Oil giant BP, the company behind the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the United States, reported profits of $7.7 billion for the last quarter of 2011. Company executives and industry analysts sounded bullish about the company’s future in a recent New York Times article, saying they had set aside enough money to compensate victims of the Gulf spill and had plans to expand drilling operations in the Gulf.
BP seems to be recovering nicely after the disaster, which killed 11 people and pumped 170 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. But stories from the Gulf suggest that the region is anything but healed.
The Gulf has been plagued with a suite of unexplained afflictions. Gulf fishermen say this is the worst season they can remember, with catches down 80 percent or more. Shrimp boats come home nearly empty, hauling in deformed, discolored shrimp, even shrimp without eyes. Tar balls and dead dolphins still wash up on beaches. Scientists report huge tar mats below the sand, “like vanilla swirl ice cream.”
Fishermen, cleanup workers, and kids report strange rashes, coughing, breathing difficulty, eye irritation, and a host of other unexplained health problems that have persisted in the years since the disaster. Many of them have shared their stories with my colleague Rocky Kistner, who worked at NRDC’s Gulf Resource Center in Buras, Louisiana.
According to the presidential oil spill commission, there were 79 serious accidents involving loss of well control in the Gulf from 1996 to 2009. These accidents are hardly one-in-a-million occurrences. Yet nearly two years after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, Congress has still not passed comprehensive safety regulations for offshore drilling. Oil companies continue to rely on decades-old oil cleanup technologies, such as the booms and skimmers that picked up just 3 percent of the Gulf spill.
Natural Resources Defense Council