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Oil Industry Safety Record Blown Open
National Wildlife Federation says catalogue of oil industry accidents proves BP disaster in Gulf of Mexico is not a one-off
None of the individual incidents catalogued by the National Wildlife Federation comes close in scale to BP's oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the worst environmental disaster in America's history. But the thousands of lesser offshore spills, pipeline leaks, refinery fires and other accidents demolish the industry argument that BP's ruptured well was a one-off, and that the oil and gas business has grown safer, the report's authors said.
A pelican covered in oil from the BP leak is cleaned in Louisiana. (Photograph: Reuters) "These disasters make it clear that the BP disaster isn't a rare accident," said Tim Warman, who directs the global warming programme for NWF, which calls itself the country's largest conservation organisation. "These are daily occurrences. These are daily incidents of not paying attention."
In a further grim reminder, the American midwest was in the throes of its own environmental disaster today, with a ruptured pipeline gushing gallons of oil into Michigan's Kalamazoo River.
Enbridge Energy, which is Canadian-owned but based in Houston, said the spill may have reached 1m gallons. Federal government officials in Washington and the state of Michigan were struggling to stop the oil from reaching the Great Lakes.
In the Gulf of Mexico, meanwhile, while BP's oil well remains capped, a tugboat crashed into an abandoned well this week and set off a 100ft gusher of oil and gas.
The coastguard commander, Thad Allen, told reporters today that operations were switching from response to recovery, suggesting that equipment and personnel in the Gulf could be drastically scaled back in four to six weeks. "If you need fewer skimming vessels out there, there is going to be a levelling you need to consider," he said.
The report from the National Wildlife Federation drew on records from the Minerals Management Service, which regulates offshore drilling, and the Environmental Protection Agency, to come up with a figure of 1,440 offshore leaks, blowouts, and other accidents were reported between 2001-2007.
In addition to environmental damage, these caused 41 deaths and 302 injuries.
The safety record for onshore activities was even more dismal. Some 2,554 pipeline accidents occurred between 2001 and 2007, killing 161 people and injuring 576.
"Oil and gas is being produced in 34 states across the country and it is just not being regulated to the extent it needs to be," said Lauren Pagel of Earthworks, which monitors extractive industries.
At times, the accidents occurred far from industrial installations such as offshore drilling rigs or refineries. In one particularly gruesome incident from August 2000, three families with young children on a camping trip in New Mexico were consumed by a 500ft fireball from a ruptured pipeline. All 12 people were killed, and an official investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board later blamed the pipeline company for failing to detect or repair severely corroded pipes.
Four years later, a tanker truck lost control and crossed guard rails outside Washington DC, igniting 8,000 gallons of burning petrol on one of the country's busiest highways. "There was fire everywhere," the report quotes highway officials as saying. Four people were killed.
Among the causes for the poor safety record was the industry's relentless costcutting, despite record profits, said the report's authors, describing equipment failures, tank corrosion, and other signs of poor maintenance. The poor safety and environmental records were not restricted to the so-called Big Oil companies.
Enbridge Energy has had 400 separate spills between 2003 and 2008, spewing 1.3m gallons of crude into the environment, according to official records.
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14 Comments so far
Show AllWell that says it all...I know I have personnaly witness three very big explosions, and fires from gas and oil sites. Once in N.J. when a huge gas tank those big round ones exploded. I was in Brooklyn and my building shook as if it was my building that exploded, but the tank was 30 miles away .From my rooftop we could see the fire. Last year a truck exploded on the highway and burned for 20 hrs.,and in our town there was just recently a small oil leak from pipes that fill trucks, but it was big enough to make the news.
We must go GREEN it is not that hard. It will cost less in the long run. Why would we let them do this to our Country ?
This fracking and pipes, and all this deregulation it's to much. They have made it so we need them, but we can show them we don't. We must demand that spineless Obama really start the energy program he said he would. In 5 years we could have at least 50% of the houses and small towns in America runnig on Solar and Wind power. If they can spend 33 billion on war they can spend half that on rebuilding America into a model for the future of the world, and leave those Oil companies sucking oil in poor countries, and not in our strong, into the future Country. America take responsibility and make your world a better, safer, and cleaner place to live. It is up to us, it's that simple.
razormirror
You're absolutely correct.
