The Oil Is Still Out There
Oil started flowing into the Gulf when the Deepwater Horizon exploded at 9:53PM CDT on April 20th, 2010. It stopped at 2:25PM CDT on July 15th.
That’s 85 days, 16 hours, and 32 minutes of oil flow.
The Department of Energy’s final estimate of 2,604,000 gallons [62,000 barrels or 8,432 metric tons] per day exceeds BP’s “worse case” guess. PBS subtracts the guesses that BP has made about the amount of oil it was sucking up from the well to produce the final total of 190,120,055 gallons [4,526,668 barrels or 615,627 metric tons] of crude oil dumped in the Gulf to kill the wildlife, foul the beaches, and destroy livelihoods.
In the end, Joe Caldart, a plumber from Kansas, gave BP the design that capped the well. It is an old story played out on multiple sitcoms with the incompetent husband attempting to fix a leak, and the basement flooding before the plumber gets called.
The BBC looks back at the BP spill: Life in Gulf of Mexico one year on
The mayor of Bayou La Batre in Alabama is spoiling for a fight. Not a raised voices, finger-pointing type of affair but a full-on physical scrap. That is how frustrated Stan Wright, who has been in office for 11 years, has become.
“We was taught down here you have to fight for what you get,” says Mr Wright, as he spits chewing tobacco into a brass pot sitting on his cluttered desk.
“I wanna get physical, I wanna beat the hell out of somebody,” he continues, slamming his large hand down to make a point.
“You know you done said everything you can say, you done everything you can do, next thing there’s the fight. But who you gonna fight when the federal government allows this company [BP] to come in and do this to us?”
Bayou La Batre has seen multiple major hurricanes since Stan Wright has been mayor, and they have come back. BP and the oil spill may be the last straw. Surgeon General Regina M. Benjamin is from Bayou La Batre, which her official biography describes as a poor fishing village.
There is a lot oil, maybe even the majority of the spill, sitting on the bottom of the Gulf, killing everything around it, but the drilling is starting again, even though nothing much has changed to make it any safer.
2 comments
The old saying “everything is connected to everything” is proved beyond a doubt by this disaster. You don’t just extinguish a couple species, or a dozen: past a certain point, you kill every blessed thing that has a niche in an ecosystem. I very much fear that has happened here, on a scale never seen before while H. sapiens walked the earth. No, the Exxon Valdez was never that big or bad. That one recovered (sort of) in a matter of decades; OTOH, the consequences of the Deepwater Horizon spill will probably continue throughout the lifespans of most of the people reading this… and the Gulf will still never be the same.
You know, if any act could persuade me that the criminal justice system should include the death penalty, ecocide could well be that act. It is a kind of murder writ large beyond imagining.
At the moment it looks like it has eliminated a generation from every species in the Gulf. There will be at least one entire year missing from the life cycle of everything. The oystermen are reporting no baby oysters. The dolphins washing up are last years’ calves. It must have happened to every other group.