Remembering the Deepwater Horizon oil spill
The other day I found an old T-shirt in the bottom of a box in the closet, a 3XL anti-British Petroleum shirt that fits like a tent now (6 years and 80lbs ago). It brought back a lot of memories of living in the Florida Panhandle during the tragic oil spill of 2010.
Six years have passed since the Deepwater Horizon oil spill that dumped 210 million gallons of crude into the Gulf of Mexico. So much has changed since then. I was living in Panama City, Fl at the time of the spill, it was my first summer there as a resident. While we all had fears of our beautiful beaches being inundated with oil, we all saw and felt the economic downturn that occurred even without oil on the beaches.
It was a summer of discontent. Millions of gallons of oil lurked offshore, somewhere off in the distance, prone to the Gulfstream and the tides, the winds, and, God forbid, the possibility of a hurricane spinning up and dropping loads of the black stuff right on your doorstep. I recall teams of volunteers being poised and ready to clean soiled marine life. It was even predicted that one might need to wear a respirator mask in order to go to the beach. Indeed, a dark cloud hung over the community and just offshore in the waters as well. There were arguments and punches thrown at town hall meetings, boycotts of BP gas stations, people in the tourist business fighting with family members who were in the oil drilling business, and millions of gallons of the mysterious chemical Corexit.
As summer began things got heated fast as the watch for oil on the beaches continued. Fishing boats were employed to drag booms in an attempt to corral oil slicks that were slowly creeping up on the white sands of the panhandle. These fishermen, whose livelihood was being destroyed, turned to BP in the cleanup effort for a paycheck. BP, being the dirtbags that they are, turned around later and tried to deny the same fisherman any kind of payout in their $25 billion settlement with the US government, even as they were falling ill and their future earning ability was being destroyed.
The news was contradicting: BP officials saying there was no oil on the beaches, while news reporters exposed oil buried some 12 to 18 inches below the surface of the sand in some places. I clearly remember going to a favorite spot on the west end of Panama City Beach one day, only to encounter yellow tape. The beach had been closed off after a giant refrigeration unit from the exploded oil platform had washed up on the beach, partially buried in the surf. It was a graphic image of the catastrophe, incidentally the largest man-made disaster in US history, which had seemed invisible but also seemed to have no end in sight. Now that a piece of the platform was on our shore, the lies of the executives and the politicians started to melt away in the steamy Florida heat.
Where was all the oil? 210 million gallons being pumped into the Gulfstream yet none of our beaches were being coated with it. BP officials had a variety of explanations; they were stopping it with booms, the numbers were being exaggerated by the media, Corexit was being sprayed directly into the flow of the well dispersing the oil and causing it sink to the bottom of the gulf, Corexit was harmless, on and on.
Corexit has since been proven to be very harmful. Studies have shown that it can increase the toxicity of oil up to 52 times! 4.9 million gallons of the chemical dispersant was used in the gulf causing the oil to sink to the bottom. This chemical has essentially destroyed part of the food web of the gulf, coral reef's at the deepest parts of the gulf are covered with a mixture of oil and Corexit, and recent studies have found that oil is lingering in the mid depths as well. In 2015 a 25,000lb BP tar mat was found on a Louisiana barrier island (http://www.mississippiriverdelta.org/blog/2015/03/18/five-years-after-the-oil-spill-dead-dolphins-and-25000-pound-tar-mat-found/). And the spilling continues, from Oregon to Peru to, yes, Louisiana, where just a few weeks ago 90,000 gallons of oil was spilled by Shell about 100 miles due south of New Orleans (http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2016/05/13/3778155/shell-gulf-spill/).
The beaches of the Florida Panhandle were largely "spared" by the use of this chemical dispersant. However, fear essentially killed a summers worth of business for many shopkeepers that rely on tourist income from the summer months to sustain them throughout the year. Six years later there are many claims that are still unpaid by BP, with others being offered pitiful settlement amounts.
So far British Petroleum has been held accountable for about $35 billion worth of the damages from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, they set aside $56 billion total for the anticipated costs. This leaves some $21 billion in the money pool and yet BP is still dragging their feet. They've paid out billions of dollars to investors for the lies they told about the severity of the spill. Just to be clear, the cost of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill will be incurred for many decades to come. $56 billion is but a drop in the bucket.
The public health costs have yet to be tabulated. After all, life is precious. How do you put a dollar figure on the lives that have been lost, much less the lives we could lose as the cancerous nature of this toxic chemical/oil blizzard beneath the sea rears its ugly head in the decades to come?
A dollar figure cannot be placed on this type of tragedy, and it is incumbent upon all of us to not only never forget the scope and magnitude of this disaster, but to take action.
Jesse Alberson
June 8, 2016
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