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New Concerns Over Earthquakes In Oklahoma Near Vast Oil-Storage Facility (nytimes.com)
HughPickens.com writes: The NY Times reported on October 14, 2015 that a magnitude 4.5 quake struck Saturday afternoon about three miles northwest of the Cushing Hub, a sprawling tank farm that is among the largest oil storage facilities in the world, now holding 53 million barrels of crude with a capacity for 85 million barrels. The Cushing oil hub stores oil piped from across North America until it is dispatched to refineries. The Department of Homeland Security has gauged potential earthquake dangers to the hub and concluded that a quake equivalent to the record magnitude 5.7 could significantly damage the tanks and a study by Dr. Daniel McNamara study concludes that recent earthquakes have increased stresses along two stretches of fault that could lead to quakes of that size. "It's the eye of the storm," says Dana Murphy, vice chairman of the state's oil and gas regulatory body, the Oklahoma Corporation Commission.
"When we see these fault systems producing multiple magnitude 4s, we start to get concerned that it could knock into higher magnitudes," says Daniel McNamara, author of a paper published online that a large earthquake near the storage hub "could seriously damage storage tanks and pipelines." "Given the number of magnitude 4s here, it's a high concern."
"When we see these fault systems producing multiple magnitude 4s, we start to get concerned that it could knock into higher magnitudes," says Daniel McNamara, author of a paper published online that a large earthquake near the storage hub "could seriously damage storage tanks and pipelines." "Given the number of magnitude 4s here, it's a high concern."
They'll be OK.
I have always been told that little quakes unload the pressure that creates big quakes.
Which is it?
THe fear mongering is running rampant.
That said, what measures have been taken to contain a spill caused by some entity storing that much material in one locale?
Rick B.
It seems unlikely there would be a major ecological disaster from tank rupture, and pipeline ruptures could be contained rather quickly.
Unfortunately, some spillage is an accepted part of the energy trade-off provided by crude oil.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
and hire a couple of Japanese and Chilean consultant engineers. With a 4.5 earthquake, a typical chilean does not even bother to get up from his desk. Their buildings are designed to stand much worse.
You do realize if there's a major spill, the problem can extend beyond loss of oil and money, don't you?
We can hope the berms and so forth work, but in the case of an earthquake, the ground's integrity can be disrupted, so it's not a sure bet by any means.
There is certainly reason for concern.
As for Slashdot's choice of stories, meh. Don't like the headline, don't read.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
We're all lucky they didn't build a solar power or wind farm there - can you imagine the toxic spillover that would be caused if an earthquake would hit one of those?
Drill baby, Drill!
They're getting excited about 4s and 5s? Quick someone tell them about the petrochemical depots near LA.
Keep fracking! I own Conoco-Phillips stock!
Liberals don't hate poor people the love then. They love how dependent they are, and the love how good hand outs sound to someone struggling to get by, they love the way that buys votes.
The trick is keeping poor people poor while keeping up the appearance of trying to help them. Strategies include.
1) High property taxes ( because it looks like the wealthy pay more but really when you break it out along in come its pretty regressive)
These support expensive but deliberately ineffective education programs where failure is rewarded and indoctrination over independent thought is the order of the day.
2) Secret poor taxes. Taxes on things that the poor spend disproportionate income on, gasoline, heating oil, etc. This also includes Sin taxes, alcohol, cigarets, lotteries.
3) The passage of ever more regulation and barriers to entry. Can't have entrepreneurs, no we need 'workers' who will remain wage slaves to existing business their entire lives.
4) Pushing for inflation to discourage savings, real independence comes from having savings. Ensuring your savings are always loosing value unless you hand them over to someone wealthier to gamble with is a huge part of their game. Don't argue but but they're the ones passing legislation to stop the gambling not they are not. Dodd Frank does exactly nothing, Wall Street played their part and made fuss for the cameras but its totally business as usual. Its lefties that always want to raise the debt ceiling and do more 'stimulus'. Government debt is a big source of money supply expansion the usual driver of inflation. This isn't lost on the PTBs.
