A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [105]
Another witness at the briefing says that a sixty-nine-year-old man with sixty-nine cents in the bank called into Larry King’s Gulf telethon and pledged $10 on his credit card. Why doesn’t such decency come in corporate proportions?
Courts have ruled that a corporation’s first and foremost “responsibility” is maximizing profits for shareholders. But what if the courts had said instead—in consideration of the fact that a corporation’s profitability benefits from military, copyright, and patent protections of the United States government—and by being ensconced in a great and technologically sophisticated country made stable by its laws and the peace its taxes buy—that corporations must budget 10 percent of profits (in the age-old tradition of tithing) to doing social good? What would the world look like then?
But that would be big government, interfering with business. Burdensome regulation! Meddling with the market. Happy to enjoy the meal and loath to wash the dishes, oil companies and other multinationals slurp their market-distorting taxpayer-funded subsidies like spaghetti. But this prevents new energy technologies and new companies from getting a toehold in a real market.
Sorry; the mind drifts.
Next witness. Brittin Eustice. Charter boat captain, about thirty. He takes people fishing for fun. Rather, took. Like the guy I talked to on Dauphin Island, Eustice says he recently fished an area about eighty miles south of Port Fourchon, Louisiana. Lookin’ for the big boys: marlin, huge yellowfins. It was “very dead.” They got one small blackfin and one dolphinfish in three days of fishing. “Usually that’s what you catch in the first ten minutes,” he says; usually you see lines of live floating weed and a lot of flyingfish. It was, he testifies, “extremely unusual.” About the Oil and his life, he tells the assembled congressional folks, “No one knows what’s the plan, what the effects will be. How can I plan anything?”
National Wildlife’s Schweiger has the closing comment: “America needs clean energy …” He elaborates while my mind drifts again, because, of course, this is the most obvious message of the blowout. But before that locomotive can start moving, more fundamental things need to happen, things about money in politics.
On July 10, a Saturday, crews use undersea robots to yank six 52-pound bolts and remove the existing flange. They remove the ill-sealed cap installed five weeks ago. Oil resumes gushing. Next task: installing a 12-foot high, 15,000-pound piece of equipment that will eventually attach to the remaining hardware on the ocean floor and, on its other end, allow attachment of an 18-foot-high, 150,000-pound series of hydraulic seals that—engineers hope—will allow them to fully direct all the oil up to collection ships.
In a procedure taking several days, they install this new tighter-fitting cap, which features valves like a blowout preventer’s. On a positive note: it is possible that the cap can also close the well like the blowout preventer was supposed to do, stopping the flow of oil altogether.
It appears that BP is actually getting serious about stopping the flow of oil. Not just collecting some of it. Not just marking time while waiting for relief wells that require more weeks of drilling.
Cleverly—how refreshing to be able to say that—this new cap has a perforated temporary pipe above the valves. Rather than trying to simply cap the enormous pressure, the perforations allow the pressurized oil to continue escaping through the open valves while workers fully tighten the cap into place.
By July 14, on the eighty-fourth day of the blowout, nearly 5 million barrels—something like 200 million gallons of oil—have spewed into the Gulf. And the well is still flowing unchecked. This blowout now clearly outranks Ixtoc I’s 3.3-million-barrel blowout.
Engineers have been trying to determine if it’s safe to close the cap’s vents and let the pressure build. The worry is that