Note to Readers: Today we are offering a retrospective of our coverage of the BP oil spill that began one year ago today. The rig blowout happened within hours of Chiron first entering Pisces on April 20.
At the time, this news was so agonizing that few of us could imagine things could or would get worse. Now, with several nuclear reactors damaged and spilling radioactive steam and water into the environment, we do indeed have a worse global situation on our hands. Yet today, we peons out here in the public don’t have a clue the real extent of the damage.
By some estimates, BP was allowed to intentionally dump nearly as much Corexit dispersant into the ocean, as there was oil that leaked. The contents of that chemical, millions of pounds of which were dumped into one of the world’s most exploited fishing areas, are not known to the public. And one year on, the regulations for blowout preventers are no better than they were that day.
New deepwater drilling permits are being issued allowing use of the same technology that caused the BP blowout and spill on April 20, 2010. This article was published May 7, 2010. Here is a link to the original presentation. –efc
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What happened to wonders we once knew so well?
Did we forget what happened, surely we can tell.
— Jon Anderson, Yes
Dear Friend and Reader:
It’s ominous to me that the explosion aboard the BP/Transocean/Mitsubishi oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico happened within hours of Chiron entering Pisces on April 20. Chiron, a planet that has a knack for revealing the weakness in a system, ingressed Pisces at about 1:31 am CDT; by 10 PM the oil rig was in flames and 210,000 gallons a day of crude was leaking into the gulf. A survivor said in an interview that the workers had about five minutes to evacuate.
Two days later the burning rig sank, taking 700,000 gallons of diesel fuel with it, leaving a snarled tangle of metal over the wellhead on the sea floor a mile down. All work that happens from this point on will be done by robotic submarines, working in the dark, in the midst of a gushing flow of crude oil.
Many frightening questions remain unanswered, and many are not being asked by the cosmetic journalism that is covering this story, or rather covering it up: for example, how much oil can we dump into one ocean and not threaten life in the rest of them? How little does it take to disrupt the ecosystems of the Earth and make our one and only planet unsuitable for life?
As Jonathan Schell said in The Fate of the Earth, we don’t have another planet to experiment on, so we don’t want to take too many chances. But we are taking many. I never thought I would be writing an obituary for the Gulf of Mexico. With this event, the world as we know it has changed irrevocably. It is on the level of an undersea Chernobyl — the 24th anniversary of which passed on April 27, as this event was in its early days. The impact of that event, too, has been grossly minimized: a new book has come out presenting evidence that the death toll was not 4,000 but closer to one million. The ‘story of the environment’ — any story, and all of them added up — looks one way when it’s told by industry or government, and another way when it’s looked at honestly.