The troubling thing is most conservatives and fascists alike have also taken up these strategies as a way to hold onto their own power.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
A quake in the 4.x range happens 10,000 - 15,000 times per year. In the 5.x range, 1,000 - 1,500 times per year. So we're seeing quakes like these happen several times a day, every single day, all over the world and there's not a single instance of ecological disaster the FUD being spread in the article tells us to believe.
A magnitude 5.x earthquake "Can cause damage of varying severity to poorly constructed buildings. At most, none to slight damage to all other buildings. Felt by everyone." So a 5.7 around a bnch of pretty well constructed oil tanks is hardly something to get worked up about.
I'm sure Max Zorin is fully concerned with the safety of Zorin Industries fracking operation in Oklahoma.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
We have seen that the relatively minor amount of water injected into the ground during fracking operations tends to induce earthquakes.
Carbon dioxide under pressure (supercritical CO2) is a solvent that is at least as good as water, and sequestration proposals call for pumping gigatons of liquid carbon dioxide underground, into the same kind of strata that once held oil. Does anyone think that this will not tend to induce earthquakes?
Releasing oil from a storage area would cause an environmental mess - some would use the word catastrophe, I would not. Oil on the loose mucks up agricultural areas, sometimes makes for fires that kill a few dozen people and wildlife. These are minor effects.
A release of multiple millions of tons of carbon dioxide would be an actual catastrophe. Look up "Lake Nyos" and observe that a natural release of CO2 managed to kill 100 people and thousands of livestock, not to mention hundreds of hectares of crops and wildlife, all in a very sparsely settled area. And that was from a very minor release.
What I fail to understand is that the very same people who eschew nuclear power because the waste products "Will be dangerous for centuries" don't have a concern about storing vast quantities of carbon dioxide underground. If the radiation release at Chernobyl had been carbon dioxide instead, it could have left all those people who were evacuated dead in their homes before anyone could worry about sending them elsewhere. RadWaste is dangerous for hundreds of years, stored carbon dioxide is dangerous forever,
Let's think twice about how to "fix" carbon emissions.
Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.
I dont know if they've strengthened laws recently. But before the recent seismicity increase, seismic safety was a minor factor.
Why is The Department of Homeland Security poking its nose in everywhere? Why are they "gauging potential earthquake dangers" when this would normally be monitored and studied by the USGS?
Better known as 318230.
Allowing quakes to happen easier with existing stress.
About six times more quakes happen for each smaller magnitude. So with the increasing number of 4s and 5s, it suggests a possible 6.
The maximum size quake is bounded by the largest possible fault area, a number not well understood yet.
Poe's Law
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
another Poes Law
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
As others have pointed out, you can't postpone the inevitable.
As other others have pointed out, pumping lubricants deep underground for Profit is a pretty bad idea.
A somewhat minor Apocalypse is due here Real Soon Now. Maybe a Trillion Dollars or so in damages and deaths. The End of Silicon Valley, and every single massively negligent local Refinery. The Shorelines will burn, Silicon Valley will drown.
I am actually prepared. I have a few weeks of supplies on board. Sails don't need much in the way of ongoing Infrastructure. The crackpot Survivalists, being largely concerned with their Guns, and deeply concerned with other Survivalists with _their_ Guns, actually have just a few good ideas. Be Prepared, the Boy Scouts Marching Song. Stock up.
This Apocalypse won't involve Meteorites, Petulant Gods, Muslim haberdashers, or SJW Zombies.
Locally, at least, the Apocalypse will involve a relatively inconsequential shift along the Hayward Fault.
I'll ride it out. Because of the Geography of the Bay, local Tsunamis aren't much of an issue. Glub, glub, burp, glub. The shorelines for a few thousand miles elsewhere, on the other hand...
(Developers have filled in the Bay shorelines already; what would normally take Millennia has taken less than a Century. Fill dampens.)
Frankly, concerning Oklahoma, I don't give a damn. That State and those People richly deserve what's coming their way. That's because they don't care about the fact that...
Plate Tectonics happen.
If OK thinks climate change is a hoax..then the state burns..
Well, since these earthquakes in a (previously) geologically stable region have been shown to be the direct result of irresponsible fracking, all I can say is, you made your own bed (by electing leaders who put the corporate interests of oil and gas corporations above the people's), no you can sleep in it. Enjoy the flammable water table, escalating earthquakes, and soon-to-be-covering-what-arable-land-remains-in-your-state oil slicks.
You voted for this. Now enjoy.
Let's face it. it's going to take a major catastrophe to get America's collective head out of its ass. Of course Fox News will blame the whole thing on Obama, but eventually, people will figure out that we're being screwed by big corporations.
Unfortunately, history (Deephorizon) has shown us that, even after being screwed by big companies, the deep south still votes republican -- the base thinks that the free market should regulate itself. Hey, you voted for these clowns, live with the consequences.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
The solution is simple. Build a replacement tank farm in a area which does not suffer earthquakes and start storing the crude there instead of Cushing Hub. Then when the Cushing Hub tanks are empty, decommission the site.
Yeah, sure, I'll trust DHS for warnings; DC is in the pockets of the MId-east governments; of course they want to scare us out of using our own carbon resources...
Am I the only one wondering why DHS is the lead agency here? If only there were some kind of agency in charge of geological surveys of the United States... (DHS is probably there because energy security is in vogue in the Beltway, but it definitely shouldn't be the lead agency)
When Memphis falls down, people are going to lose their minds. It's just a guessing game as to when. Nobody is prepared for it and the USG will drag down the rest of the country to deal with a relatively local disaster. "United we stand, together we fall".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Experience has shown that that's the real killer problem after earthquakes, right?
The Trans-Alaska Pipeline and the huge oil tanks at Valdez Alaska are designed for 8.5 magnitude earthquakes. Anything the Okies can imagine is a lesser engineering problem.
Set the required earthquake and containment parameters, give the tank farm operators 3-5 yrs to start phasing in upgrades, and 5-10 years to finish. Done.
Zzzzzzzz.
That makes me feel so much better! Just when I was getting used to the idea that most of our reactors are in earthquake zones.
They say they have a much larger potential for storage than they are now using... that implies tanks most tanks are empty. I suggest fitting those empty tanks with multiple flexible bladders... say, 8 or ten bladders per tank... the outside walls should be lined with steel fabric such as conventional chain link fencing, so that if the rigid, outer walls are compromised, the steel fencing fabric will hopefully still be able to contain the bladders with their content. Fill that tank with its bladders with oil from one of the other tanks, and retrofit each other tank one at a time until all are upgraded. It would be expensive, but would be about the same thing as spending the money New Orleans really needed to prevent the worst of the Katrina disaster that we still have not recovered from. An ounce of prevention... blah, blah, blah. We need to stop spending so much money recovering from disasters, and use forethought.
My god, what a biased bit of idiocy you spew. All the stuff the far right espoused have been shown not to work, the opposite approach has been shown to work, and they still use their big bucks to shout at the tops of their lungs, attempting to drown out the voices of reason to get their own way. As an example, Reagan's "trickle down" BS... let the rich have what they want, and eventually the poorest will benefit, too, except that was tried, the lower class never benefitted from it, and it has been shown that when companies, states, countries or whatever raise minimum wage, more people have more spendable income, the percentage of people living in poverty shrinks out of proportion to the increase in minimum wage increase, and everyone benefits. People with more money eat less cheap, unhealthy food, there is less money needed to be spent on health care, etc., etc. Stop trying to blame the Democrats for everything... Reagan ran on a platform-- on each of his terms-- of paying off debts and balancing the budget, yet increased the national debt more than all previous administrations COMBINED. Bill Clinton fought and snarled and bullied to get the budget balanced, and yet as soon as Republicans had the chance, we had sky-high deficit spending again. Can it... nothing you have to say makes sense, as history has shown.