Stunning Drone Footage Of The Midwest Flooding Wreaking Havoc On US Oil
After the first deadly winter storm this season, now come the floods: the near-record water level across the U.S. Midwest has disrupted everything from oil to agriculture, forcing pipelines, terminals and grain elevators to close. This is the worst flood in the region since May 2011, when rising water on the Mississippi and its tributaries deluged cities, slowed barge traffic and threatened refinery and chemical operations and is just shy of the worst flood of breaking 30-year records.
According to Bloomberg, the floods have killed at least 20 people and shut hundreds of roads across Missouri and Illinois, according to AccuWeather Inc. Rain-swollen rivers will set records in the Mississippi River basin through much of January. Fifty miles (80 kilometers) of the Illinois River remain closed, according to the U.S. Coast Guard, as well as five miles of the Mississippi River.
Additionally, the Coast Guard issued a high-water safety advisory for 566 miles of Mississippi River between Caruthersville, Missouri, and Natchez, Mississippi. It also instituted high-water towing limitations near Morgan City, Louisiana, for vessels heading south that are 600 feet or shorter, it said in a statement.
And while water levels have started to recede in some areas, closures and restrictions remain in place for safety, said Jonathan Lally, a spokesman for the U.S. Coast Guard. “The high water is kind of moving in a big glob and it’s on its way down,” he said Friday in a telephone interview from New Orleans.
The impact of the flood has hit farmers, with hog producers in southern Illinois calling other farmers, hoping to find extra barn space to relocate pigs. Processors are sending additional trucks to retrieve market-ready pigs, she said. In one case, an overflowing creek took out electricity and made roads impassable, causing 2,000 pigs to drown.
But the flood's most adverse economic impact may be on oil, which may see an even greater increase in stockpiles as a result, pushing the price of oil even lower.
As Bloomberg adds, so far the biggest oil shutdown involves Enbridge Inc.’s Ozark pipeline, which was booked to carry about 200,000 barrels a day this month to Wood River, Illinois, from Cushing, Oklahoma. The outage of the section under the Mississippi River may further add to stockpiles at Cushing that reached a record high last week.
"The closure of the Ozark pipeline will just add to the stocks at Cushing,” said Amrita Sen, chief oil economist at Energy Aspects Ltd. in London.
Also shuttered is Spectra Energy Corp.’s 145,000 barrel-a-day Platte oil pipeline between Guernsey, Wyoming, and Wood River which remains closed as a precaution because of the river’s condition.
Aside from closed pipelines, energy companies have also shut down various terminals in the affected region. Kinder Morgan shut its Cahokia terminal in Sauget, Illinois, and its Cora terminal in Rockwood, Illinois. Cahokia handles chemicals, coal, cement and metals while Cora handles coal and petcoke, according to the company’s website. Kinder Morgan declared a force majeure, which protects it from liability for contracts that go unfulfilled for reasons beyond its control.
“We plan to return to service as soon as possible after the water recedes,” Wheatley said Friday in an e-mailed statement.
Exxon Mobil Corp. shut its fuel terminal on the Mississippi at Memphis and is taking precautions to secure the facility, spokesman Todd Spitler said Friday in an e-mail. Impacts to customers “will be minimized as alternative supply will be provided,” he said.
The worst case scenario would be if the floodwaters reach Louisiana, which has 10 refineries in the Baton Rouge-New Orleans area with a combined capacity of about 2.5 million barrels, or 13 percent of the nation’s capacity, said Andy Lipow, president of Lipow Oil Associates in Houston.
Refineries including Exxon’s facility in Baton Rouge and Marathon Petroleum Corp.’s in Garyville, Louisiana, will probably try to get their crude and ship out their products if they can before the river levels rise, Lipow said.
In short, this Midwest flood will have a significant impact on US oil transportation and logistics, which in turn will make the already acute problem of oil storage even worse, and comes at the worst possible time, just as Cushing inventories are already at record high (with about 10mm barrels of capacity left) and seasonally rising fast, and when the price of oil is very sensitive to even the smallest (forget record) builds in inventory.