All renewable energy should be deployed at local levels and the giant, centralized grid should ultimately be abandoned and dismantled. It is inefficient to say the least.
The multi-nationals have recognized both the need to lull the growing demand for renewable energy and the huge profits to be made from it. Their marketing campaigns are already underway. Soon we will be paying the same criminals, who have drowned us in oil, for whatever renewable power is made available. Homes and businesses will not be energy independent. The banks and the corporatocracy will make sure that green energy becomes their exclusive "private property".
Think about it. Oil, coal, gas and all fossil fuels require all manner of processing. They must first be located, then extracted, refined and transported just, for starters. This costs the corporations lots of money.
Renewable energy is a different story altogether. Once the initial expenses of manufacturing and deploying the hardware, needed to produce solar and wind power, are met, the cost of producing that power is negligible. Sunshine doesn't require mining or shipping over thousands of miles to be refined. No wells need be drilled to produce wind power. Once solar and wind farms have been built, the cost to the energy industry will be almost nothing. They will take FREE energy from nature and charge us exorbitant rates for its use. They will greatly exaggerate the cost of the technology and use that as an excuse to charge even more than they do for the poison they've been shoving down our throats for decades.
Mark my words. I am virtually certain that drafts of legislation are being written, even now, that make the ownership and operation of hardware, for generating power using solar and wind, illegal for anyone other than duly "licensed" corporations. There will be zoning and safety ordinances, national, regional and local, to guarantee it.
And what is even more insane is that these oil companies are making RECORD profits. Exxon just reported a 91% increase in profits from a year ago. 91%! Add to all of this the fact that the U.S. Government gives billions of dollars in tax breaks and subsidies - SUBSIDIES! - to the oil companies, and it is absolutely breathless in its absurdity.
If Exxon and BP et al are making hundreds of billions of dollars in profits every year, why the FUCK do they need subsidies and tax breaks?? Why the FUCK do they need to cut costs?? Where does the insanity end?
"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag, carrying a cross."
Sinclair Lewis, "It Cant Happen Here", 1935
Clearly, Sinclair Lewis was right on the money. We are now, definitively, a fascist state. If you saw the story this morning on Democracy Now! about Google and the CIA setting up the latest upgrade to the surveillance state, you know that everything we say here or in our e-mails or on our cell phones is being processed and parsed, and we progressives are being watched.
On the other hand, when they come for all of us CD progressives, at least we'll get to meet each other in person in the camps!
and how many nuclear accidents (have happened?) are waiting to happen?..................
Here is a repeat of a comment I made earlier in the week about the Kalamazoo River spill:
In spite of the super fund site along the Kalamazoo, this river is home to oxbow wet lands and annual flooding fens that support a large array of riverine, marsh and seasonal wetlands that are essential for an untold interweaving of species and systems of life, including human. It winds through the southern part of the state out into Lake Michigan through rather impressive wetlands and lakeside dunes and divides the small artist and tourist havens of Saugatuck and Douglas. Like many of the little lakeside Lake Michigan towns, these are summer retreats struggling with over development and its associated environmental challenges.
The dune systems that run from Chicago all the way up the east coast of Lake Michigan to the Straits of Mackinaw are unlike any in the world. I would ask that people take a look at a map of Michigan's western coast to get a birds-eye idea of what is at risk should this oil slick and others to follow, due to poor environmental regulation, enforcement and legislation, be unstoppable as they make their way into the big sweetwater lake. What would one larger accident or a series of such catastrophes do to an absolutely one-of-a-kind ecosystem of moving sand dunes, some that tower 300 feet over the lake and are divided by small and large rivers and fiord-like "inland" lakes that drain the entire western side of the state and that are, again, a prime feature of the state's largest healthy industry, tourism?
A patchwork of state and federally managed public lands and parks are all that protects some of the most spectacular examples, while runaway development has already destroyed much of the Great Lake and inland lake shores and the rivers and wetlands that feed and filter the water that flows through and into them. We have already had to fight off bizarre schemes that suggest that oil and gas wells should be sunk at a diagonal from the beaches to get at the minerals under the waters of the Great Lake.
