Ordinary Days, Occasional Disasters

Sunday afternoon. Read the paper – the PD – takes about 20 minutes. Didn’t finish a NY Times Sunday paper until Wednesday. It’s raining on and off. This is not supposed to happen here in May. World’s out of balance. Nature’s not happy.

Quite a week. Oil rig explosion turning out to be an environmental catastrophe of monstrous proportions. Guy tries to blow up Times Square and all who happened to be within radius of his bomb, had it gone off. I wonder if this guy will ever think about the totally innocent people he might have murdered, and how those deaths would have devastated their families and friends, other innocent people, now that he’s got the rest of his life to do nothing but think about things? Just ordinary people – vendors, out-of-town families, cops and others, moving through Times Square – who’ve got nothing to do with this guy’s hate, this guy’s sick, demented soul. All on what would have been another ordinary day. And then to boot it was all capped off by a stomach-churning roller coaster drop in the stock market reminiscent of 2008. Oh, God, here we go again!

But it’s Sunday, and it’s raining, and the dog needs walking. An ordinary day in a sea of ordinary days, except on those days when something goes haywire. The whole deal is very unpredictable, but we’re lulled into thinking it’s not by the ordinary, damned blessed ordinary, days.

The oil rig explosion, killing eleven workers, and massive spill taking out lord-knows how much wildlife, and poisoning the LA wetlands and shoreline for an indeterminate time is the big dose of reality we Americans need to face. If we want oil we are going to have to accept that there will be occurrences like this. I don’t say accident, I say ‘occurrence’ because what happened might have been preventable.

The flying fingers of blame point to a government agency, the Mineral Management Service (MMS), a Secretary of the Interior extremely thirsty for off-shore drilling, a President who touted for it with an assurance that all was safe in the hands of greater technology, not to leave out the corporation, British Petroleum, itself.
Were safety precautions, known and used by other drilling operations, disregarded because of costs? According to a Wall Street Journal article of April 28, “The U.S. considered requiring a remote-controlled shut-off mechanism several years ago, but drilling companies questioned its cost and effectiveness, according to the agency overseeing offshore drilling. The agency, the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service, says it decided the remote device wasn't needed because rigs had other back-up plans to cut off a well.” The article goes on to point out that regulators in two major oil-producing countries, Norway and Brazil, require them. According to environmental lawyer Mike Papantino, former vice-president Dick Cheney’s energy task force decided that the $500,000 switches were too expensive and BP wasn’t required to buy them. BP claims they’re not necessary because there are other back-up systems to prevent spills of this nature. How’s that workin’ for ya BP and MMS, as Palin would say?

Speaking of BP, Tyson Slocum of Public Citizen states that it has, “One of the worst safety records of any oil company operating in America. In just the last few years, BP has paid $485 million in fines and settlements to the US government for environmental crimes, willful neglect of worker safety rules, and penalties for manipulating energy markets.”

And speaking about other corporations involved in this disaster how about good ol’ Halliburton, the company responsible for the faulty cementing leading to the explosion? Even the maligned and notoriously lax U.S. Mineral Management Service reveals that cementing is “the single most important factor in 18 of 39 well blowouts in the Gulf of Mexico over a 14-year period.” And as for former Colorado Senator Ken Salazar, now Secretary of the Interior, he has lobbied strenuously for increased offshore drilling and easing environmental regulations. It was MMS, a bureau of Salazar’s Department of Interior that issued BP and other oil companies categorical exclusions from Environmental Impact Studies (EIS) that might have pointed to the dangers of the deep-sea drilling operation. Mr. Salazar, as well as Mr. Obama have a lot to answer for.

However the responsibilities play out, of one thing we can be certain, other occurrences like this one will happen again. It will happen again because we are all addicted to oil. All of us, or at least 99.9 percent of us. That’s the plain truth. We burn it, use it to make all kinds of stuff we’ve come to depend on, and it’s how we live. Maybe some of us are more profligate, but we all share in our dependency on it. At least for the foreseeable future.

So we have to accept that rigs are going to blow somewhere on the planet that harbors rigs, and workers will die, and the unfortunate environment that’s in the way, animals and plants, other innocent victims, will pay a terrible price. That is the reality, and it applies to nuclear reactors as well, which when they blow will be a fatal error for millions of humans. It’s the cost of these kinds of energy.

The same reality applies to terrorist attacks – they will be tried. Safety is not assured. There is no way to guarantee security. It’s a fact of life. Measures can be taken to reduce the risks, but there’s nothing foolproof. And living in constant fear is no alternative. Being alive is a risky business.

And then the ordinary days lull you back to sleep, until another crazy thing comes along to wake you up. And how about that crazy stock market?

But it’s a Sunday afternoon, the rain is letting up, the dog is getting noudgy and it’s time to pick up a grilled chicken from the Mexican market. Thank the fates it’s an ordinary day.

Thanks to gregpalast.com and allenroland.com for additional information for this article.