So without further ado, here is the stunning drone's eye footage of this near-record flood, courtesy of the WSJ.
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"Dredging, navigation and flood control are primary missions of our Corps of Engineers"
Not so much anymore and they sucked at the above anyways.
Now they are staffed with starry eyed envirostatsi hell bent on beating out EPA for the most radicalized Big Government fuckups and boot stompers.
rivers here in north america are a lot longer than they are in britain. dredging one region just channelizes it for a portion, which prevents the adjacent wetlands from sopping up much of the overflow. result is that it flows harder and faster downstream, and accentuates the flooding downstream. then downstream region screams for more dredging. repeat. repeat again.
there are smarter folks who are trying to stop rebuilds in flooded out bottomlands and return them to agriculture or parkland, so that they can serve their pre-civilization function of overflow retention. this movement has a long way to go, and the hardest part is that 95% of the time, these bottomlands are beautiful riverside property -- prime spots for real-estate developers to build and sell fast. it is a never ending story.
The EU's plan would have worked out well if it had been implemented about 800 years ago before all the buildings and land modifications had taken place. Now it is a policy of lunacy. You can bet the ones who worked so hard to establish the regulations causing people misery knew exactly what they were doing.
Very little is coincidental or a failure to foresee consequences. It is all part of the global plan.
Hanlon's Razor : Never attribute to conspiracy what can easily be explained by stupidity.
I've seen these rivers flood many times over the decades and everytime the gov/news always say "it's the worst they've ever seen." The floods are natural, nothing new to see.
The December floods of '82 broke through a levee near me, then froze up for a month or two. We would load up backpacks with supplies and spend the entire day ice skating throughout the bottoms.
It's not natural. See the above post about tiling the land. The Minnesota and Mississippi did not flood like this before the massive tiling campaign. The Corps of Engineers also are complete retards in calculating levies for flood control. Apparently, they don't think about displacement the levies create.
The planners all know the possibility of their actions but everyone else either just follows orders or only sees their little area of involvement. Object too much and you are either fired, moved to an irrelevant shit job or told to shut up and do as you are told.
We had somewhere between 8 and 11 inches of rain in the span of 48 hours here in north central Arkansas last weekend. The White River rose to a level we haven't seen in nearly a decade. But the waters receded almost as fast as they rose, owing to the fact that we're at about 1000 feet elevation here. Our silica sand plant never shut down for the weather (though the railroad terminals we ship to have been experiencing delays). I feel for the folks at lower ground who are getting the collective brunt of all those streams and rivers dumping into the larger rivers.
Not so stunned.
I find it funny that Tyler just used the same description that the WSJ had.
Doesn't take much to stun Tyler?
First rule of Stun Club....
Flooded Lives Matter.
I'd like to feel sorry for these people. But the area is a well known flood zone. I can't.
Thirty years ago when they had the last major flood, I used to travel to Nebraska regularly. You really get a sense of how wide the devastation is when flying over it.
Feel sorry for your tax dollars that will bail them out of this "unforseeable disaster".
That's the best explanation I can think of why they continue to build in flood zones.
long 6 x 6 treated posts? and stair risers? long lumber- ha, oh yea housing is going bongos, ha...
It's a well known 'man made' flood zone. We flooded some folks.
http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/columns/tony-messenger/messenger-pied...
Just think of all of the 'shovel ready' jobs being created!
The black swan...all those insurance payouts. Since insurance companies can't make money on their capital due to low interest rates. They'll be hard pressed to payout and will be raising rates across the nation, putting more pressure on Joe Six.
Stunning?
It's a puddle
I bet alot of those locals cal it a "swimming pool."
We called falling off the water ski's on the river a Mississippi Enema.
Finally, a reason to raise gas prices.
That shell petrol station photo really needs a small rib parked next to the pump "filling up"...
Gasoline should come down in price since it will be so diluted with water.
Another Keynesian fantasy come true.
We see the floods and say...so what...Californians gawk at the film footage and say "why not here!"
so about that 72 degree air that was destined for the Arctic...?