.

In the coming weeks, BP also plans to bring in two more oil collection ships in addition to the two in the Gulf, bringing containment capacity to 80,000 barrels (about 3.4 million gallons) of oil a day, more than high-end estimates of how much oil had been leaking. Zukunft said the Helix Producer and the Q4000, two of the ships disconnected from the well to put on the containment cap, could be quickly re-connected within hours if scientists decide that's necessary.

Meanwhile, a worker who was onboard the Deepwater Horizon oil rig when it exploded testified before investigators Monday.

The hearing is part of a Coast Guard and Bureau of Ocean and Energy Management investigation of the April 20 explosion, which killed 11 workers and sent oil gushing into the Gulf. The hearing is scheduled to last all week.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/07/19/gulf.oil.disaster/index.html?hpt=T2

Damon Winter/The New York Times

The BP drilling station on the artificial island in the Beaufort Sea. Because of its location on the artificial island, it has been exempted from the moratorium on offshore drilling.

But about three miles off the coast of Alaska, BP is moving ahead with a controversial and potentially record-setting project to drill two miles under the sea and then six to eight miles horizontally to reach what is believed to be a 100-million-barrel reservoir of oil under federal waters.

All other new projects in the Arctic have been halted by the Obama administration’s moratorium on offshore drilling, including more traditional projects like Shell Oil’s plans to drill three wells in the Chukchi Sea and two in the Beaufort.

But BP’s project, called Liberty, has been exempted as regulators have granted it status as an “onshore” project even though it is about three miles off the coast in the Beaufort Sea. The reason: it sits on an artificial island — a 31-acre pile of gravel in about 22 feet of water — built by BP.

The project has already received its state and federal environmental permits, but BP has yet to file its final application to federal regulators to begin drilling, which it expects to start in the fall.

Some scientists and environmentalists say that other factors have helped keep the project moving forward.

Rather than conducting their own independent analysis, federal regulators, in a break from usual practice, allowed BP in 2007 to write its own environmental review for the project as well as its own consultation documents relating to the Endangered Species Act, according to two scientists from the Alaska office of the federal Mineral Management Service that oversees drilling.

The environmental assessment was taken away from the agency’s unit that typically handles such reviews, and put in the hands of a different division that was more pro-drilling, said the scientists, who discussed the process because they remained opposed to how it was handled.

“The whole process for approving Liberty was bizarre,” one of the federal scientists said.

The scientists and other critics say they are worried about a replay of the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico because the Liberty project involves a method of drilling called extended reach that experts say is more prone to the types of gas kicks that triggered the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon.

“It makes no sense,” said Rebecca Noblin, the Alaska director for the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental watchdog group. “BP pushes the envelope in the gulf and ends up causing the moratorium. And now in the Arctic they are forging ahead again with untested technology, and as a result they’re the only ones left being allowed to drill there.”

BP has defended the project in its proposal, saying it is safe and environmentally friendly. It declined to respond to requests for further comment.

Extended-reach drilling has advantages. Drilling at an angle might be less threatening to sensitive habitats. But engineers say that this type of drilling is riskier and more complicated than traditional drilling because it is relatively new and gas kicks are more frequent and tougher to detect.

And because of the distance and angles involved, drilling requires far more powerful machinery, putting extra pressure on pipes and well casings.

Several companies have built artificial islands to drill offshore in the Arctic and elsewhere, in part because surging ice floes can destroy conventional floating or metal-legged offshore drilling platforms.

Critics say that such islands are so tiny that a large oil spill will quickly flow into the surrounding waters.

BP officials say that by accessing the Liberty oil field from far away, the project reduces its environmental impact in the delicate North Shore area.

The Liberty field lies about five miles from land under the shallow waters of the Beaufort Sea in an area populated during the winter by seals and polar bears and covered by thick floating ice.

During the summer, bowhead whales migrate through the region.

“The overall Liberty Project has been planned and designed to minimize adverse effects to biological resources,” BP wrote in 2007 in the development proposal to federal regulators. “Impacts to wetlands have been significantly reduced including shoreline and tundra habitat for birds and caribou.”

The project will also involve nearly 400 workers in a region where jobs are scarce, according to BP.

