As Len reminded us in this morning’s Daily Astrology post, this week marks the one-year anniversary of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The disaster — declared by some to be the worst maritime spill in history — killed 11 workers, released nearly 200 million gallons of oil, tens of millions of gallons of natural gas and 1.8 million gallons of chemicals. Of course, these numbers — like those given for the immediate impact of the combination earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disaster in Japan — are just the tip of the iceberg. A year after the Gulf spill, we still have no idea what its full impact may be.
A quick look at cnn.com yielded no mention of BP or Deepwater Horizon, although msnbc.com gives it a sidebar near the top of the page; likewise at alternet.org and truthout.org. Meanwhile, Democracy Now! today featured an interview with Antonia Juhasz, author of the new book, Black Tide: The Devastating Impact of the Gulf Oil Spill. Juhasz attended the BP shareholders meeting in London last week and spoke on behalf of Gulf Coast residents who were denied entry. She owns shares, and so was able to get in, although the others held proxies which should have also allowed them entrance. Among those denied was Diane Wilson, a fourth-generation fisherwoman from the Texas Gulf Coast, who describes her experience in a DN! blog sidebar.
Juhasz spent eight months embedded in the communities hardest hit by the spill, and notes that this spill did not merely shut down industry in these communities. These are mostly subsistence fishermen and women — they catch fish both to sell and to eat themselves, simply as a matter of survival. And although BP set up a claims process right away — the result of a bit of legislation spurred on by the Exxon Valdez spill — Juhasz reports that, “at this date, one year later, less than 40 percent of the claims that have been filed have even been processed, much less paid out.”
It’s a multi-layer disaster, to be sure. There is the ‘simple’ fact of oil and dispersant resting on the ocean floor, being ingested by marine life and causing slow or immediate death; there is the impact on the human beings simply trying to eke out a living by catching these fish who can no longer do so; there is the added struggle imposed on these communities by corporations more interested in giving themselves bonuses than making any kind of reparations; and in a sense, there is the next disaster waiting to happen. As with the nuclear industry’s mind-blowing levels of denial, the oil industry and their pocket-politicians are still full-steam ahead, with no new technology to prevent (or stop, once started) another massive spill: