A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [47]
“If you see pictures from the sky, how many haphazard cuts were made in the land, it blows your mind,” says Patty Ferguson of the Pointe-au-Chien tribe. “We weren’t just fishermen. We raised crops, we had wells. We can’t anymore because of the saltwater intrusion.” Sixty-year-old tribal elder Sydney Verdin feels a tingle of vengeful satisfaction. “I’m happy for the oil spill. Now the oil companies are paying for it the same way we’ve had to pay for it,” says Verdin. “I can’t think of one Indian who ever made any money from oil.”
May 16. Out of the galaxy of goofy ideas, one that seems positively prosaic: they’ll stick a tube into the leaking pipe. Why didn’t any of us think of that? (Actually, of course, we did.) But their leaky tube is half-assed and it less-than-half works.
Incessant national airing of live video shows a lot of oil streaming past the mile-long tube sucking some of the oil from the ruptured pipe up to a waiting ship. BP is in an interesting bind. They say they’re collecting 5,000 barrels a day through the tube. But for weeks they’ve been saying the well is leaking 5,000 barrels a day. Yet we can all see clearly on TV that most of the gushing oil isn’t going into the tube. Busted!
A BP spokesman washes clean, sort of, fessing, “Now that we are collecting 5,000 barrels a day” through the tube, “it [the amount coming out of the pipe] might be a little more than that.”
A little more? It’s twelve times more.
Spin cycle: “From the beginning,” intones the BP spokesman, “our experts have been saying there really is no reliable way to estimate the flow from the riser, so we have been implementing essentially a response plan.” Anyone Buying Propaganda?
It gets better. Two days later, BP decides to announce that it is not collecting 5,000 barrels through the tube. “We never said it produced 5,000 barrels a day,” says BP’s chief operating officer. “I am sorry if you heard it that way.” Oh, it’s our mistake; we all heard it wrong. He says the tube is scarfing more like 2,000 barrels a day.
Lying? I don’t know. But, well, actually, yes, since they did say, “we are collecting 5,000 barrels a day.”
It would make BP look better if its spin doctors can convince us they’re collecting less than 5,000 daily, whether it’s true or not. Trouble is, we can’t tell. Question is: Can we trust BP?
“We cannot trust BP,” says Congressman Edward Markey. “It’s clear they have been hiding the actual consequences of this spill.” Purdue Professor Wereley, who’d estimated that the flow is more like 56,000 and 84,000 barrels daily, says, “I don’t see any possibility, any scenario under which their number is accurate.”
Ian MacDonald of Florida State University, an oceanographer who was among the first to question the official estimate, concludes that BP is obstructing an accurate calculation. “They want to hide the body,” he says. Notes Congressman Henry Waxman, who chairs the House Committee on Energy and Commerce: “It’s an absurd position that BP has taken, that it’s not important for them to know how much oil is gushing out.”
During the third week of May, Tony Hayward says, “Everything we can see at the moment suggests that the overall environment impacts of this will be very, very modest.”
When CNN’s Candy Crowley asks Thad Allen for his response, the admiral responds, “Obviously they are not modest here in Louisiana. We don’t want to perpetuate any kind of notion at all that this is anything less than potentially catastrophic for this country.”
Crowley responds with what most of us are thinking: “Well, this is why people don’t really trust BP, because here is the CEO of the company out there saying, ‘We think the environment impact will be very modest.’ ”
Allen adds, “We’re accountable. And we should be held accountable for this. We are taking this very, very seriously.”
Thank you, Thadmiral. It’s about time we got a government message in