A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [51]
My question is: Why are they using dispersants at all? As the incessant video shows, the entire leak is erupting from one small pipe. It’s not like a massive tanker spill, where it’s all in the water already and there’s no ongoing “source.” This is very different. They have their hands around this whole thing at that pipe. It seems to me it could all be captured. After all—it’s an oil well.
And now: voider of her own election, former Alaska governor turned national misfortune Sarah Palin comes out of her nutshell again to say that—to make a long story short—Obama’s response has been slow. It’s another signature blast of her sound-and-fury insight. And it prompts White House spokesman Robert Gibbs to suggest that Palin needs her own personal blowout preventer.
Granted, the administration’s response does seem slow. And the Coast Guard, in my estimation, has been disappointing. Our president disagrees with the likes of Palin and me, saying, “Those who think we were either slow on the response or lacked urgency, don’t know the facts.”
In a late-May press release, a group called Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility alerts us to the details and particulars of the BP response plan. Basically, there aren’t any. Plus, it’s so full of nonsense that apparently no regulator read it seriously.
Dated June 30, 2009, the “BP Regional Oil Spill Response Plan—Gulf of Mexico” covers all of the company’s various operations in the Gulf. The plan lists “Sea Lions, Seals, Sea Otters, and Walruses” as “Sensitive Biological Resources” in the Gulf. None of those animals live there (at least not since the Caribbean monk seal went extinct in the 1950s). BP has obviously just cut-and-pasted from documents written for drilling in Alaska. The document also gives a Japanese home-shopping website as a “primary equipment providers for BP in the Gulf of Mexico Region for rapid deployment of spill response resources on a 24 hour, 7 days a week basis.” The sea turtle expert you’re supposed to call is a researcher who’s been dead for five years. And the 600-page plan never discusses how to stop a deepwater blowout.
By May’s last waning days, some fishermen hired to do cleanup by BP say they have become ill after working long hours near oil and dispersant. Headaches, dizziness, nausea. Difficulty breathing. Burning eyes. The EPA’s air monitoring has detected odors strong enough to cause sickness. The EPA’s website warns coastal residents that these chemicals “may cause short-lived headache, eye, nose and throat irritation, or nausea.”
BP says it’s unaware of any health complaints.
That’s because: “You don’t bite the hand that feeds you,” says the president of the Commercial Fishermen’s Association. Many fishermen have told him about feeling ill. “You left in the morning, you were OK. Out on the water, you’ve got a pounding headache, throwing up.” And yet, he says, “BP has the opinion that they are not getting sick.”
Maybe time for a second opinion.
On May 26 BP subjects us to two new vocabulary terms. Of all the kooky names for dopey ideas, these two take the cake: “junk shot” and “top kill.” Let’s use them in one sentence: “They don’t work either.” The rodeo names reflect the rodeo thinking that got us here. One half-baked idea after another.
The Bright Ploy this time: attempt to stop the upward flow of oil by sending heavy drilling fluid down the well. Workers have triggered the original blowout and explosion by removing the heavy drilling fluid that had, in fact, been holding down the oil. So we might call this the “oops” strategy, as in “Oops, let’s go back to what was working before we caused the blowout.”
It’s way too late now, though. As the University of Texas’s Petroleum Engineering Department chairman says, “You have the equivalent of six fire hoses blasting oil and gas upward and two fire hoses blasting