Election Commission Meeting Announced

Virginia (Ginna) Watson has filed a formal complaint with the Election Commission in Little Rock. Tammy Lambert did refuse to swear George Hozendorf in as commissioner on the Election Commission of Garland County. To do so would have violated the law concerning contested elections et al. I will forego my opinion because everyone that votes has a dog in this fight.

July 5, 2010, a meeting of the Election Commission has been called and publicly announced in the Sentinel Record yesterday, to be convened at 10am in the Election Commission Building on Ouachita Avenue. The public is invited to attend. I hope everyone that is concerned for their right to vote and the sanctity of the Commission attends.

Along a different tack, I am adding my opinion of the disaster we are all facing in the Gulf of Mexico. It is an editorial I submitted to another website. I hope you understand my concerns and if you believe in God now would be a good time to pray.

Never before in the history of our planet have we done so much damage in so little time as what BP did with that well in the Gulf of Mexico. The truth about the end is somewhere in the knowledge hidden away from public scrutiny by the ones that decided money was more important than public safety and the environment. It will end and unfortunately it doesn't bode well for any life form along the coast or any place less than a hundred feet in elevation. The Gulf is a cauldron systematically reducing the salts in the water by evaporation to a density that settles out and forms salt domes under the soft sediments that filter down from above. As depth increases so does pressure. For every 30 feet, you add one more atmosphere of pressure. Anyone with a calculator can do the math. At 5000 feet, everything is compressed and held stable by the lack of seismic forces such as witnessed in California. Because it is so 'stable', people forget this is the most seismically active part of the earth. Anybody who has driven over a highway in and around Houston, Texas can attest to the movement of the ground. They are growth faults and the Gulf coast is defined by them. Because the sediments are soft they slide over each other without a whisper (unless you pave over them as the highways are apt to be then you notice one side of the road is higher than the other). It surprises a lot of first-timers to the Gulf coast that the roads are so 'stepped'.

Little variations in the pressure and the salt moves up and around through the sediments. Oil is created and retained by the impermeable barrier of the compressed clays and diatom carcases that filter down forming shale and limestone seals.

Now along comes the arrogant leaders of BP who know that this is a huge reservoir and they have the money to drill to whatever depth they want. Damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead! Ignoring the geologists and geophysicists that they hired to keep the well safe and profitable, they cut corners and now we, the people of the US will bear the cross of their folly. No one knows what is happening down there except its not working the way it was supposed to. The well can't be capped and it sure as hell doesn't need to be drained because all that salt will move and the oil will gasify in the chamber left behind increasing the risk of a tumultuous blowout of horrific proportions. I just hope that if they are drilling a sideways well to get to the broken pipe that its an injection well. Pumping water into the chamber to keep the oil from turning to gas will, I hope, delay the inevitable. I'm sure that there are geologists with far greater knowledge than mine that will have a different perspective. All I have to go on is the well logs I read while working for Gulf Oil in International Exploration. A gas bubble will bring anything sitting above it to the ocean floor. I believe that's why BP hasn't moved a super tanker onto the site. Losing one of those ships would be really hard to replace.

I dove some of the salt ridges formed in the Gulf. They are the only variation in an otherwise invariable seascape of sand and silt. One is called Stetson Banks and it lies approximately 85 miles from Galveston. Its one of the few places to dive that you can get down to the bottom and still not violate the dive tables.

If you have friends or relatives living or working along the coast, I would suggest you tell them to make other arrangements for a living. The toxic gases being released right now are causing problems for those working to clean the shores. No one is wearing respirators that I have seen. I just hope they have better insurance than the first responders at WTC on 9/11/01. I have never been a doomsday person but this looks like I may have to change my perspective.