Revisiting the Gulf two years later

BP’s “Macondo” well, which ruptured and sent the Gulf of Mexico and this nation into a tailspin two years ago – was named after that village in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s classic “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” The fictional village was destroyed by an apocalyptic storm and erased from history. Marquez was one of my favorite authors who I studied religiously at University of Arizona in a literature program. Along with anything to do with marine ecosystems — I was on it starting at age 8. The health of the ecology of the Gulf of Mexico is not good. The health of the people there is sketchy. The effectiveness of our ability to wrest control of the oil economy and manage our country’s oversight over the crimes of the drilling and platform operators is in worse shape. What did President Obama say two months after the wellhead blew on April 20, 2010, killing 11 working men and 60 days after it had already dumped millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf? “It’s the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced.” Two years later, is there closure? Repair? Greg Palast, investigative reporter, discussed the settlement in March: “I think a settlement is horrific, because it includes no provision that was expected for punitive damages. When I did the investigation with Rick Rowley, we went to the Caspian Sea, and found out that there was a prior blowout at a BP rig, Transocean rig, for the same exact reason as the Gulf: the cheap, crap cement that they use … . That’s the type of information we need from the trial. There should have been, and it was completely expected that there would be, a provision for punishment, for punitive damages. What BP was able to pull off here was, effectively, massively increasing the fee to lawyers, but not one single dollar added to the fund that Obama had already forced on BP, not one dollar added to the $20 billion. The same exact terms, and yet no trial.” These stories about BP, the suit, settlements, and the current health of people and animals in the Gulf are pretty consistent when one reads the news from non-mainstream media. Palast wrote, “BP Settlement Sells Out Victims: Deal Buries Evidence of Oil Company Willful Negligence.” His new book is called “Vultures’ Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates, and High-Finance Carnivores.” Also covering the BP settlement trial was Antonia Juhasz, working for The Nation magazine on a grant from the Nation Investigative Fund. Her book, “Black Tide: The Devastating Impact of the Gulf Oil Spill,” plays a big role in my understanding the entire mess with BP, Halliburton, TransOcean and all the others that put people and ecosystems through with felonious lack of planning for possible impacts of a failed cement cap was destined to blow out. Juhasz said: “I think that one of the things that’s key is that these numbers that ultimately come out of this disaster need to be, for BP, at least about $60 billion total. Otherwise, we’re going to continue with a process that analysts are saying right now for BP, the way the settlement is moving is that this could be great for BP. What it will do is price out smaller companies from deep water who can’t afford to deal with what are expected to be even more disasters, because they don’t really know how to do deepwater drilling, but the big guys that can afford the settlements will get to take over. That means we’re pushing deep water into the hands of the BPs, the Shells, the Exxons, the companies we don’t trust anyway.” Again, thanks to non-mainstream media, like Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez, hosts of Democracy Now, for getting folk like Greg and Antonia on the air. We have so much to revisit, re-examine, and re-invigorate when thinking about all the factors around and behind the blowout, the unbelievably bad responses by BP and our government, and the incredible long-term effects of the oil, gas, and dispersant had and will have on people and animals. The first daunting message of this entire “oil in our veins” fiasco is the disaster’s absolute magnitude.  15,000 barrels of oil a day  210 million gallons total  500,000 tons of natural gas seeped out  2 million gallons of toxic Corexit dispersant applied from air and water  410 “controlled burns” of oil on the surface  72 million pages of documents  BP is the largest producer of oil and gas in the U.S. Gulf Coast  British Petroleum is the world’s fourth largest company  $7.8 billion to victims of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico  Deepwater Horizon was working in 5,000 feet of ocean and 41 miles from Louisiana It all brings me back to DTE’s commitment to “Dispatches from a Disaster (here)”, and letting me and others bring to Spokane Marc Gauthier’s valiant and heroic trip to the Gulf in a sub-compact rental with his sea kayak strapped to the top and his camera by his side. That effort was rewarded with Gauthier’s creative outpouring and deeply enriched transformation; witnessing the effects of unstoppable oil, ineptitude and hubris, plus volatile compounds eating at the sanity and physiology of people, plants, animals and Marc himself changed him for life. “Gulf Coast Blues – Oil in Our Veins” is an hour-plus long film with several extra shorts bundled in. You can learn more about that project here and watch the trailer visit here. One moment in the film shows Marc recording himself while sitting in the car, after a hard week playing cat and mouse with Gulf Coast officials to try and make sense of the foot-dragging, media blackout and just plain “banana republic” lack of effort to help people and planet. He is talking about dolphins he had just seen break the oil sheen surface. It moved him to tears realizing the short- and long-term effects of that oil and those fumes on the mammals’ immediate futures as well as the effect on possible newborns. For more information about Marc and this project, visit here or here.