A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [103]
We solemnly drink a shot of tequila to sundown. The whole scene is beachy enough to shake the fog of oil for a little while. Like, thirty seconds. It’s all anyone is talking about. And here, where the blowout has turned things upside down, most people are thoroughly confused.
“How deep is the well?”
“I think it’s eighteen thousand feet.”
“It’s seventeen hundred feet. The well itself starts five thousand feet from the surface.”
“No, it’s a lot more than seventeen hundred.”
“I think it’s seventeen thousand.”
“I think that’s right.”
“Or it’s seventeen thousand feet from the surface—”
“Maybe it’s seventeen thousand from the surface to the bottom of the bore?”
“No, no; from the floor of the sea, it’s seventeen thousand—. Uh, wait; you’re right. Correct, correct.”
“I don’t understand these numbers; how can they do this drilling?”
“There’s nobody in the Coast Guard who knows—I mean, the oil companies are secretive. You can’t find out anything from the oil companies.”
“That’s—to me—the government should be keeping the transparency.”
“Y’know, we put observers on fishing boats.”
“We had observers in Iraq.”
“Observers do visit, but—”
“They should have observers on all these rigs. And they should report to the public what’s going on.”
“Instead, Minerals Management Service, literally in bed with them; what I hear.”
“That whole department needs to be washed out. Start over.”
“BP’s hiring for a lotta different things. Look for oil, put out boom, check boom, move boom around—a lotta different stuff.”
“What do they tell you not to do?”
“Can’t pick up birds; gotta call them in.”
“And they got, like, a gag order. They tell you anything you find is the property of BP.”
“These past weeks have felt like months. You know it’s gonna really hit. You’re pretty sure, anyway. You don’t know when. But with these onshore winds, you know it’s coming. Don’t quote me; I have a contract. Been to training. Got my yellow card. Got my credential card. Hopin’ to get called.”
A diesel mechanic says, “All the work’s slowin’ down. People don’t use their boats, nothing breaks.”
“Recently I went for three days’ fishing in the blue water, about a hundred twenty-five miles from shore. These guys I was with are very knowledgeable about catching fish. We caught one dolphin and a barracuda. Normally at this time of year, we should’ve loaded the boat. We should’ve had lots of yellowfin tuna, wahoo, a bunch of dolphin-fish, prob’ly hooked a blue marlin. It shoulda been phenomenal. This is a very good time of the year. We were shocked. We did not see oil—but the fish are gone.”
A man named Jack, retired after thirty years of working seafood safety for the Food and Drug Administration, says in frustration, “If only the guys from Transocean had said, ‘Y’know, we’ve got a problem with one of the gauges not working right and we feel like we shouldn’t remove the fluid from the well,’ and the BP guy had said, ‘Let’s take a couple of extra days and do it right.’ That’s all they had to say. None of this would have happened. But they did the exact opposite. They forced this catastrophe on everybody.”
“And the second wolf said, ‘I can save you money by …’ ” By the bottle rockets’ red glare, I shake hands with a guy who says he was in Vietnam in 1968. I say, “That must have been unspeakable.” He says it was. He says, “What kills me about this present atrocity with the oil is that when you’ve had an investment in this country like I have made, seeing the lack of mobilization is staggering. I can’t believe this has been allowed to happen to the United States. I can’t believe that the United States allowed this to happen to itself.”
On July 7, the Thadmiral tells America via CNN.com that a relief well is “very close” to being completed, adding that he expects it to intercept its target in a mere month to five weeks.
I’m going to keep breathing.
The same CNN article informs us that Christian, Jewish, and Muslim clergy joined “in prayer and commitment to the communities