WORSE THAN THE EXXON VALDEZ

From the New Orleans Times-Picayune:

To understand the gravity of the danger facing Louisiana's coast from the oil that began washing ashore Thursday, pollution clean-up veterans offered this starting point: Forget the word "spill."

"This isn't a spill," said Kerry St. Pe, who headed Louisiana's oil spill response team for 23 years. "This isn't a storage tank or a ship with a finite amount of oil that has boundaries. This is much, much worse."

It's a river of oil flowing from the bottom of the Gulf at the rate of 210,000 gallons a day that officials say could be running for two months or more. If that prediction holds, much of the state's southeastern coast will become a world-watched environmental battleground that hasn't been seen in the United States since the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska 21 years ago.

For residents of coastal communities and the vast fleet of commercial and sports fishers that call those wetlands home, that fight will become part of the daily scene. Coastal scientists and clean-up experts say the source and volume of the pollution combined with seasonal wind directions and tides have the potential to push oil deep into local estuaries, bringing the army fighting the oil and its miles of containment booms to much of the marsh. And, it has the potential to spread to every state along the Gulf Coast.

More here.

This is really starting to piss me off.

A massive river of crude oil is coming to Louisiana. It will devastate the fishing industry here, a bedrock of the local economy. Lots of people are going to lose their jobs; lots of businesses will go under. And that's just one of the obvious effects on the economy. The wetlands will also be devastated. In addition to what will likely be millions of dead fish, birds, and other animals, the vegetation that keeps the Gulf of Mexico from swallowing the marshes and swamps that serve as hurricane buffer for South Louisiana will also take a major hit. Louisiana's coastline may literally disappear as a result of this "spill." I have no idea what the economic effect of losing hundreds of square miles of coastline will be, but it can't be good.

And who's going to pay for the cleanup? I'm betting that BP, which leased and ran the destroyed rig responsible for the "spill," and which, as observed on NPR Thursday afternoon, had no "plan B" for when their anti-explosion equipment failed, will fight against liability in the courts, tooth and nail. If they lose, which probably won't happen, they'll just declare bankruptcy, default on their debts, reorganize, and start doing business again. If they win, the most likely scenario, we'll pay. More public money paying for private profit. Another shitty bailout of robber barons who have nothing but contempt for humanity.

I am particularly disgusted with all that "drill, baby, drill" rhetoric so casually uttered by politicians and pundits who have no idea what they're talking about. I am especially disgusted with President Obama, who recently gave the go-ahead for lots more offshore drilling, even though it won't really do much to help us with energy shortages.

But it's not just about economics and politics. This is fucked up. A major oil corporation goes "oops" and suddenly people's lives are upended. Permanently.

There's a damned good reason environmentalists have been working their asses off for decades to limit offshore drilling to the level it's at now: when offshore drilling fucks up, it fucks up bad. Same with nuclear energy, too. Why don't our leaders understand that there's literally no margin for error with this shit? Why aren't we aggressively pursuing clean energy? I mean, for god's sake, we put a fucking man on the moon. Answer: greed, shitloads of cash, and politicians who take payoffs euphemized as "campaign donations." That is, our corrupt political system simply doesn't give a shit what happens to you and me.

South Louisiana's going to be scrubbing tar out of its life for a decade or more. Fucking assholes.

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