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Here We Go Again: Another Rig Explosion - by Stephen Lendman
Drilling means spilling, hundreds of annual incidents, most small, unreported, yet their cumulative effect is devastating, what the industry and nightly news won't mention or explain.
On February 25, 2009, Environmental Research web.org writer Kate Ravilious did, headlining "Small unreported oil spills add up to major damage," saying:
Big spills make headlines while small ones "often go unnoticed and unreported. But these little slicks could be just as damaging to the environment as large spills, according to new research findings."
Barcelona, Spain Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya Professors Jose Redondo and Alexei Platonov developed a way to spot spills from satellite images. They show that "small oil spills are very common, and when added together they become comparable to large" ones. Their frequency makes them damaging, yet little about them is reported.
Studying European waters alone, they determined that major spills happen every few years, large ones three or four times a year, and smaller ones virtually daily. Extrapolated globally over time amounts to a major environmental problem, compounded by many small incidents and natural seepage - as much as 14 million barrels a year globally offshore.
"For example, it seems that there are four to five times more spills (large and small) in East Asia than in European Coastal waters," and Middle East ones experience "significantly more spills." Most often, negligence to cut costs is why.
According to Redondo and Platonov, "the cumulative effect and toxic dose (of small spills) is the same as a large spill, and will be detected in the long run," as well as their environmental damage, slowly destroying the health of global waters.
Charles Clusen, Natural Resources Defense Council National Parks and Alaska Projects director believes up to 500 spills happen annually and will increase with greater production, plus natural seeps adding more. According to former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminstration (NOAA) supervisory researcher Jeff Short:
"Once you have a spill, you are pretty much screwed. That's because oil spreads on water at a rate of one-half a football field per second. Recovery can take decades."
Another expert says offshore spills cause more damage than a terrorist attack. They're unacceptable risks - reason enough to ban all shallow and deep water drilling and strictly regulate the rest. Besides daily spills, the Gulf of Mexico alone has experienced over 500 oil rig fires since 2006, most never reported, the latest on September 2. More on it below.
Exhibit A in Alaska was the Prince William Sound Exxon-Valdez incident. After over 20 years of natural weathering, it remains an environmental and human catastrophe, and it was minor compared to BP's greatest ever environmental crime.
On land, drilling is hazardous, but offshore requires complex technology, greatly increasing the risks. According to UC Berkeley Engineering Professor Robert Bea:
"This is a pretty frigging complex system. You've got equipment and steel strung out over a long piece of geography starting at the surface and terminating at 18,000 (or more) feet below the sea surface. So it has many potential weak points," compounded by negligence to cut costs. "Just as Katrina's storm surge damage found weaknesses in those piles of dirt - the levees - gas likes to find weakness in anything we connect to that source."
Drilling is a dirty, dangerous business. The long-term harm greatly outweighs the benefits. Besides spills and other accidents, the ecological damage is immense, contaminating waters and shorelines. Drilling releases toxic muds, containing poisonous heavy metals, including mercury, cadmium and lead, as well as dangerous amounts of arsenic, benzene and radioactive minerals. According to the EPA:
Drilling "may leave behind waste containing concentrations of naturally-occurring radioactive material (NORM) from the surrounding soils and rocks. Once exposed or concentrated by human activity, (it) becomes Technologically-Enhanced NORM or TENORM. Radioactive materials are not necessarily present in the soils at every well or drilling site. However, in some areas of the country, such as the upper Midwest and Gulf Coast states, the soils are more likely to contain radioactive material."
