Author’s note: This is bad…really bad. Anyone else having nightmares about this?
Excerpt:
For weeks, the magnitude of the oil disaster in the Gulf has been something people have read about. Now it is reality for the residents on the coast of Louisiana.
Even CNN, between sound bytes of the latest celebrity and entertainment news, reported that “there is a sense of doom” among Gulf coast residents as “light” crude in the form of thick tar washed up on the beaches and marshes, killing every form of marine life that it touches. Almost 70 miles of the Louisiana coast have been hit by this poison.
“I’ve never heard so much fear in people’s voices,” says Mike Tidwell, author of Bayou Farewell, which chronicled southern Louisiana’s long legacy of environmental problems. “A hurricane is an event with a beginning, a middle and an end. This is more like a nuclear accident offshore and a radiation cloud is coming in. Nobody knows what the consequences will be. There’s a sense of doom.”
And there is no end in sight. Some have likened this to hurricane Katrina, but it may be more like Chernobyl. Neither BP, nor the federal government seem to have a clue as to how to stop the volcano of oil erupting from nearly a mile below the surface of the Gulf.
The federal government, meanwhile, through the newly appointed BP spokesperson from the Coast Guard, Admiral Thad Allen, said they are “satisfied with the coordination that is going on,” and that BP is “exhausting every technical response” to the leak. He added that “there’s no reason to make a change” to the official response to the oil spill. When asked to clarify whether BP or the US government was in charge of the cleanup, Allen said that the two were working in “partnership.”
Have you people not learned anything from the “heckuva job, Brownie” gaffe? In its’ infinite wisdom, the Wall Street Journal now reports that the, “U.S. Wasn’t Ready for Major Spill.” Ummm, hey WSJ editors, this is not a spill, it is an uncontrollable volcano of oil erupting from a mile below the surface of the ocean. And no one knows how to stop it!
On top of that, Reuters reports that BP’s “top kill” solution will be delayed. BP claims they have spent over $760 million on clean up thus far, but considering they have made $6.1 billion in profits in the first quarter of this year, that amounts to about eight days of profit. Wow, the suffering there is astonishing.
It may be time for the federal government to step in and take control of this situation…and throw a few BP executives in jail until it is sorted out. After all, goat herders in Afghanistan have been detained for years for a lot less than this.
Read more here: Orlando Independent Examiner