News To Make You Furious

The Best Oil Spills Are The Ones You Never Hear About

2019 Jan Furious- Taylor Spill We don’t even have to work to make you Furious these days when staying informed means staying angry. But even just staying informed requires information. While bald-faced lying seems to be the preferred weapon for today’s Ministry of Truth, the old-school method of just burying serious problems still has adherents. It’s been a working strategy in the Gulf oil fields off Louisiana since 1936, where environmental degradation and political corruption have become a grim and silent business as usual. The BP Debacle in 2010 was a spotlight on corporate negligence and governmental complicity, but you know who breathed a sigh of relief? Taylor Energy. Their drilling platform, just 7 miles from BP’s Deepwater Horizon, has been uncontrollably dumping oil into the Gulf since being wrecked in 2004. It escaped the glare of publicity before, during, and since the BP fiasco and continues to quietly hemorrhage away, and it will continue to do so for about the next 100 years…

Taylor Energy’s Mississippi Canyon-20 platform and its pipelines were casualties of Hurricane Ivan in 2004. 145 mph winds and 71-foot high waves caused an underwater landslide that turned the platform horizontally, moved it 900 feet, and buried everything in mud up to 100 feet deep.

Taylor tried to contain the damage, but ‘Conventional plugging and abandonment typically involves re-entering the target well internally from the surface, maintaining well control, and inserting cement plugs,’ said Unified Command, the government-created body set up to oversee Taylor Energy’s spill response plan. The company plugged about a third of the 21 wells before adopting “a longer-term well intervention strategy”.

It’s not clear what this long-term strategy involved other than a daily flyover and studied silence. Taylor Energy wasn’t allowed to drill or bore through the mud because of the risk of making the spill worse. In 2008, four years after the disaster, Talyor Energy liquidated and reduced to one employee who theoretically remained to manage the cleanup. Whatever his job was, it certainly wasn’t to tell anyone about the continuing leak so he kept very quiet about it.

In 2012, an alliance of environmental organizations sued Taylor Energy using the Clean Water Act for failing to halt the flow of oil. The Coast Guard had tried to estimate the amount of oil spilled since 2004, but as one of their representatives said “The key weakness in our estimates is they are based on the reporting from the company [Taylor].” Taylor claimed a leak of between one and 55 barrels per day, or between .86M and 3.9M gallons of oil leaked. The Department of Justice commissioned an estimate based on satellite imagery instead which found oil leakage up to 700 barrels per day, or about 49.6M gallons. For reference, BP’s Deepwater Horizon debacle flushed 176.4M gallons into the Gulf.

Taylor Energy unsurprisingly tried, and surprisingly failed to have the case thrown out so they reached a settlement with the plaintiffs in 2015. The company agreed to release “information about the spill since it started in 2004 and open public access to information on an ongoing basis”. All refusals to make data public will be reviewed by a Magistrate Judge, who will decide whether Taylor will have to comply with the request. They also agreed to contribute $400,000 to study and mitigate oil pollution in the Gulf of Mexico, but as one plaintiff noted, the requirement for transparency is likely a more significant win for the public.

As of today, the spill is still continuing. According to Greenpeace the tapped reserves have enough oil for the spill to continue for the next 100 years.

Digging Deeper…

The Gulf of Mexico’s decade-long oil leak, by Chris Lo in Offshore Technology, Oct 2015

Veil of Secrecy Finally Lifted on Taylor Energy’s Decade Long Oil Leak, Louisiana Environmental Action Network, Sep 2015

Oil spill you’ve never heard of has been leaking into gulf of mexico for a decade, Zoe Schlanger in Newsweek, Apr 2015

Taylor Energy oil platform, destroyed in 2004 during Hurricane Ivan, is still leaking in Gulf, Mark Schleifstein on NOLA.com, Jul 2013

A 14-year-long oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico verges on becoming one of the worst in U.S. history, Darryl Fears in Washington Post, Oct 2018

Apalachicola Riverkeeper v Taylor Energy Company, case filing May 2015. Includes specific lies of Taylor Energy next to the specific truths they hid for eleven years.

An oil spill you’ve never heard of could become one of the biggest environmental disasters in the US, AJ Willingham on CNN, Oct 2018

The Largest U.S. Oil Spill You’ve Probably Never Heard of Is Still Leaking After 14 Years, Jorraine Chow on EcoWatch, Oct 2018

Word of the Day: Chutzpah, Marc Yaggi on Waterkeeper.org, Jan 2016

Taylor Energy: Still Leaking Oil and Still Secretive, Larissa Liebmann on Waterkeeper Alliance, Sep 2016

Judge Finds Taylor Energy Improperly Limited Third-Party Review of Information Surrounding Ongoing Oil Spill, Waterkeeper Alliance, Sep 2016

Taylor Energy executive blames decade-old oil leak on “act of God”, Associated Press on Fuel Fix, Jan 2016

An Act of God: Taylor Energy’s Fatalistic Fairytale, Larissa Liebmann on Waterkeeper Alliance, Jan 2016

‘Act Of God’ Blamed By Energy Company For Decade-Old Oil Spill, Debbie Elliott on NPR, Jan 2016

Gulf oil leak caused by Hurricane Ivan spills much more than thought, federal lawyers say, Amy and Kunzelman on Pensacola News Journal, Sep 2018

Why is a spill that started in 2004 still leaking oil in the Gulf of Mexico?, Noel KirkPatrick, on Mother Nature News, Oct 2018

This Oil Leak Could Last for 100 Years — and the Company Involved Refuses to Fix It, Tim Donaghy on GreenPeace.org, Feb 2016

Playing favorites to big political donor over old oil leak?, Tucker and Kunzelman on CapitolHillBlue, Jul 2015

Secrecy shrouds decade-old oil spill, Michael Kunzelman in JapanTimes, Apr 2015

Taylor Energy Website. The site reads in full… “Taylor Energy Company LLC sold its oil and gas assets in 2008 and ceased all drilling and production operations. The legacy of its namesake lives on through the work of the Patrick F. Taylor Foundation, which was established in 1985 as a charitable extension of the company.”

Digging Deeper into Dwyer

For some reason, oil spills seem to make us particularly Furious and we’ve done quite a few articles on them in our own media. Here’s some of our ’favorites’…

The BP Atrocity, Tom Dwyer, Tom’s Tidbits, Oct 2010