You might have come across this ‘Fucking Booming’ by FishGrease, but in case you haven’t, here’s a snippet and a few pictures to give you the idea:

Generally, boom is long and bright bright orange or yellow. It is not bright bright orange or yellow so you can see it, dear fledgling boomer, but so Governors, Senators, Presidents and The Media can see it. It has a round floaty part that floats, and a flat “skirt” that sinks. A RULE: the floaty part never floats high enough and the skirt never rides low enough. Some oil will ALWAYS go over the boom and some will ALWAYS go under it. Our task is to MINIMIZE both! We do that by fucking proper fucking booming. Here. This picture teaches you almost 100% of what you’ll learn in DKos Booming School, about fucking proper fucking booming:

I lost my one copy of Photoshop, had to learn Gimp, and so the quality is sorta piece-of-shit-c*nt, but you get the idea. It’s fucking obvious. Boom is not meant to contain or catch oil. Boom is meant to divert oil. Boom must always be at an angle to the prevailing wind-wave action or surface current. Boom, at this angle, must always be layered in a fucking overlapped sort-of way with another string of boom. Boom must always divert oil to a catch basin or other container, from where it can be REMOVED FROM THE FUCKING AREA. Looks kinda involved, doesn’t it? It is. But if fucking proper fucking booming is done properly, you can remove most, by far most of the oil from a shoreline and you can do it day after day, week after week, month after month. You can prevent most, by far most of the shoreline from ever being touched by more than a few transient molecules of oil. Done fucking properly, a week after the oil stops coming ashore, no one, man nor beast, can ever tell there has been oil anywhere near that shoreline.

In practice, there’s a reason the best booming schools last weeks. Different types of shoreline, different shapes, require different configurations. Your numerous anchor points (for this spill those would be 1-yard cement blocks with tie-off buoys) need to be chosen so the boom-tenders (you) can adjust the ropes, slanting the booms this way and that to account for changes in wind and current. Booms are tended 24/7, by the way. BUT… just having learned what you’ve learned here today, DKos Boomer, you know enough of the CONCEPT to figure it out. You get it. You could go out there and watch how the ping-pong balls (your test-oil) glide along the boom. You could see where they miss the catch basins and you could adjust and re-configure and you could perform fucking proper fucking booming. By the third day of actual booming, no one on this planet would be better than you. So if you understand it, and all these production employees understand it (we’re talking tens of thousands of people here), then why is most or all of the booming along the Gulf… being done wrong?

Sample of current booming:

I assume this is valid, if you can stomach the inane comments, and if you go down a bit, you’ll find a few that seem to confirm this:

I was in the Coast Guard from 70-76 when fucking booming was being invented and it was the CG that was driving the science (or art). In the Santa Barbara channel by the late 70’s the CG could order the stand-by booming boats (that sit at anchor today just off the harbor) to lay boom within an hour or so, capture the oil in the water, send it to the lab, and tell the media by the next morning where it came from–off-shore rig or tanker, and which rig.

Good fucking booming is not rocket science, it’s proper procedure, and just like Katrina, it pisses me off more than I can type to sit here and watch people WHO SHOULD FUCKING KNOW BETTER screw it up. The science exists, plenty of people know how to work it, and through incredibly bad management and complete disregard for doing things the right fucking way, the people running the entire show have completely fucked it up. ARGH!

And the media are a bunch of know-nothings that are unwilling or unable to go ask a few people–who are right fucking there–what’s wrong with this picture and what should be done right. But no, it’s not NEWS, damnit, it’s too complicated, too depressing, too challenging to Big Companies, not personal enough for our 30-second report. The producers don’t want this kind of story, they think it kills ratings. So we watch meaningless “news” stories with a reporter on some charter boat that gives essentially zero useful information. But the reporter looks good on the boat with her hair slightly askew in the wind and we cut to a commercial–maybe a shampoo commercial to tie in the reporter’s hair.

Thank you Fishgrease for this fucking diary!

This entry was posted on Monday, May 31st, 2010 at 19:17 and is filed under Our World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.