A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [95]
Because of the early “not leaking; too early to say catastrophe” statements by the Coast Guard, because of the tone implied by “anomalies, not plumes,” because of the BP–Coast Guard marriage and the chronic official bullying, because the EPA seems to let BP shrug off even weak directives, because, because, because—nobody believes “them” when they say the dispersants are “practically” non-toxic. Whether they’re right or wrong is beside the point. The point is: “they” have a credibility problem; they’ve lost the people’s trust. No one is sure who to believe. There is no real source of reliable information, and people continue to believe, think, and feel a lot of things that aren’t true. But some are true. It creates confusion.
So, rightly or wrongly, people remain concerned that the dispersants will kill plankton, fish, and other marine life. People are concerned they’ll taint seafood. People are concerned that they’ll break up millions upon millions of gallons of oil so that it pollutes vast swaths of the Gulf, making the oil unrecoverable, rendering millions of feet of boom useless on principle, bathing fish eggs and larvae, making things die, getting long-term into commercial fish, shrimp, and oysters, and taking bolt cutters to the food chain.
Certainly all that is “true” in a strict sense, but the important questions are: How much, for how long? Will it kill a lot of plankton? Will it seriously taint seafood? Or, in the vastness and chemical complexity of the Gulf, will the effects be trivial and temporary? It’s so hard to know.
An EPA spokesperson: “Before making any alterations to the current policy of allowing heavy dispersant use, we will need to have additional testing of the dispersants plus the oil.”
Allow it, then do tests. Isn’t that completely backward? They’re allowing the whole region to become a laboratory of lives.
St. Tammany Parish president Kevin Davis isn’t having any of this. He simply calls on the Coast Guard commander to immediately end use of dispersants. “Breaking the oil down so that it travels underwater and resurfaces is creating a situation where we can neither see it nor fight it,” Davis says. “This is not a prudent course of action.”
Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart tells us that BP has had 760 “willful, egregious safety violations” over the last three years. ExxonMobil, by contrast, has had one. “Exxon,” explains Stewart, “could get seventy times the willful, egregious safety violations and still be ninety percent safer than BP.”
A few days after the Coast Guard declares “willfulness” a felony, BP generously decriminalizes free speech in America, encouraging workers to talk to the press if they wish to. About that, a shrimp boat captain says, “Yeah, I saw that notice. But our contract still says our people on our boat can’t talk to anyone.”
With a perceived crisis in oil supply not just from the blowout but also from Obama’s drilling bans and moratoriums, I expect a surge in gasoline prices. But the price of gasoline is going down. Is this because calls to get beyond oil might galvanize political pressure to move away from fossil fuels and do more for clean energy—so gasoline prices are getting fixed? It’s as if, just when we’re waking up to fight the bad guys, they give us another shot of muscle relaxant.
Do you remember the “ultimate solution,” relief wells? By the first week of July the first relief well is about 1,000 feet vertically from its targeted point of interception with the blowing well—a target, remember, seven inches wide, 18,000 feet below the Gulf’s surface. In scale, the drill pipe is like a wet hair extending thousands of feet from the drilling rig, through the ocean, and deep into the seafloor. How can they know where it is, where it’s headed, and where it needs to go?
It’s very high-tech. To determine the inclination (angle) and azimuth (compass direction), accelerometers and magnetometers send binary pulses through the drill pipe to the drill rig.