Working under a mile of water is inherently dangerous, no matter what kind of precautions you take. One of my former neighbors was a pararescue diver in the Air Force and got out to do underwater construction on oil platforms. The thing he hated most was spending so much more time in the decompression chamber than actually working because there wasn’t enough room to exercise and stay in shape for the actual job, in his case specialty welding. You need to be in excellent shape just to breathe at the depths he worked in because of the pressure.

Spill, baby, spill.

I’m as guilty as the next coastal resident when it comes to the amount of work I’ve done for the “awl bidness.” Hell, I’ve even written change management s/w for offshore platforms, allowing visual mock-ups of what they will look like when those six pieces of new equipment replace those two pieces of old equipment… all connected to the safety procedures for installing/deinstalling the equipment. It’s not that they don’t try to get it right… it’s that it goes wrong just often enough to assure several disasters a year.

There has to be a better way to obtain energy. And there have to be ways of using less of it. Drilling offshore is just a bad idea, even with precautions duly taken.