What BP Doesn’t Want You to Know About the 2010 Gulf Spill

[xchrom]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2013/04/22/what-bp-doesn-t-want-you-to-know-about-the-2010-gulf-spill.html

"It’s as safe as Dawn dishwashing liquid.” That’s what Jamie Griffin says the BP man told her about the smelly, rainbow-streaked gunk coating the floor of the “floating hotel” where Griffin was feeding hundreds of cleanup workers during the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Apparently, the workers were tracking the gunk inside on their boots. Griffin, as chief cook and maid, was trying to clean it. But even boiling water didn’t work.


An agonizing 87 days passed before the BP oil spill was finally sealed off. According to US government estimates, 210 million gallons of Louisiana sweet crude had escaped into the Gulf, making this disaster the largest unintentional oil leak in world history. (Benjamin Lowy/Getty)

The BP representative said, ‘Jamie, just mop it like you’d mop any other dirty floor,’” Griffin recalls in her Louisiana drawl.

It was the opening weeks of what everyone, echoing President Barack Obama, was calling “the worst environmental disaster in American history.” At 9:45 p.m. local time on April 20, 2010, a fiery explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig had killed 11 workers and injured 17. One mile underwater, the Macondo well had blown apart, unleashing a gusher of oil into the gulf. At risk were fishing areas that supplied one third of the seafood consumed in the U.S., beaches from Texas to Florida that drew billions of dollars’ worth of tourism to local economies, and Obama’s chances of reelection. Republicans were blaming him for mishandling the disaster, his poll numbers were falling, even his 11-year-old daughter was demanding, “Daddy, did you plug the hole yet?”

Griffin did as she was told: “I tried Pine-Sol, bleach, I even tried Dawn on those floors.” As she scrubbed, the mix of cleanser and gunk occasionally splashed onto her arms and face.

[Laelth]

1. Safe, indeed! (sarcasm) k&r for exposure. n/t

-Laelth

[chervilant]

2. No surprise that Limbaugh used

his bully pulpit to excoriate those of us who know this disaster (and BP's wanton use of corexit) is far worse than we're being told.

80% decline in fishing catches! On another thread about the documentary "Revolution," some DUers ridiculed the filmmakers' assertion that all life in the oceans will be dead within fifty years. With BP and Fukushima, that assertion doesn't seem too outlandish to me. At the very least, who wants to eat seafood potentially contaminated with toxic chemicals and/or radiation?

I am deeply saddened by our species' self-destructive hedonism. All for the filthy lucre -- our one true god.

[marions ghost]

3. My marine scientists friends (& family)

talk about this all the time.

You're either with the scientists or you're with BP.

[bahrbearian]

4. making this disaster the largest unintentional] oil leak in world history.

Unintentional? does that mean there was an intentional leak that was bigger?

[Scruffy Rumbler]

5. I believe what Saddam Hussein did in at the end of the first Gulf War.....

Thanks, Daddy Bush! He destroyed the oil wells, spewing oil over a large swath of land and sea. We were bringing in all kinds of teams in to try and cap the wells.

[bahrbearian]

6. That would be it, Thanks

[snappyturtle]

7. I am sickened by the BP teevee ads purporting how

wonderful the Gulf is now after the "clean up". Yesterday I put
a bag of Gulf shrimp back into the refrig. section at the store.
I want them but.....

[Bill USA]

8. recommended!