A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [91]
And why wasn’t the “Minerals Management Service on the rig that day making sure the regulations were properly followed”? Precisely because of people who champion smaller government, less regulation, more freedom for industry. Let’s face it: most people who think they’re “conservatives” these days are mainly phonies, radical front people for big business dedicated to removing public safeguards and safeguarding private greed. The missed point about whether government should be small or big, strong or weak is: it’s our government. It should be accountable to us. Real conservatives would tell corporations to go to hell when they try to contribute campaign money, when they work to influence elections. By allowing themselves to become obsessed with the demand for “small government,” “deregulation,” and taxes, in effect they mostly represent big corporations that pocket profits and dump their risks and the costs onto other people. Some of the other people are too angry to realize that there’s a shell game going on. The rest of us are simply too comfortable. “The best lack all conviction,” Yeats said, “while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
It’s hot. And because it’s so hot, BPs beachside cleanup workers—30,000 of them—are told to work for twenty minutes and rest for forty. For $12 an hour, the work is sweaty and uncomfortable, but not overly taxing. To save their backs, workers are not allowed to put more than ten pounds of oily sand in a bag. That’s not much sand. Hundreds and hundreds of plastic bags, each with its little dollop of the besmirched beach—where are the hundreds of thousands of plastic bags, oily absorbent materials, and hundreds of tons of oily trash going? Landfills. Mixed with regular trash. Because it has to go somewhere. Don’t worry: BP says that “tests” have shown that the material is not hazardous.
Someone on the radio is saying, “… To get near oil on the beaches, people need special training. But BP has troops … thousands of workers, who have received such training.…”
They make oil sound so special. It’s oil. Gasoline’s more dangerous. Ever fill your car’s tank? Ever change your car’s oil? You don’t need special training. For anyone with a pair of old sneakers and a shovel, it should be no Big Problem to pick up a little oil if they want to.
Out on the water, some of the workforce sits idle. About 2,000 vessels are supposedly involved in the cleanup efforts. But many captains sit aboard their boats, awaiting instructions. For this, BP pays them, say, $1,000 a day (the fee varies with the size of the boat). Meanwhile, thousands of people from around the country want to drop everything and come help. But there’s nothing for them to do. And their calls don’t get returned. Forty-four nations have offered to help. For the most part, their calls don’t get returned, either.
“The clean-up effort has not been perfect,” BP’s new American spokesmouth, Bob Dudley, acknowledges. But, seeking to assuage fears in the only language known to multinational corporate brains, he adds that BP remains a “very strong company in terms of its cash flow.”
Science bulletin: an astonishing congregation of dozens of the world’s largest fish—whale sharks—have been discovered in the Gulf of Mexico. One aerial photograph showed about ninety of the behemoths together, about sixty miles from the oil. “It blew my mind,” says the University of Southern Mississippi’s Eric Hoffmayer. The bad news? You guessed it: some of them have also been seen in heavy oil. They eat tiny creatures that they strain from the water. Their feeding technique includes skimming the surface and moving almost 160,000 gallons of seawater through their mouths and gills per hour as they feed on tiny fish and plankton. Watching them, you get the impression that their feeding method is the worst possible technique for surviving an oil slick. “This spill’s impact came at the worst possible time and in the worst possible location for whale sharks,” Hoffmayer