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Sunday, May 9. 2010
Another Disaster
It will go down as the worst environmental disaster in the history of our nation, the effects of which will far exceed those of Hurricane Katrina. And it will affect the same area of our nation as Hurricane Katrina — and then some.Several hundred thousand gallons of crude oil a day is gushing from the ocean floor where the oilrig platform, Deepwater Horizon, blew up, caught fire and sank, killing 11 oilrig workers as it went. Once it sank the tube that brought the oil to the surface collapsed and the safety equipment that was supposed to prevent the type of leak that is taking place now, a blowout preventer, failed.
The oilrig is (was?) owned by British Petroleum and the well operator, Transocean, Ltd, both of which are foreign companies. Isn’t that ironic? The funnier part is BP is claiming responsibility for the oil spill, but claims they aren’t responsible for the explosion that sank the oilrig or for the blowout preventer that failed and caused this disaster. It’s the fault of Transocean, who BP says own and operates the oilrig.
As the cleanup and recovery mounts into the billions, just how much responsibility is BP willing to accept? Of course, they make 3-4 billion dollars in profit every quarter, so maybe it won’t be a big hit on them, but a corporation hates to lose any profit, especially if it’s a half year’s profit.
Just a month before the Lefty world was rocked when President Obama said he would support and encourage more off shore drilling, following Sarah Palin’s campaign call to “Drill, baby drill!” Despite two major oil catastrophes just in my lifetime: Santa Barbara in 1969 and then just 20 years later, the Exxon Valdez, the president decided to remove the ban on further exploration and drilling off our shores—despite the fact that effects of both are still being felt in both locations.
Oil is still found in the sand and gravel of Prince William Sound, where the Exxon Valdez hit a reef in Alaska, spilling almost 11 million gallons of crude. Twenty-one years after the disaster occurred. All of the wild life of that area has been affected and continues to be; salmon and other fish species have had low hatching rates and the growth of sea mammals have been stunted as well.In Santa Barbara, the beach communities advise visitors to buy and wear disposable sandals because the oil is still seeping from the ocean floor where Union Oil’s Platform A in the Dos Cuadras Off Shore Oil Field, located in the Santa Barbara Channel, had a blow out 41 years ago. The oil seeps from the floor and gets washed to shore, turning the once brown sand black.
Hawaii has a black sand beach, Punaluʻu Beach, but volcanoes naturally created it. Lava flows into the ocean, explodes into little bits of basalt that washes to shore and voila! Black sand beach!
Not so on the beaches of Santa Barbara. The oil seeping from the spot on the ocean floor where the blowout occurred creates the black sand. My friend, Christina Smith, Playboy’s Miss March 1978 told me about the oil on the Santa Barbara beaches because part of her pictorial was shot there. In several photos the sand is clearly black, which I thought was cool — at first. Then I found out why that sand is black and will remain black for millennia.Christina said that during the shoot much of their gear, clothing and props were covered with oil from being laid down on the sand. Back in October 2007 I wrote about it (Here) and how the explosion from the blowout created cracks in the ocean floor. Authorities used a specialized cement to seal those cracks, but what man creates, nature eventually subverts and it didn’t take long for nature to get around the cement sealing off the cracks in the ocean floor. Sadly, sea life in the area continues to ingest petroleum and will be affected for millennia.
And now we have the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana, with another blowout of an oil well head on the floor of the ocean, this one a mile below the surface. Millions of gallons, maybe millions of barrels will be spilled into the Gulf of Mexico before British Petroleum, Transocean, Ltd. and the U.S. government get this tragedy under control.Oh yes, American taxpayers will be on the hook for at least part of the bill and you can bet BP will ask for some sort of assistance from the government to make up for some of the cost of fixing the problem and cleaning up the mess.
BP and others tried putting a four-story hood type thing over the leaking oil head, but water pressure created crystals that clogged the 100 million ton contraption. So, it sits while oil spills into the gulf.
Oil has now washed up on shores in Louisiana and Mississippi and it is expected on the beaches of Alabama and Florida soon. And then meteorologists expect the prevailing weather patterns will push the oil into a current that will take some of the oil around the horn of Florida and up the East Coast.
This is by far the worst man-made environmental disaster in our nation’s history and it will only get worse in the foreseeable future. And President Obama wanted to lift the ban on expanding off shore oil drilling. I’m guessing he’s changed his opinion on that — let’s hope.
Here’s the funnier part of this story: Rush Limbaugh and some of his ilk, like President Bush’s last press secretary, Dana Perino, want us to believe this disaster was the result of sabotage by environmentalists, because the president was in favor of lifting the off shore drilling ban.
Then of course there are people who want us to believe the president and his administration delayed response to allow an environmental disaster to occur — even though the Coast Guard was on site the day it happened and officials from the Department of the Interior and the Department of Homeland Security were onsite two days later. Some people are crazy in their partisan zealotry.And the real truth is, this disaster won’t be going away any time soon, even when the oil leak—if the leak—is stopped. Like the Santa Barbara and Exxon Valdez disasters, this one will be with us for decades to come.
Think about it: if you have a small child, they will be seeing black-tinted sand on the beaches of the Gulf Coast when they are in their 30’s and 40’s. Maybe longer. More off shore oil drilling? I think not.
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