Gulf oil disaster is a crime against nature and humanity

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T of Mexico will live in infamy as one of the he Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf worst industrial accidents and environmental catastrophes ever.

On the night of April 20, a massive bubble of highly compressed natural gas rushed from the wellhead up the riser and onto the platform. It was sucked into the diesel engines that powered the rig’s electrical generator, causing a powerful explosion. Fire broke out, and the crew scrambled to evacuate.

Two days later, the semi-submersible floating drilling vessel sank to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, where it is lying in pieces. Its pipe was perforated in three places and hemorrhaging millions of cubic feet of methane and barrels of light crude. Now the oil slick is oozing across the Gulf of Mexico, polluting wildlife habitats and threatening the health, safety, and livelihoods of Gulf Coast residents.

Deepwater Horizon was not a producing well. Its purpose was to drill the borehole— the deepest ever—into a vast shale formation 13,000 feet beneath the seafloor of the Gulf of Mexico in preparation for oil and gas extraction. The wellhead was located at the very edge of a vast reservoir of methane and light crude, covering 25,000 square miles—almost the size of the Gulf basin itself.

We know from a CBS “60 Minutes” investigation that a month before the explosion, the Blowout Preventer (BOP) was seriously damaged by an operator error. A crew member on deck accidentally moved a joystick, applying hundreds of pounds of force while moving 15 feet of pipe through the BOP. This tore up the rubber gasket or “annular” that is required to seal the wellhead and prevent a blowout.

Torn up bits of annular coming up with the drilling muds were reported to a supervisor, who cavalierly dismissed it as inconsequential even though any pressure tests to be run on the BOP were going to be inaccurate as a result of the damage and a gross misjudgment would inevitably occur. Prior to the accident, the BOP also had a hydraulic leak and a weak battery. Plus, there had been a problem with one of its control pods.

BP was two weeks behind in its schedule because of a previous failed attempt to drill the well. Under capitalism, time is money so the crew was being forced to speed up and increase the rate of penetration.

The well was in its final phase of completion. The last segments of the concrete casing, which extends all the way down from the wellhead to the geologic formation, were to be placed by pumping down a cement slurry. That was the job of the subcontractor Halliburton. The last three sections were concrete plugs that would function as corks in the drilling column while awaiting another oil platform to take over the actual extraction process. The manager from Transocean, which owned the rig, wanted correctly to have the third plug put in place with the column full of heavy drilling muds to keep the oil and gas under high pressure properly contained below.

However, the manager from British Petroleum (BP), which leased the rig, insisted on doing it faster without the muds. As a result of this foolhardy shortcut, the bottom plug failed, the well kicked and a catastrophic blowout occurred. This was due primarily to the hubris of the oil industry in thinking that no back-up technology was required in case of blowout preventer failure.

Clearly, the two fateful decisions that were prompted by haste and corporate greed—to continue using a damaged BOP and to add the third plug without drilling muds—are proof of criminal negligence on the part of both Transocean and BP. This is especially true given what is at stake environmentally.

We were told repeatedly by BP, the government, and corporate media that only 5000 barrels or 210,000 gallons of oil have been spewing out daily. We now know from independent scientific measurements that the volume is much greater. The company has been lying all along in order to limit liability on the damages.

Since the cataclysm, we have witnessed numerous failed attempts to cap the gusher. It has become glaringly obvious that BP’s engineers are completely out of their depth. This is because they arrogantly and falsely believed that a deepwater blowout could never occur. Consequently, the Energy Giant didn’t bother to invest in the development and testing of containment technologies that actually work. After all, it would have cut into their megaprofits, which stood at $6 billion the first quarter of this year.

In order to prevent the slick from hitting coastal areas, BP has been spraying toxic dispersants to break up the oil into tiny droplets with the aid of wind and wave action. Once they are a digestible size, bacteria then consume them. By the last week of May, military cargo planes had flown some 192 missions, dropping a million gallons of chemicals and adding to the hydrocarbons that are already polluting the Gulf.

Dispersants contain a surfactant—a surface-active wetting agent that reduces the surface tension of the oil. Other chemical ingredients include contaminating detergents and solvents. The dispersant that was applied for several weeks to the surface and subsurface of the ocean is one of the most toxic ones available, yet the ever-subservient EPA gave the go ahead for its use despite a scientific report that warned of its detrimental effects on marine life in the benthic regions.

