15th Anniversary of the BP Deepwater Horizon Disaster

Sunday, April 20 is the 15th anniversary of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil-well blowout disaster off the coast of Louisiana – perhaps the largest human-caused environmental catastrophe ever (unless you figure-in the ongoing American petroleum industry’s impact on climate…)

The ongoing impacts on charismatic animals have been tracked because heretofore there has been funding to track them, and the impacts are pretty clear by the various chemically-induced illnesses and mortalities of turtles and marine mammals. (This tracking is probably going away under the current administration.) It is less clear what has occurred on the ~150 sq. miles of sea floor habitat, suffocating under the toxic cocktail of hydrocarbons and the dispersants used at the broken wellhead.

Above the waterline, oil suffocation of marsh grasses has doubled the erosion rate of Louisiana marsh shorelines – which was already disappearing at a rate of 20 to 35 sq. miles/year due to a number of factors, including diversion of the Mississippi River and channelizing the marshes for pipeline and tanker access to inland refineries. This will significantly amplify the impacts of sea level rise in coastal Louisiana.

Of course nobody really wants to hear about all of this stuff… so depressing. And it might inform Federal-level prophylactic and mitigation policies – probably the dominant reason so many of the research projects revealing these impacts are being de-funded.

The circumstances that led to the Deepwater Horizon disaster were lubricated by lax attention to regulations, and exacerbated by a way-too-friendly relationship between the Oil Industry and the Department of Interior.

So now that the oilmen are in the Oval Office, it is not surprising that the current administration is proposing “Sunsetting” all regulations that interfere with petroleum production.

Unless cooler minds prevail (or just step up to the plate, dammit…), I believe we’ll need to be choked by a series of environmental disasters before the public gets angry enough to rein in these rogues.

This is what happened in 1972, when, after a litany of environmental disasters, the public got pissed-off to the point that we were done giving industry free license to destroy our living habitat: The Cuyahoga River Fire, Love Canal, the Stringfellow Acid Pits, and ubiquitous local experiences of having to suffer foul air, poisoned lakes and streams, and nasty patches of tar on local beaches – all at the leisure of the industries that were “giving us jobs.”

It was just over 50 years ago that a whole raft of environmental regulations were almost unanimously brought into law. The National Environmental Policy Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Clean Water and Clean Air acts, the Endangered Species Act – along with their regulatory agencies – Environmental Protection Agency, National Marine Fisheries Service, Marine Mammal Commission, US Fish and Wildlife Service etc…

So it turned out that these agencies and their policies were so successful that now people don’t know, or don’t remember how bad it was before they showed up.

Since then industry propaganda has been successful enough to frame these agencies, and the regulations as “a burdensome impediment to industrial and economic progress.”

At the moment it appears that we may need to learn these ugly lessons again.