Creatures From The bp Lagoon

Gulf Coast RecOILs from Bad Pollution
by Ken Davies

It wasn’t that long ago (2005) when hurricane Katrina washed an average of six blocks of buildings off the entire 80 mile coast of Mississippi. We’ll still be rebuilding for another ten years while also recovering from insurance extortion, Wall Street bailouts and its effects on home values, and now recOILing from the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. Thanks to BP, our “Redneck Riviera” is moving toward becoming a “Wretched Riviera.”

It has all been like a horror movie unfolding ever so slowly. Anxiety and despair mount daily as one awaits each next troubling physical, chemical, economic, social or political creature to emerge from this lagoon. You can follow local Mississippi news headlines at http://www.sunherald.com/oilspill/. Disturbing are the pictures of shores and marshes soaked with oil. These will take generations to recover just like the Alaskan shores, which have still not recovered from Exxon Valdez. There are confirmed reports of BP, sometimes with official assistance, preventing journalists and photographers from gaining access to the areas. But they got there anyway. Heart breaking are the photos and videos of oil covered wildlife struggling to escape the slimy muck. Over 350 pictures of Gulf oil devastation and its effects can be seen at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/30/louisiana-oil-spill-2010_n_558287.html. There has also been such an abundance of political finger pointing and side-taking across the media that folks outside this area are starting to forget that not only hundreds of thousands of residents are being adversely affected, but also 11 oil rig workers were killed out there because BP took shortcuts on safety.

On April 20 of this year, a “ship” registered in the Marshall Islands-that’s what they legally classified the floating oil rig called Deepwater Horizon-exploded and sank, killing 11 workers and setting forth a yet unstoppable gusher of oil a mile below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, forty miles off the coast of Louisiana. The media keeps calling it a spill. Spill doesn’t get it. The Exxon Valdez dumping 10.4 million gallons in Alaska 21 years ago was a spill. This gusher spews an unknown amount of oil, first said to be 1000 barrels (42 gallons each) a day, then 5000 a day, later somewhere between 35,000 and 60,0000 barrels, maybe 2.5 million gallons a day and now latest government figures are 73.5 million to 126 million gallons a day. Whew! The numbers keep changing depending on who’s reporting. There won’t be a relief well until at least August and the possibility exists, at this writing, that the gusher could go on for years. Meanwhile, the oil is floating on, below and across the Gulf from the shores of Louisiana to the edges of Alabama and Florida. But now, this is also the start of hurricane season.

The folks who fish and make their livings from the sea say that this area is, or used to be, a land of four seasons: shrimp, oyster, crab and crawfish. At present, many of the usual federal waters are now closed to fishing. It’s shrimp season, but many shrimpers have gone to work for BP’s Vessels of Opportunity. They can make more money mopping up oil. Out-of-area boat owners also hurry to get local licenses so they can cash in, keeping more local owners unemployed. Other local boat owners are still waiting for their call from BP. Seafood restaurants scramble desperately to make deals with whatever loaded fishing boats come into harbor. Oysters, insufficiently available, are now off the menu at regional Red Lobster restaurants. Folks who own tourism businesses like motels, charter boats, beach related rentals and the like tell of cancellations and few bookings. Resort casinos are seeing fewer gamblers available to redistribute their wealth upward, so layoffs may be coming. The White House’s moratorium on drilling has left oil rig workers searching for new employment. But a Louisiana judge just overturned that. Now the White House will appeal. You get the picture. Hundreds of thousands of people are having their lives irreversibly altered if not shattered with no prospect of returning to a previous way of life during their lifetimes no matter what President Obama promises for bringing the Coast back bigger and better than ever.

There is anger. But in most non-beachfront areas life goes on more or less normally, though more slowly as the economic creatures emerge. If there is boycotting of local BP stores, it doesn’t show. People appear to shop there and there are no bullet holes in the BP signs. It feels like people assume they are just stuck in the chain of events, victims of fate, to await the curse playing out.

Political creatures arrived early on. Mississippi’s U.S. Rep. Gene Taylor, who had spent enough time in the Coast Guard Search and Rescue in his early years to know something about water, flew over the area about May 1 and declared “ This isn’t Katrina. It’s not Armageddon” and described the oily surface as a light, rainbow sheen with patches that looked like chocolate milk that would soon biodegrade naturally. We haven’t heard much from him since. Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour became famous for saying that the media is hurting tourism more than the oil is, since oil had not shown up on Mississippi beaches as yet. It is noted by many, however, that Barbour, a former tobacco lobbyist and good ol’ boy southern politician, is also the best known of oil lobbyists whose campaigns absorbed lots of oil contributions. On a national scale, the show goes on daily between the political parties visibly taking sides with big oil BP or the fishermen and other working folks. The bipartisanship, between the two parties and their seemingly multiple offshoots of talkative tea partiers and barking blue dogs, appears to be more extreme than any I recall since the 1968 arguments over Vietnam war protesting. As examples, Parker Griffith (R-Ala.), 6/15, at an Energy and Commerce hearing, argued that the treatment of oil executives has been “disrespectful.” Well, of course it has, fool! As another example, it seems Obama arranged a $20 billion escrow deal with BP to compensate the victims of the pollution as well as a $100 million fund to compensate oil rig workers during the drilling moratorium. (Most victims of Exxon Valdez had ended up getting stiffed after long years of delayed litigation.) Texas Republican congressman Joe Barton then made himself famously hated by apologizing to the BP head executive for the president’s “shakedown.” Now the Democratic National Committee has unveiled a new television ad that calls Republicans oil company loyalists who would rather apologize to BP than hold it accountable for the massive spill in the Gulf. The 30-second ad started running June 21 on national and Washington cable stations. It includes a clip of Joe Barton apologizing to BP. The apologetic Barton later apologized for apologizing.

The finger pointing extends outside congress as well. Conversations arise anew about wind turbines, solar energy, global warming, wars in oil countries and getting off fossil fuels. There are those who remind us that we hypocrites, who own cars and use energy and plastic materials, are at fault for the “spill accident.” We refuse to let them drill, baby, drill on land or shallow water. So they are forced to drill in deep water (where they apparently don’t have to pay billions in lease royalties?).

Other finger pointing is directed to safety factors. Six days before it exploded, a BP drilling engineer called it a “nightmare well.” BP didn’t listen. It would cost too much in profits. Then there was the congressional hearing. Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) noted that “what we found was that Exxon, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Shell and BP have response plans that are virtually identical. The plans cite identical response capabilities and tout identical ineffective equipment. In some cases, they use the exact same words and made the exact same assurances.” So what happens when the next “spill accident” occurs on one of those 3800 rigs out there?

It is also no longer any secret that the government regulatory agency, Minerals Management Services, that Obama inherited from Bush-Cheney was supposed to be, well, regulating. Instead, the corrupted officials when investigated were reported to have “frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions, had used cocaine and marijuana and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives.” Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll aside, the regulatory agents allowed BP folks to pen their own inspection forms. Maybe the toxic dispersants that planes spread on the oil should have been spread on the MMS a few years earlier. Instead, they spread it on the Gulf where it made the oil harder to control, contributed to the sea poisoning, and affected the air quality as the gunk came ashore, making clean up crews dizzy, headachy and nauseous.

Among the bright spots, BP has just purchased 32 units of a centrifugal oil separating device made and funded by actor Kevin Costner and his scientist brother Dan. Kevin has been working to get this in front of oil companies and government officials for about 20 years. With no chemicals, the device intakes oil spills and separate the oil from the water returning the water 97% clean. That’s a positive start.

All that is the back story as well as a good part of the future story. For those of us who live here, what will the Gulf Coast look like in a month or a year? How much toxic oil will settle to the bottom, poisoning the food chain? How much will come ashore and when? What about the local landfills where the cleanup crews are dumping what they clean up? What about toxic air quality? Will it just smell bad or will it poison us as well? How about quality of life, businesses, jobs and home values? How much more will taxes and insurances go up on our devalued homes because of this? Will the oil industry get bailed out at our expense? Will our government run interference on behalf of its people? Or will its members be clerks for big oil like they were for Wall Street? What about safety and regulations? We’ve seen deregulation. With 3800 of those rigs out there, when will the next one get out of control? How much of that oil will a hurricane bring ashore as rain or storm surge? Will insurance companies pay? Or will they dismiss congress and weasel out like after Katrina? Will we build a new energy economy? Or will it be like the famous OPEC oil embargo of 1973 when President Nixon scared us out of our Lincolns and Cadillacs, only to return to the same old same old when “they found” enough stored barrels of oil to end the crisis?-after the price increase, of course.

It looks like the largest, costliest and most famous American piece of “government subsidized artwork” here on the Gulf Coast is likely to be “Oil Swirl” by BP. The oil and gas industry, of which BP is a member, reported $169 million in 2009 lobbying expenditures. Hmm. That’s $12 million more than the entire National Endowment for the Arts appropriation for that year. A bunch of politicians are still beating up on artists and grants while trying to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts because of “obscenity accusations” going back 20 years to 1989. We can’t blame this oil obscenity on the NEA, can we? Yet, long after Jesse Helms and his favorite Serrano and Mapplethorpe photos have been forgotten, this influential expression of profit and ecology, already spanning numerous photographic and literary pieces exhibited world wide, will be remembered for decades to come.