A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [62]
The scenery, changing slowly. Tractors for sale. Tractors at work. Signs advertise the services of those who weld, those who build docks. “Deep Sea Fishing: 4.4 miles.” Close by but already in the past. A man named Twinkle is running for office.
One of life’s simple pleasures: driving with the radio on. I hear that the wife of one of the eleven killed says BP will never feel the pain the survivors feel. But how could it? It is not a person. Where a heart would be, it has only money.
The Supreme Court disagrees with me; five of its justices say a corporation is a person. Does a corporation have a belly button? That’s one’s passport down through ages, a living link in the one eternal chain of being, life to life. BP is no person. Person: a two-legged primate with thoughts, feelings, blood ties, dreams. Not something for courts to trifle with. Not, in truth, subject to their opinion. A sacred matter, of the greatest of mysteries.
First glimpse of Mobile, Alabama, includes too many oil rigs to count easily. One reason I’ve so seldom returned to the Gulf is the rigs’ visual blight. They’re the wide horizon’s piercing reminder of oil’s stranglehold on us, our cheap-energy addiction. The rigs flare their gas from their long arms like Lady Liberty’s torches. We are all victims, all perpetrators. What goes around comes apart.
The shorelines of Mobile Bay are confettied with orange boom. It’s hot. The sun raises an ocean haze. Right now here, the Oil is mostly an idea, the coming thing. The booms await it. The rigs foreshadow it.
On the corner, the BP station. I still have half a tank.
Scientists continue to plague us with pesky reports of massive plumes of undersea oil. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution researchers working aboard the National Science Foundation’s ship Endeavor beginning in mid-June confirm the presence of drifting oil deep below the surface. Using 5,800 separate measurements, they find a hydrocarbon plume over a mile wide, over twenty miles long, hundreds of feet thick, detectable down to 3,300 feet, and extending itself at a little over four miles a day.
People envision a river of oil. But Woods Hole chemist Chris Reddy will explain, “The plume was not a river of Hershey’s syrup.” The water samples collected at these depths had no odor of oil and were clear. The dilute oil was detected by instruments. “But that’s not to say it isn’t harmful to the environment,” he adds.
And in perhaps the world’s first case of plume envy—or whatever you’d call it—the University of Georgia’s Samantha Joye says her plume is bigger than theirs; she says Woods Hole’s plume “doesn’t hold a candle to the plume we saw.”
Whether like syrup or seltzer, the thought of massive plumes of undersea oil is disturbing. So from what corner shall come the next volley of fresh reassurance? National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) officials call the academic scientists’ announcements of their discovery of plumes “misleading, premature and, in some cases, inaccurate.”
Note: “in some cases.” Interesting phrase. An exception big enough for a wiggly pig. Means—it would seem—that “in some other cases” it is accurate to say there are giant undersea plumes of hydrocarbons now drifting in the Gulf.
NOAA says oxygen depletion in the waters surrounding plumes is not “a source of concern at this time.” NOAA says critics blaming dispersants for the plumes have “no information” to back their claims up. NOAA administrator Dr. Jane Lubchenco, whom Newsweek—in a carefully crafted phrase—calls “a respected oceanographer when President Obama tapped her to lead the agency,” says there are no “plumes,” only “anomalies.”
Now, wait a minute. Don’t tell me “no information.” Obviously, the oil is coming out of the seafloor. The dispersants are designed to keep it underwater. It’s coming from beneath the surface. It’s being dispersed beneath the surface. And when it surfaces, it’s being hit with dispersants