Currently oil and gas companies are proceeding to lease land from poor farmers all over the state to go ahead with subterranean fracking types of mineral extraction. Another kind of mining that leaves behind huge ponds of toxic tailings that no one knows quite what to do with, as well as a large percent of irretrievable toxic waste in the water tables underground. All waters in Michigan flow into the Great Lakes. I cannot imagine what an accident involving these highly toxic ponds would mean to the largest repository of fresh water on the planet, which is, even then, a relatively small and easily impacted geological feature.
I fear for these waters should especially a Republican be elected in the next election, although I have to add that the most progressive environmental legislations and protections in my memory happened under Republican governor Bill Milliken. Alas, there are few if any Republicans of his kind remaining and the Dems, similar to their ilk across the country, are spineless and fearful to push for anything that would annoy the billionaire mineral thieves. Currently a sulfide mining operation is being started a few miles from the Lake Superior shore in the Upper Peninsula by the British company Rio Tinto... an operation that has already been recognized as inadequate in its plans for protecting the surface and subterranean watersheds, which it will use to squeeze out nickel and copper from some of the oldest surface rock formations on the planet.
Soon, I expect, everyone will be wringing their hands about the destruction of the relatively pristine waters that run into Lake Superior from this mine. No sulfide mining operation has been successful in preventing long long lasting water table damage. Due to this, similar operations have been prevented in Wisconsin and elsewhere.
Wind --- tide --- wave --- river current --- solar --- geothermal --- and perhaps others that I am unaware of can and must (if my grandchildren and theirs, are to survive) be utilized. I failed to mention conservation --- it is the first line of defense, but our pshchopathic capitalist system keeps all of them buried --- in the name of profit.
Are we as a "tool making" species really that stupid?
dh
We're certainly stupid enough to let a small number of raving psychopaths have complete control of Earth and all its resources. The maniacs ultimately running the show probably constitute about a tenth of a percent of the human species.
Actually more like 4 to 5 percent of the total population. Pretty scary. dh
Privatized Profit / Socialized Disaster!
~~~~~~~
As for the Gulf of Mexico, they sunk the oil out of sight out of mind!
Can't prove it's there, CAN YOU! Proof! They want PROOF!
~~~~~~~~
They criticized A-Whale for not skimming oil, but you can't skim oil if it's doesn't float to the surface.
The EPA will doubtless levy fines for each careless spill. The fines may even be a fraction of one day's profit.
Is it now time for The Nature Conservancy, Sierra Club, Environmental Defense Fund, National Audubon Society, National Research Defense Council and the Union of Concerned Scientists to cut their ties with BP and kick them out of The American Wind Wildlife Institute and every other environmental coalition? It's clear that BP is trying to greenwash its image by hiding behind legitimate environmental groups, who are taking gifts of money and land from the oil giant. Too cozy? You bet. An expose like this could not have come out of any of the other co-opted organizations.
When I graduated in 1973 (BSME), the solar, wind, tidel, etc. power generation concepts were all the rage. Since that time we've not built a single nuclear plant and our per capita consumption of power has declined thanks to innumerable improvements in heat pumps, distribution efficiency, conservation and product efficiency. We all bought into the zero population growth concept and limited ourselves to two childeren per family. The 93 clean air act was passed into law by G.H.W. Bush and we've seen scrubbers, percipitators, and various other improvements added to fossil fuel plants, making our air the cleanest it has ever been in my lifetime.
After years of government seed grants, none of the "sustainable" new technologies have become competitive or even reliable. Wind mills chop up as many birds as the oil spill has killed. No one wants these things in their neighborhood. Other technologies fail because they are not really suited to development by centralized power suppliers.
The anthropogenic causes of green house effects have been exposed to be a hoax, and the entire forward progress seems to be locked in a political ideological battle about the evils of free-enterprize. Government grants and tax incentives have turned the academic community into prostitutes, so we seem to have lost our objectivity in our leadership.
IMO, we need it all, fossil, nuclear and sustainable sources of power. We need to plug the invasion by illegal immigrants, who have been the reason for the increasing demand for power in this country (i.e. population increase).
While there have been thousands of minor spills and abuses, they have been largely inconsequential compared to the current BP disaster caused by the arrogant concept of deep sea drilling. BP wasn't lacking in government regulations or oversight. BP was the poster child of the progressive environmental movement. They were well connected to the bureacracy.
If you want to know how to go green, ask your grandparents. Practice what you preach.