The chemical compounds in Corexit 9500 are the proprietary information of the manufacturer Nalco— part of the industry’s Old Boys Network—so no one really knows exactly what they are. A giant experiment is being conducted on sea organisms, yet BP and the government are perfectly fine with the trade-off—sacrificing deep-sea to coastal life. Never mind what the chemicals will do to the fisheries.

Prompted by the strong objections of marine biologists and environmentalists, the EPA finally ordered BP to use a “less toxic” dispersant and to turn over the secret list of ingredients.

Because the oil and gas is shooting up through 5000 Gerald Herbert / AP feet of salt water, the sea’s water column is serving as a fractioning tower—just as in a refinery. As the oil moves upward through the different temperature and pressure gradients, some of it is dissolving in the salt water. Its more volatile fractions are evaporating at the surface. The warm surface water temperatures are aiding in a more rapid breakdown than in Prince William Sound, site of the Exxon Valdez disaster, where the temperatures were much colder.

The remaining oil is the heavy-fraction crude, which is sinking slowly and ending up as asphalt on the seafloor. Therefore, the surface slick is as little as 2% of the total volume. The stuff that floats to shore will cling to the vegetation and wildlife and embed into the beach sand and wetland soils, where it will poison the ecosystems for decades.

Also, reports coming from the NOAA research vessel Pelican indicate that there are enormous oil plumes in multiple layers of different thicknesses suspended at varying depths. The scientists believe that the dispersants may also be helping the oil to coagulate into these large plumes. The crew took readings of oxygen levels in the area and found that they have dropped by 30%. If they decline any further, marine organisms that cannot escape the anoxic conditions by swimming away will suffocate.

There are two possible causes of the oxygen depletion. First, the huge amount of methane that is being released from the well is using up the oxygen. After two weeks, methane degrades into carbon dioxide in an oxidation reaction. Oxygen is a friendly element that likes to glom onto others so the reaction makes for less dissolved oxygen in the water for marine organisms to breathe.

In addition, the Pelican’s scientists believe that the dispersants may be speeding up the process of oxygen depletion as the microbes eat up more of the oil being made available to them. Dispersants are also food for microbes, and as they die and decompose, more of the oxygen is used up.

Unfortunately, NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenko cowardly disassociated herself from the Pelican’s findings. NOAA issued a disclaimer in late May that characterized the information its own scientists had given to the media as “misleading, premature, and in some cases, inaccurate” and said the reduction in oxygen is not marked enough to be of concern. A University of Maryland biologist has disputed this, saying a 30% reduction would be “highly significant.”

It did not take long after the blowout for the oil slick to make landfall. Glops and smears of oil have floated into the Lousiana bayous and onto the beaches of Mississippi, Alabama, and even Florida. As feared, a huge swirling eddy or “cyclone” from the Loop Current has now captured a gigantic tail from the southeastern portion of the slick, which is moving briskly toward the Florida Coast. It is only a matter of time before it’s drawn through the Keys up the Atlantic Coast to contaminate beaches, estuaries, and fisheries there.

The hurricane season officially begins in June. If a major hurricane sweeps through the region, the combination of high winds, waves, and storm surges will push even more of the oil slick over the shelter islands and further inland up the bayous. With the prospect of violent weather looming, this Grand Daddy of All Oil Spills could make Katrina look like a picnic. The ecological impact The ecological impacts of this massive oil spill will be enormous. We are seeing only the tip of the iceberg. Scientists warn that the pollutants could remain for generations doing their dirty work as the contaminants bio-accumulate through the food web.

This is a critical time for the wildlife of the Gulf marine and coastal ecosystems. Sea mammals are breeding, fish and shellfish are spawning and birds are nesting. Thousands of creatures are migrating to the Gulf to reproduce or stopover on their traditional flyways to fuel up for the journey northward. Chemicals that kill eggs or offspring will affect the survival rates of (continued on page 9)

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many species and decrease the region’s biodiversity.

Swimming through the open-water habitat, are blue, fin and sei whales, dolphins and porpoises. As air-breathing mammals they must surface through the oily layers for air. Their bodies are not only being oiled, but they are breathing the noxious fumes, which will damage mucous membranes and airways, lead to infection and eventual death. The plankton that baleen-feeding whales eat will decline due to the contamination; there goes their food supply!

