View of the oil spill from space on May 24, 2010
NASA file photo
Yesterday, after an unimaginable three-month period, the gushing ecological disaster known as the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, or more commonly as the British Petroleum Oil Spill, was finally capped successfully. My fingers are crossed that this containment cap will hold, and the focus can shift from emergency measures to a sustained recovery.
I hate to be a Debbie Downer about the capping of the well - it's FANTASTIC that it has stopped gushing, but this is only the beginning of a more focused effort to actually effect a real, comprehensive clean-up instead of the current method of placing a band-aid over a bullet wound. This is a world event that will have far-reaching impacts on the environment, wildlife, the seafood industry, tourism, health care and the economy for years to come.
I really feel as if the media has fallen down on the job for much of this event. Every major media outlet is focusing on this tragedy now, but details were few and far between at the start and many reporters failed to dig deeper into what was really going on at first. A LARGE part of that can be attributed to the inappropriate control BP had over the area in the beginning and their direct use of the Coast Guard to restrict and deny access to the worst areas. Another problem, of course, was the fact that BP repeatedly lied - or 'misinterpreted' - the amount of oil that was actually gushing from the well, which caused people to unintentionally downplay the reality of the disaster. Of course, that convenient misinterpretation also slowed the response effort. When I saw twenty people in bio-hazard suits wander sluggishly down miles of beach on the news, I realized that the clean-up effort started as more of a farce than a true emergency response. Yes, there are miles of shoreline to tend to, but perhaps some of the millions BP is funneling into marketing and ad campaigns could better serve as additional funds for the EMERGENCY it is directly responsible for.
Okay, I am ranting and I haven't even gotten close to my point! It is hard not to get upset about this, but I'll try to move along...
I read in the newspaper last weekend that all the oil they're cleaning up from the beaches in bio-hazard suits has NOT been classified as a bio-hazard in terms of disposal. Say WHAT?! Yeah, that doesn't even come close to making sense to me, either. But apparently, the Department of Environmental Quality recently ran toxicity tests on the collected oil and declared it non-hazardous. Since then, Waste Management has been dumping the oil and all of the associated oil-coated trash into places like this small Mississippi landfill!
Apparently unsafe dumping has been an ongoing problem. It has even further-reaching consequences than simply being about irresponsible disposal and is contaminating areas all over Mississippi, Florida, Alabama and Louisiana. There have been reports of leaking trucks trailing oily streams behind them daily, providing ample opportunity for ground contamination and potentially causing problems for inland water supplies. This is a really good article detailing the problems of safely hauling away and disposing of the 4000 tons of solid waste (and the seemingly non-existent oversight of the workers and companies involved).
If this asphalt-like poisonous goo is allowed to be thrown away like nothing more dangerous than household trash, it will certainly leach into water tables, poison non-aquatic wildlife, impact the surrounding flora, and compound this disaster in many horrible and as-yet-unknowable ways. Why isn't this waste being sealed properly? Why isn't this issue being focused on by the mainstream media?
I had to rephrase my Google search three times to get information on where the collected oil is actually going. That is ridiculous - Google is usually a magical genie that knows what I'm looking for before I even finish typing the words. Why is information on where the oil is being sent after is it 'cleaned up' so difficult to come by? Shouldn't people be wondering where the clumpy chunks of oily sand that are being trucked away will end up? Shouldn't the government realize that allowing Waste Management, a supposedly 'green' company, to dump this stuff into landfills is a BAD, IRRESPONSIBLE IDEA? Anyone who can grasp the concept of landfills (which includes all of the thinking world except for the brains at BP and WM) should realize that they are not impenetrable lock boxes that can magically store away the evils of the world forever.
There have been almost 150 reported cases of oil-exposure related illness reported so far, with symptoms including dizziness, nausea, chest pain, headaches and vomiting, and that is simply from exposure to the oil on the beaches. What will happen when this thick crude ends up in the water, the food, and the bodies of the local people?
Don't even get me started on the rumors that they are actually dumping sand on top of the oil to hide it instead of cleaning it up - BP has proven to be so morally bankrupt that I believed that rumor immediately. Sure, the layers shown in this video could have occurred naturally, and there is no real proof that it didn't - except for the past actions of British Petroleum, a company that wants its collective lives back so badly that it doesn't really care if other people's lives are ruined in the process.
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