BP: Epic Failure

The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the worst environmental disaster in America’s history, is being brought home online.

In the idiom of the internet, the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is an epic failure. It is the worst environmental disaster in America’s history. Forty-three days into the catastrophe, the frightful numbers were all over the news.

Eleven people were killed in the initial explosion. The leaking pipe is 5,000 feet (1.6 km) down on the ocean floor. Oil is spilling into the Gulf at a rate of 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day. Somewhere between 20 million and 43 million gallons of oil has already leaked into the Gulf. An oil slick is set to destroy 100 miles of Louisiana coastline. Over 700,000 gallons of Corexit 9500, a toxic chemical dispersant that is illegal in Britain, has been poured into the waters of the Gulf. A quarter of U.S. waters in the Gulf are closed to fishing. BP’s costs thus far are $1 billion and its lost market value is $63 billion. The cleanup costs could reach $10 billion. Lawsuits could cost BP another $10 billion.

And time is running out to fix the leak. The hurricane season has just started and forecasters are expecting it to be the most intense one since 2005. If that year does not ring a bell, perhaps this will – Hurricane Katrina. A Colorado State hurricane research team says that there is a 47 per cent chance that a hurricane will reach the Louisiana shore this year. We could have a repeat of Hurricane Katrina with 100 million gallons of oil added to the mix. Epic failure indeed.

Over the past weeks I have kept my web browser open to the Gulf oil spill cam, a live video feed set up by BP and hosted on the internet by Democratic Congressman Edward Markey. Initially, BP hid knowledge of its “spill cam” from the government. Only after Markey demanded that BP make the live feed available did independent scientists and the world get to see the exact nature of the leak. Markey’s role as chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming may have convinced BP to be more forthcoming.

Day after day now, I have been switching back and forth between my various work screens on my two monitors and the spill cam. I watched as a muddy cloud spewed from the leak during the failed attempt to inject heavy drilling mud into the pipe in the “top kill" operation. Days later, I saw a giant yellow metal claw grab hold of a pipe while a spinning silver blade encrusted with diamonds slowly cut through it.

Mesmerized by the alien quality of video coming from 5,000 feet below sea level, I watched as smaller shiny metal claws maneuvered to release clamps, grab hold of belts and cables, and do whatever it was that the operators on the surface were intent on getting done. At one point I called out to my wife to come see the long skinny eel that was swimming around the broken pipe as it spewed out a toxic cloud of black oil and natural gas. I silently wished the eel away to safer waters.

It is impossible to watch the spill cam without thinking about movies such as Alien or any of the recent underwater horror films. The live video feed is a real-time science-fiction nightmare and a source of political debate and outrage for millions of viewers. Republicans try to spin this into a story of government incompetence, while Democrats see it as the ultimate metaphor for the free hand of the market. The truth lies somewhere in the middle of this ideological muddle.

The first time I watched a live video feed over the internet was in 1996. I clearly remember seeing the sun set over the New York skyline, and as I watched, the same sun was setting over my home in Ottawa – two cities, one sunset, one internet, one world. We are nodes in the network of technology and capitalism.

Today, the water I flush down the toilet will eventually make its way to the Gulf of Mexico. Some day in the future I will eat a fish that swam in the same oily Gulf. For all its ethereal digital quality, much of the machinery of cyberspace also runs on the universal lubricant of global capitalism – oil. The spill cam has a lesson for us all to heed – the oil that runs this global village can also ruin it.