“Drill Baby Drill”, Really? : Deepwater Oil Spill For Dummies

This article is meant for all of you out there who can’t figure out what in the world is all the oil spill fuss about, but do care to fashionably go-green. The catastrophe being talked about is far from funny, and thus my inability to treat it with levity. Let’s just agree than fewer people will be looking for offshore drilling jobs in offshore oil rigs this fiscal year.

The Deepwater platform oil spill is a massive explosion that took place in the oil rig maintained by BP in the Gulf of Mexico. The oil well, one of the deepest ever under-water one, blew up killing 11 workers and is now not-so slowly destroying much more. Despite having “fail-safe” valves employed by the company that would not allow oil to gush out in the event of a blow-up, every day about 19,000 barrels of oil is being leaked into the ocean. This is a disastrous figure in front of what BP had assumed to be 5000 barrels.

A better example of corporate greed and the world’s insatiable dependence on oil cannot be fathomed. The spill has sparked off heated debates about the usage and dependence of the U.S. on oil, a fuel that is unsafe, nonrenewable, dangerous to drill, and above all, filthy to use. The BP CEO’s oil spill response, apart from claiming the the spill to be “relatively tiny” when compared to how large the ocean is,  is that any effects on the environment would be “very very modest”. *sigh*

To clean up the oil, approaches employed by BP intended to stop the spill, have effectively fallen flat on their faces. The most ambitious one called “top kill”, which involved sending heavy fluid like mud and cement into the well to stop the flow has failed miserably. Their next attempt to close the opening could take more than 2 months to show any results. This would involve sending robot submarines to cap the opening with a valve. Deepwater engineering has a new challenge ahead, and the doubts will continue to expressed in the years to come.

Amongst all this, politics still flourishes as reports of Grand Isle, Lousiana getting more clean-up attention due to Obama’s visit crop up. Bob Abbey has been appointed the acting director of now deep-in-shit Minerals Management Service. The last director has presumably resigned, but some sources cry that she was fired. President Obama, who had recently supported the off shore drilling practices, now has no chance of passing any bill in its favor. He called the failure of closing the leak “enraging and heartbreaking”.

At the same time, more and more workers (many volunteers) have reported nausea, head aches and shortness of breath after working with the spill. They have since been hospitalized. The fishermen on the coast of Florida, who had just survived the wrath of Katrina, have suffered a setback they don’t see a way out of. About 25 percent of the Gulf has been closed down for fishing. Hotels on the beaches are rapidly being effected by cancellation of reservations.

All this apart, the ecological damages are unprecedented, and no jackass like an oil company baron would consider that even worth mentioning. The ecosystem, consisting of the marshlands which house more than 400 species including the endangered Ridley turtle and many birds could take more than a decade to recover from this, if it ever will. If the oil enters the Loop current, it would spread from the Gulf Stream to the Atlantic Ocean. Images of pelicans (who face the risk of suffocation *ugh*) and their eggs coated in oil have hit the internet. And while we continue to debate and discuss the best ways to clean up oil spills, the oil continues to spread.

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