But concerns exist about the project’s oversight and critics say the project offers another example of dangerous coziness between industry and regulators.

For example, the federal scientists say that BP should never have been allowed to do environmental reviews that are the responsibility of the regulators. And yet, the language of the “environmental consequences” sections of the final 2007 federal assessment and BP’s own assessment submitted earlier the same year are virtually identical.

No such overlap existed in the documents for other major projects approved by the same office around the same time, a review of the documents shows.

Both assessments concluded that the effects from a large spill potentially could have a major impact on wildlife, but discounted the threat because they judged the likelihood of spill to be very remote.

They also asserted that BP’s spill response plan would be able to handle a worst case — which BP estimated as a spill of 20,000 barrels per day.

Officials from the minerals agency declined to answer questions about the handling of the BP’s environmental assessment, but they added, “In light of the BP oil spill in the gulf and new safety requirements, we will be reviewing the adequacy of the current version of the Liberty project’s spill plan.”

In promotional materials, BP acknowledges that the Liberty project will push boundaries of drilling technology.

To reduce weight on the rig, BP has developed a new steel alloy for the drill pipe.

So much force is needed to power a drill over such long distances that BP had to invest more than $200 million to have a company build what it describes as the largest land rig in the world.

The drill’s top drive is rated at 105,000 foot-pounds of torque, while North Slope rigs are typically rated at 40,000 foot-pounds.

“It will take all of this technology that we’ve developed and exploited in Prudhoe Bay and extend it to a new realm,” Gary Christman, BP’s director of Alaska drilling and wells, told Petroleum News in 2007.

But engineers say that realm includes greater risk.

John Choe, an expert in extended-reach drilling and director of the department of energy resources at Seoul National University, said that it was less safe than conventional types of drilling because gas kicks that can turn into blowouts are tougher to detect as they climb more slowly toward the rig.

“So, you may not detect it until it becomes serious,” he said. “In that case, the kick or drilling related problems become too big to be managed easily.”

A 2004 study commissioned by the Minerals Management Service came to a similar conclusion.

“A gas kick represents probably the most dangerous situation that can occur when drilling a well since it can easily develop to a blowout if it is not controlled promptly,” it said. Extended-reach drilling wells “are more prone to kicks and lost-circulation problems than more conventional and vertical wells, but have some advantages when the well takes a kick because gas migration rates are lower.”

Despite these concerns, the Liberty’s 614-page environmental assessment says nothing about how the project would handle the unique risks posed by this type of drilling.

Mike Mims, a former owner of a company that specialized in extended-reach drilling, said he believed that the worries about this type of drilling were overblown. “The kicks can occur but they move slower and the bubbles don’t expand as fast,” he said.

“It all comes down to personnel,” he added, “If your people understand the risks and handle the work carefully, this drilling is entirely safe.”

BP discovered the Liberty oil field in 1997, began construction of a rig there in 2008, and was nearing final preparations this April when the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico.

Two weeks after the Obama administration declared a moratorium on offshore drilling on May 27, BP announced that the Liberty project would continue, with drilling scheduled to start in the fall, generating its first oil production by 2011. By 2013, BP estimates, Liberty will yield 40,000 barrels of oil per day.

If approved, the Liberty will be the longest horizontal well of its kind in the world. BP’s production plan for the Liberty notes that drilling studies only support horizontal wells up to 8.33 miles. Any horizontal wells longer than that, the plan says, “have not been studied.”

State regulators have faulted BP for not being prepared to handle a spill at a similar, though less ambitious project, known as the Northstar field. That project involves vertical drilling and sits on an artificial island six miles northwest of Prudhoe Bay in the Beaufort Sea.

The Liberty project will tie into the Endicott pipeline when complete. On April 20, the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration warned BP that it was in “probable violation” of federal standards because of corrosion found on its Endicott oil pipeline and a lack of records indicating corrosion protection and monitoring efforts.

BP has faced a number of challenges at its Alaska facilities. The company sustained two corrosion-caused leaks in its rigs in Prudhoe Bay in 2006, including a leak of over 200,000 gallons that cost the company around $20 million in fines and restitution. This was the largest spill to have occurred on Alaska’s North Slope.