A little over a year ago, we read a story by investigative reporter Greg Palast about the 20th anniversary of the Exxon Valdez disaster. This article about the criminal response of Exxon to the destruction caused by their greed and malfeasance was so infuriating, but so important, that we had to share it with our readers. Unfortunately, there’s no shortage of news like that and our “News To Make You Furious” section was born.
Now that history has repeated itself with the spill in the Gulf, will it also repeat itself with BP’s response? The Valdez had lessons for all of us on the environment, corporate control, and the oil industry, but it also had lessons for BP on how to respond to disasters of this type. We apparently didn’t learn any of the lessons we should have, but was BP paying closer attention? Are we watching the same scenario play out again? Shockingly, agonizingly, sadly, but perhaps inevitably, this article is still relevant today.
Links on the BP disaster
There’s already too much information for anyone to assimilate on the BP spill, but here are some things that we ran across that you might find interesting…
Video from Fort Morgan, Alabama, June 1910 by Ben Raines, including the image above.
http://blog.al.com/live/2010/06/lots_of_sharks_and_lots_of_oil.html. Ben also has more coverage that’s just as compelling at http://connect.al.com/user/braines/index.html.
An Alabama TV station collected samples of sea water in various places around Mobile Bay, including beaches re-opened because they were “safe”. With the cutoff for safety at 5ppm, WKRG found levels of 221ppm where a child was digging at the beach. That was the highest level they could document, because their final sample exploded while they were testing it.
BP is paying Gulf scientists big bucks for contracts that require their silence
http://blog.al.com/live/2010/07/bp_buys_up_gulf_scientists_for.html
Health hazards of the BP spill, in detail
http://www.sciencecorps.org/crudeoilhazards.htm#Exec
Gulf Oil Blog of Marine Biology department at University of Georgia
