A black tide of death is ebbing its way from the far depths of the ocean and sloshing along the shores of the southern United States. The oil envelops all things and kills the living in a slow choking fate of grease. The destruction is far beyond a single creature or species – it swallows whole ecosystems and its disruptions will echo across the entire country financially and politically.
The profit-driven catastrophe began in a baptism of human blood April 20 when 11 oil rig workers were burned, blown or drowned to death in the initial fiery explosion.
The Deepwater Horizon drilling rig sank 5,000 beneath the gulf as a number of Coast Guard ships attempted to quell the natural gas and oil fed fire.
The rig suspended a long metal pipe from the sea floor and when it sank, this engineering thread buckled alongside it, resting in a heap on the ocean’s floor. It now rests at a depth too great for even modern man to tread and the entire recovery/repair operation must be done with remote controlled robot submarines. It all sounds like the start to modern science fiction thriller.
Just a side note, but 40 years ago our country sent three astronauts to the moon on Apollo 11 for more than 21 hours in a four-day round trip back to Earth.
I keep thinking back to all the doomsday movies where the most famous actors pretend to be our world’s most genius scientists and policy makers. Together with some luck and exaggeration, they always seem able to save Earth despite the fact its annihilation was only 72 hours away to start. After seeing how we’ve reacted to the gulf spill, their fiction is all too clear.
If the oil spill had been a doomsday meteorite speeding apocalypse towards Earth, we’d be extinct by now.
All the might of the United States of America and its largest corporations (big oil) apparently lack the ability to successfully plug the out-of-reach hole. We can topple sovereign nations in a matter of days and coordinate multiple foreign wars, but we can’t stop the oil.
What’s it say about a culture the can dig itself a hole it can’t fill? We have the technology to reach these distant petroleum reserves and the technology to keep it secure. This is an incident where incompetence was motivated by capital gain and operator error. “We have the technology,” as they so dramatically say, but apparently not the judgment to implement it correctly.
Though I wonder if I’m being too harsh, after all no industry can be perfect – but this one mistake is akin to Russia’s Chernobyl.
