In the most highly publicized oil spill disaster since the horrific Exxon Valdez calamity back in 1989, a British Petroleum sanctioned oil well in the Gulf of Mexico has puked millions of gallons of pernicious crude oil into the ocean.  Depending on who’s talking, the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig (subcontracted and built by Transocean) failed and exploded on April 20, 2010 as a result of lax monitoring, poor workmanship, flawed design, human error, or good ol’ capitalist greed.  At varying levels, it was probably a combination of all of them, and the blame game and reprehensible politicizing was on between BP, Transocean, Halliburton, and Washington.  The Deepwater Horizon burned intensely for over a day and a half, suffering a series of smaller explosions before second massive fireball erupted, causing the massive rig to groan, wail, and then sink to the bottom thousands of feet below and taking thousands of gallons of diesel fuel with it.  The status of that fuel is unknown.



At the time of this writing, estimates have the amount of oil already spilled into the Gulf at anywhere between 35 million to 42 million gallons, officially making it the runaway worst oil catastrophe in US history.  In comparison, the Exxon Valdez tanker released a “mere” 11 million gallons after running aground in Alaska's Prince William Sound. While the bickering goes on, BP has made several unsuccessful attempts to contain the cantankerous leak spot, with colorfully named remediation tactics such as “containment dome”, “junk shot”, “top kill”, and finally a “riser cut” that failed because of a hopelessly jammed robotic saw blade.  Meanwhile, back on the surface, BP was doing controlled burns and spraying millions of gallons of chemical dispersants on the surface slick in an attempt to break it up into smaller particles that can then should be further broken down by naturally occurring micro-organisms.  The only problem was that the remediation tactics all failed, burns only work on appropriately dense rafts of oil, and the dispersant being used, called Corexit, is a line of solvents that are suspected to cause residual respiratory, nervous system, liver, kidney and blood disorders in wildlife and humans.  Although cautioned by the US Environmental Protection Agency about Corexit’s high toxicity, BP continues to use it exclusively and liberally, claiming that it is the least toxic compound available.  Scientists are saying that the dispersant only serves to “veil” the oil from the surface, leaving it suspended in the mid-water column.  The implication being that BP seeks only to mask the scale of the massive slick that blankets the gulf.  Oil and Corexit are creating a "toxic soup" that marine biologists say is unpredictable in its long term effect on the ocean and marine life. I think the word "bad" works as a starter scenario.  A popular national radio show host/political commentator offered his assessment on air, “You do survive these things. I'm not advocating don't care about it hitting the shore or coast and whatever you can do to keep it out of there is fine and dandy, but the ocean will take care of this on its own if it was left alone and was left out there.  It's natural. It's as natural as the ocean water is.”   Yes, oil is natural, and at it’s own pace it does seep from the ocean floor via natural biological processes, but I think the flippancy and ignorance of this statement speaks for itself and the person who uttered it.


NOAA officials are now estimating that over 5,000 barrels of viscous Louisiana crude (approximately 210,000 gallons), not the 1,000 barrels that were originally thought, are escaping the multiple leak points daily.  Over a month after the first drop of oil escaped the sea floor, nearly $1,000,000,000 has been spent in response, and to the horror of environmentalists and gulf coast residents, BP officials now speculate that the leak rate may go largely unmitigated until August, when two new relief wells will be drilled to join the current one, and siphon some of the oil away to functioning surface rigs.  Even then, oil may still be pouring out of the main leak point.  Most of the signs indicate that it may not be fully contained for over a year or more. 
 


The first signs of oil coming ashore on the Louisiana mainland were recorded around the second or third week of May in parts of Louisiana as the immense plume spread.  By early June, balls of oil had drifted all the way to the Florida panhandle, staining the sugary white sands of the state’s picturesque left coast.  Despite the hundreds of miles of containment booms, the orange/brown muck has infiltrated marshlands, estuaries, bays, coves, inlets, and beaches where some of the most fragile and temperamental eco-systems on Earth exist.  Many of them are wildlife preserves.  These brackish still water areas are the heart of America’s oyster, crabbing, and shrimping industries.  The oil now covers an area of nearly a million square miles and counting of once clear blue ocean.



On June 3rd, my family sat in front of the TV watching the evening news as we usually do, and a CBS national segment about the oil spill came on.  After the reporter described BP’s latest effort (and failure), the picture went purposely quiet and cut away to a dead turtle, a dead dolphin, and then to a bewildered pelican, its entire body saturated and matted down by a thick coat of oil, as it struggled to walk and lift its wings.  Completely exhausted, it finally plopped down in a pool of muck, trying desperately to blink the oil out of its burning eyes.  The next scene was of a young marsh tern buried up to its neck in the stuff, when it flipped backward, head submerged and webbed feet up in the air, quivering in its final death throes.  The deafening silence of the video images matched our own, broken only when my eldest daughter suddenly burst into tears.  Eventually both my girls (9 & 12), who’re passionate animal lovers, were crying as they sought out the solace of their mom’s arms.  As a parent, it’s heartbreaking to see. 


This is a “big oil situation” in every sense, with yet another preventable environmental catastrophe created by another large oil corporation (and its subcontractors) that tries to dance between the raindrops, evade responsibility, and glibly underplay the impacts.  The initial and ongoing dismissiveness displayed by BP representatives is disgraceful, and there are numerous reports coming in from government and law enforcement agencies, and the domestic and international media that BP is denying them access to affected areas as to conceal the extent of the damage.  You get the distinct feeling that the welfare of their shareholders and profit margins far outweighs those of the ocean, it’s wildlife, and the multitude of commercial fishing and tourism operations that lie along the US, Mexican, Central American, northern South American, and Caribbean gulf ring.  As of late June, BP was mandated to issue a $20B recompense to spill affected commercial operations along the US Gulf coast.  Nonetheless, I cannot believe that with BP in control of who sees and reports what, that the public is getting the real story on the breadth of the damage caused to the environment., and that $20B is chump change compared to what it rightfully should be.


And while like many Americans, I’m mad as hell with BP and the gluttonous profit driven oil industry, I woke up this morning, looked in the mirror, and then drove a gasoline burning vehicle to work.  Everyday and all day, we all use items that are made of petroleum based products.  So although our generation has been suckled on the petrol -chemical teat, we all have to advocate for every future federal and scientific effort to wean ourselves off them and to embrace a new age of clean, safe, and ecologically responsible alternative fuels. It will not happen overnight, so in the meantime, the federal government needs to hold the oil industry to much stiffer regulations on the harvesting of fossil fuels such as oil.  The Gulf spill serves as a clear indicator of the US’s sloth-like approach to addressing the clean(er) energy issue, and monitoring the current methods for oil drilling.  It just doesn’t make any sense at all to go piercing the bottom of the ocean a mile down and then an additional two miles further into the Earth, uncorking ancient and vast reservoirs of crude oil and methane under immense pressure, and not have the redundant preventive systems in place when (not if) something goes awry.  I mean, there’s something staggeringly irresponsible, something inherently and ethically improper about that, isn’t there?


In my regular daily routines, I’ve done a million and a half things since April 20, 2010.  I’ve gone to work, went to my kids’ soccer games, talked story with friends, went surfing, watched ballgames on TV, went to and rose from bed, and so on.  And for every second I spent doing these and other things I can’t even remember, oil was billowing out of a hole at the bottom of the sea and poisoning it for a thousand years forward.   Anything could have happened by the time you’re reading this, but in the short term and on a day very soon, I hope we’ll all wake up in the morning, look in the mirror, go to work like we always do, and know that the oil leak has finally been stopped completely and for good.

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