Thousands of Invisible Oil Spills Are Destroying The Gulf

Posted by Jeff on Dec 10, 2016 @ 8:25 am in Conservation | 0 comments | Last modified: December 10, 2016

Hurricane Ivan would not die. After traveling across the Atlantic Ocean, it stewed for more than a week in the Caribbean, fluctuating between a Category 3 and 5 storm while battering Jamaica, Cuba, and other vulnerable islands. And as it approached the US Gulf Coast, it stirred up a massive mud slide on the sea floor.

The mudslide created leaks in 25 undersea oil wells, snarled the pipelines leading from the wells to a nearby oil platform, and brought the platform down on top of all of it. And a bunch of the mess—owned by Taylor Energy—is still down there, covered by tons of silty sediment. Also, twelve years later, the mess is still leaking.

The Taylor Energy site will continue to leak for the next century, according to the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement. Since the storm, its oil slick stretches over eight square miles on an average day. Meanwhile, Taylor Energy gone bankrupt with only 9 wells plugged, and is suing the federal government for $432 million in trust for leak response, saying there’s nothing left to do.

There is a cowboy mythos to American oil exploration. As far as they’re concerned, they don’t need help outside their own bootstraps, so they sure as heck don’t need the National Academy of Sciences or government regulation to tell them how to do their jobs.

And that leads to issues that sound insane to an outsider: “On oil rigs, people always turn off all the alarms because they can’t sleep. And even if they do leave them on, you don’t notice when there’s an accident because the alarms are always going off.”

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