Clusterfuck in the Gulf
Every time I start thinking about the ongoing BP catastrophe I start foaming at the mouth and then end up getting so pissed I lose track of the points I’d like to advance. Suffice to say, there’s probably more bullshit flowing from Corporate BP than crude from the Deepwater Horizon well and as you’ll see shortly, that’s a whole lot of bullshit!
First off and right after the collapse BP said they were “leaking” maybe a 1000 barrels a day and to me that sounded fairly innocuous given that’s about enough crude to fill a decent sized swimming pool. Then it went to maybe 3000, then 5000 and when they realized some of that shit was floating and folks were going to see and smell it they were forced to admit a “slightly” higher amount. Trouble was/is they were lying their asses off, as now it’s fairly evident there was something around 100,000 barrels a day and that’s a huge F’ing difference! Before I do a little math you need to appreciate the fact that crude oil kills just about everything it touches and if it wasn’t pretty well entombed underground, we, as a species probably wouldn’t be around and if by some small chance we were, trust me on this, things would be a whole lot different. So, lets do a little barnyard math, ‘kay? 85 days times 100,000 is 8,500,000 barrels and at 42 gallons a barrel that comes out somewhere in the vicinity of a whole shitload of stuff that fucks up any and everything it comes in contact with. Oh yeah, you can’t overlook how much dispersant BP injected directly into the plume to hide the actual amount of flow, because that shit is more than likely just as, if not more toxic than the crude itself. So now America’s lake, AKA the Gulf of Mexico, is more akin to a hot tub some fool took a dump in instead of a large source of not only our food, but an ecological area that directly effects Florida as well as a large part of our eastern seaboard. How totally uncool is that? And they think $20 billion is gonna cover it? Yeah, right..
Be that as it may, it appears they’ve finally stopped the flow, at least temporarily, but make no mistake and no matter how much you hear in the coming month’s about how everything gonna’ be just fine, America’s lake isn’t going be the same. Not in my lifetime and very likely not ever.
Anyway, all this leaking/seeping/gushing oil thing got me to wondering just how many damn wells there are in the Gulf and answer was mind blowing to say the least. Ya’know, I’ve spent some time on the redneck riviera and just looking at the derricks/platforms from the beach it appears like someone could walk from Mobile to Galveston on those damn things and not get their feet wet, but the reality is much worse and I mean a hell of a lot worse. Since WWII something like 50,000 wells have been drilled in the Gulf, of those about 23,500 have been abandoned, another 3,500 or so have been”temporarily abandoned,”(whatever the fuck that means) but some have been left that way since the 1950’s and guess what? NOBODY has ever bothered to check ANY of them! WTF? “Regulators at the Minerals Management Service – recently renamed the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement – have routinely been accepting industry reports on well closures without inspecting the work. And no one – in industry or government – has been conducting checks on wells that have been abandoned for years.” Say what???
If that isn’t a fucked up system I don’t know what is. Heh, if you’re the guy drilling the wells it’s not, otherwise the whole deal pretty much sucks. Consider this, say that 99% of those wells are secure and aren’t leaking,(highly unlikely) that means a couple hundred are, but under the current system we’ll never know! Bottom line, we need regulation, inspection as well as enforcement with sharp teeth, not to mention royalties. I mean, where’s the F’ing Army Corps of Engineers? This sounds like something they’d be well suited to handle, but what do I know? I’m just a schmuck that likes to catch a fish now and then, eat oysters and shrimp and maybe sit on a beach someplace you don’t need a hazmat suit..
As crazy as all that is it’s not just endemic to the oil industry, the same sort of rules govern pretty much all activity on Govt. controlled lands, be it coal mines, gold mines, or oil wells.(natural gas wells have their on set of non-rules thanks to Darth Cheney) Case and point,there’s a privately held foreign company that has a bigass gold mine out west (Nevada?) somewhere and they pretty much strip mine the desert for gold and silver, nobody cares much that they devastate the land because it’s a fucking desert and there isn’t much there besides rattlesnakes and scorpions, but guess what? These guys don’t pay us a damn dime for the gold! They come in and mine the desert, mix in a bunch of toxic shit like mercury and then extract the gold, their only benefit to this country are a few jobs, is that a sweet deal, or what? I mean what other country would go for a sham deal like that? I dunno for sure, but other than maybe Nigeria not too many. As far as I can tell this all started after the civil war when we needed to generate money and used our vast natural resources to that end, but that was over 150 years ago and times, as well as the need to rape our country for a few jobs has long since past, especially so when you realize they don’t ever pay royalties. Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not saying to stop it completely, I’m saying we need to control who does what and make damn sure they not only pay us, but are on the hook if anything should EVER go wrong, this giving away of our resources has got to stop! If you wanna play, dig, drill, or mine you gotta pay and if you find something worthwhile you gotta pay more, if you can’t deal with that there’s always Nigeria..
Till next time, keep your eyes wide and don’t let the bastards beat you down…
T3