Even while you read this typeface, great plumes of crude oil are still spewing up from a broken riser pipe at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, at the site of a ruined rig 50 miles offshore.
BP is the culprit.
Government scientists now estimate the barrels of oil leaking per day to number in the 12,000 – 25,000 range. And BP’s colossal deepwater screw-up comes just shy of five years after another nasty blotch on the Louisiana history books — Hurricane Katrina.
Working on behalf of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, I’m observing (albeit, indirectly) just a fraction of the ill effects British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon spill has wrought on the Gulf and coastal states.
As a surveyor, I am charged with the duty of logging accurate boat launch counts for recreational fishermen. In towns like Jean Lafitte, Montegut, Cameron and Golden Meadow, we are consistently hearing from locals that the numbers of fishers and boaters for this time of year are sagging.
Jobless commercial fishermen and outraged citizens in the oil-producing states are deriding President Barack Obama for a measly federal response effort, and I’m finding it harder to rebuke their angry comments.
At Myrtle Grove boat launch, in particular, the Plaquemines Parish local government had organized a response effort, with the marina serving as base of operations, and commercial boats ferrying teams of parochial workers to hazard sites. We are not so certain Plaquemines had the green-light from Uncle Sam for this particular staging.
I cannot say in good conscience that BP’s foul craft is the fault of our federal government.
Captured regulatory agencies like the Minerals and Management Services aren’t exactly helping to establish good faith and credit with people whose “livelihoods [are washing] up on the beach,” as the president said last week, but BP made its bed, and now they must lie in it.
Obama’s condemning the oil giant to foot the bill for the whole disaster is a “bare minimum” compared to the destruction BP has wrought on foreign waters and soil.
The penalty for such stupefying error should at least include a tarring and feathering component — with BP crude and molted pelican feathers used, respectively, on the guilty execs— if for nothing else than public catharsis.
Katrina comparisons have been made, along with more direct allusions to the Exxon Valdez spill of 1989. Yet, Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard and Senator Mary Landrieu, and even President George Bush, did not muster the sea’s fury to summon Katrina to Louisiana shores.
But BP is the architect of our current quagmire. Post-Katrina, media and government widely acknowledged the ineptitude of the Army Corps of Engineers in constructing flood walls insufficient to stand up to the gales and floods of Katrina — the Army Corps was blamed but not held accountable in any Western Justice sense.
Conversely, Obama has put the burden on BP, and Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar vowed to “keep the boot on the neck” of the oil company.
Obama is also a painstaking orator and is careful to avoid quaint and stomach-churning turns of phrase like “Tony [Hayward] you’re doin’ a heckuva job.”
The two tragic chapters of our state’s recent history are similar debacles – yet Katrina marshaled a ghastly death toll of approximately 1,836, which leaves BP’s leak in the dust.
A gaggle of petrol-slathered brown pelicans is a grim sight, and not the kind of ugly metaphor for the state you want to explain to the kids. But the giant oil sheen is set to kill and ravage mostly aquatic life in the Gulf, and strip charter-fishermen and shrimpers of their jobs, which is, I think, mild compared to the loss of human life resultant from Katrina.
The “federal incompetence” dimension of the analogy is definitely there, though. One WWL caller diagnosed the red-tape scenario as a case of “too many chiefs, not enough Indians.”
BP drilled a deepwater well without a legitimate emergency plan. The company spouted the limp excuse that a catastrophic event (similar to the one which occurred) represented a statistical impossibility, and that they had to hedge their bets and prepare for more probable, less devastating scenarios elsewhere.
Katrina was the high moment of Nature’s wrath — unexplainable, wild and gone within a few hours, leaving quietude and ruin.
I don’t know for certain, but my thinking is BP’s deepwater spill, from the perspective of a commercial Gulf coastal fisherman, is probably akin to the trauma of being hit by an uninsured driver running a red light. There is no recourse, and the party at fault staggers away, bumbling, not really sure of what just happened.
—-Contact Trevor Fanning at [email protected].