Five species of sea turtle must navigate contaminated waters to get to the beaches in Texas, Mexico, and Florida to lay eggs and launch the next generation. The slowly recovering Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle will now be foraging on contaminated blue crabs and nesting on an oil-soaked Louisiana coast.

Critically imperiled due to overfishing, the Atlantic bluefin tuna are entering the only spawning ground for the western population. Oil is toxic to their eggs, which float near the surface, and to the young who shelter in the sargassum seaweed on which petroleum is collecting. Menhaden are essential to top predators such as sharks, tuna, swordfish, marine mammals, birds and humans. When they die of oil poisoning, the food chain will collapse.

The sea-grass beds in the near-shore areas provide food, shelter and nurseries for a multitude of marine life including sharks and the West Indian manatee. These gentle giants munch on the sea-grass and raise their young in the calm shallows. The oil will smother the vegetation, robbing them of their food source and coating their eyes and the sensory hairs on their noses, causing inflammation and infection.

Two giant human-made oyster reefs lie 500 meters out to sea, each 10 miles long being among the largest in the U.S. Coastal Louisiana produces 40% of the nation’s oysters. As filter feeders, they ingest and concentrate pollutants in their systems at levels 1000 times higher than other species. Although the oyster beds will be closed to harvesting for human consumption, probably for years to come, wildlife will still be eating those from natural beds, so the oily contaminants will be concentrating up the food chain.

Now that a portion of the slick is headed toward Florida , the state’s precious and already highly stressed coral reefs will be in danger. These rainforests of the ocean shelter a wide diversity of marine life that is in peril. There are 20 coastal wildlife refuges as well as pristine beaches in harm’s way. They provide habitat for many endangered or recovering species. Marshes and estuaries are nesting and feeding areas for thousands of shorebirds and nurseries for fish and shellfish such as crabs, mussels, and shrimp.

Unlike the rock-strewn bay of Prince William Sound , which fell victim to the Exxon Valdez spill, BP’s oil will cling to a sponge-like coast, entering the pores of the wetlands. Oil will contaminate sediments, poison wildlife and smother the vegetation. A die-off of plant life will lead to the further erosion and destruction of the natural storm-surge buffers that protect populated inland areas.

The Louisiana coast and wetlands have suffered more than their share of environmental insults. The over-engineering of the Mississippi River has disrupted its natural flow and silt deposition on the delta. Canals dredged by the petroleum industry have brought widespread destruction of the wetlands.

Oil and gas extraction have led to subsidence of the land, and rising sea levels due to climate change are inundating wetlands, which are sinking out of sight. As a result, saltwater intrusion has destroyed the protective cypress swamps and replaced brackish and freshwater wetlands with degraded saltwater marshes.

The Gulf of Mexico is home to one of America’s richest fishing grounds, which are now off limits for harvesting. Fishing fleets along with thousands of shrimpers, fishers and oystermen are sitting idle. The economic impacts to the industry and all those who work in it will be enormous.

Who’s to blame?

To blame for this mess are the Carbon Barons and a corrupt and servile government. British Petroleum has one of the worst safety records due to its aggressive cost-cutting efforts, but all of the Energy Giants are equally as guilty. Just look at how many coal miners have died recently.

Lax safety practices at BP’s Texas City refinery resulted in a deadly explosion that killed 15 workers and injured 170 others five years ago. The use of outdated equipment and overworked employees contributed to the blast. Since then, OSHA has found that the company has “willfully” failed to implement required safety measures at the plant, where workers are still being exposed to toxic emissions.

We now know from whistleblower Kenneth Abbot, a subcontractor to BP, that the Atlantis deepwater oil platform is functioning without proper operating instructions because the engineering documents have not been updated. Consequently, a dangerous operaThe planet is warming and Earth’s natural systems are racing to the point of no return. ...

We must leave all fossil fuels in the ground and launch a crash program of renewable wind and solar energy and clean mass transit.

tor error is inevitable, and it is only a matter of time before another disaster occurs.

The problem is that the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service (MMS), which is riddled with corruption, has allowed the extraction industries to write their own operating and safety regulations, enabling them to literally get away with murder. What big corporation can we possibly trust to police itself?

Knowing how Exxon/Mobil wriggled out of paying for the clean-up and compensating for damages done to the Alaskan fisheries and people’s health, activists are now demanding that British Petroleum’s assets be frozen to ensure that BP—the Big Polluter—pays in full. They are right to do so since it was the taxpayers who largely footed the bill for the Exxon Valdez spill.

