Note: this is a field posting from a Mobil device, please excuse errors. This post will be cleaned up this evening. We have been getting to our more routine survey sites in Los Angeles County over the past few days. We have seen no evidence of more recent tarring. Generally the beaches in LA… Read more »
Our team was invited to have a booth at the DARPA Robotics Challenge at the Pomona Fairplex, next to Los Angeles, California. The event is a yearlong competition in which teams from top engineering universities construct robots that can autonomously navigate a course with the theme of disaster response. The teams are awarded points for completing […]
Note: This is a partial re-post with some modifications from my students’ Aerial and Aquatic Robotic Research Blog. Check out what my students are doing now and have been doing in recent months with these killer new tools here: The AARR PIRatE Lab Blog. Several of them are exhibiting some of our flying and swimming units at the… Read more »
We are interested in assessing the ocean floor near the oil spill site for the presence of any tarballs, oiled plant life, or signs of affected wildlife. After pursuing the proper channels, we were not given permission to enter the oil spill site. Without a clear idea as to the condition of the ocean floor, we partnered with […]
One of the many policy consequences of the 1969 Santa Barbara Oil was a strong regulator of oil drilling and transportation at the county level in Santa Barbara County. Santa Barbara County’s Planning and Development Department’s powerful Energy Division is an amazingly strong office with a suite of powerful permitting and oversight tools across oil… Read more »
We will attempt to post info about our subsurface trials of our deposited oil surveys here today, assuming we have connectivity.
https://openexplorer.com/expedition/refugio/#post-3663017
We sampled our two beach sites at Ormond Beach yesterday. As with our beaches in west Ventura County, we found a generally light to moderate tarring along the strand line. It was consistently patchy with the majority of the beach being only lightly tarred. We did also detect an oily sheen within the sand… Read more »
Now we are seeing additional tar balls in Long Beach (in southern Los Angeles County). This tarring pattern has become all too familiar. We think we are done with the oil “rain,” then we get a highly patchy deposition event which tars beaches with moderate to light tar balls (and occasionally an oil sheen). The… Read more »
June 2nd and 3rd are the peak spawning days of the year for our California grunion in 2015. These fish are laying eggs and sperm as I type this into some of our newly tarred high tide lines across SoCal.
We are prepping for our first subtidal surveys for tar/crude and to vett our newest OpenROV platforms for rapid spill surveys/response. see our AARR blog: http://aarr.piratelab.org
Scroll to top