To avoid liability for the accident, the first thing BP did was to coerce the traumatized survivors of the Deepwater Horizon explosion into signing waivers, stating that they had suffered no injury and had no “first-hand or personal knowledge” of the incident. This was done after they’d drifted for hours in lifeboats. They were not allowed to see their families until they were thoroughly debriefed and were forbidden to speak to the media. This gives us an idea of the lengths to which the company will go to avoid payment and punishment for its crimes.

Regulation and reform are not the answer There are over 3000 operating oils in the Gulf. The chances of another cataclysm are good. Plus, oil spills are routine. If they’re drilling, they’re spilling. As hydrocarbon reserves run out, they will dig and drill deeper and deeper increasing the risk of accident. More workers will die and more ecological devastation will occur. That is the nature of the fossil-fuel extraction process.

Any attempts at reforming the MMS, such as dividing its permitting and royalty-collection duties from its environmental review and enforcement duties, will not matter one jot. By and large, the Department of the A to try to find a way to cap the monstrous oil s the Obama administration and BP scrambled gusher in the Gulf, the federal Minerals Management Service went back to its comfortable business as usual with the oil companies.

On June 2, the MMS granted a new drilling permit for Bandon Oil and Gas for a site about 50 miles off the Louisiana coast, south of Rockefeller State Refuge and Game Preserve, and about 115 feet under AP (Above) Massive fire on April 22 following the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig.

Interior and all of its agencies are committed to the exploitation of our natural resources, not their preservation or protection. That is because the big corporations see our dear Mother Earth as nothing but a mine of raw materials to be exploited for economic gain.

No matter how many commissions Obama assembles to study the accident, there will still be a whitewash of the affair. The freeze on offshore drilling will be only temporary. Six months from now, when the media furor has died down, the MMS once again will be granting permits to big polluters.

Obama’s announcement on March 31 to expand offshore oil and gas drilling was dead serious. That is because his administration and the capitalist class it serves are bent on maintaining their fossil-fuel powered economy and have no intention of ever converting to renewable energy or clean-mass transit. They will continue with the madness of chasing after the last barrel of oil no matter what the costs to the environment, the climate, or human life.

Mainstream environmentalists, who say that we can continue to extract fossil-fuels, but “it must be done responsibly” (with more regulation) are themselves irresponsible. They insist that it not take place in “sensitive” areas—as if the entire planet is not sensitive.

The primary reason they still support hydrocarbon extraction, whether it’s “clean coal” or the “responsible” hydrofractioning of natural gas, is that they are comfortable with the status quo and do not want to challenge capitalism—an outmoded social and economic system that is destroying our only home.

That is why it is absolutely essential that we build a class-conscious, class-struggle left wing of the environmental movement that is grassroots-based—a movement of workers, trade unionists and their allies in the communities of the oppressed nationalities, including Tribal Peoples. This movement must wage its struggle publicly, visibly, and in the streets while remaining independent of the two capitalist parties.

Regardless of what the deniers claim, the planet is still warming, its ice masses are melting and Earth’s natural systems are racing toward the point of no return. To stabilize the climate, we must adopt a policy of zero greenhouse gas emissions from all sources to reduce equivalent CO2 concentrations to a safe 300-325 parts per million. The only way to do that is to leave all fossil fuels in the ground where Mother Nature put them and launch a crash program of renewable wind and solar energy and clean mass transit powered by the same means.

To accomplish this great undertaking will require the equivalent of a wartime mobilization, in which our entire society participates in the conversion to a democratically-planned, green, sustainable eco-socialist economy that puts planetary and human needs before profits. Anything short of that will mean the end of life as we know it. n the surface of the ocean.

Although Obama recently extended a moratorium on deep-water drilling, he quietly allowed a threeweek ban on wells in shallower water to expire.

“I’m outraged,” Kieran Suckling, executive director for the Tucson, Ariz.,-based Center for Biological Diversity, said after an AP reporter told him of the new permit. “How is it that shallow water drilling suddenly became safe again?”

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Marty Goodman / Socialist Action portation funding is for highway construction and

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8 Socialist Action june 2010 The hurricane season begins in June. With the prospect of violent weather looming, this Grand Daddy of All Oil Spills could make Katrina look like a picnic.