Holding Hands with the Oil Industry

A Brown Pelican, an endangered species, lies dead in a Gulf of Mexico marsh coated in oil the color of chocolate syrup and as thick as mud. Others flap around in the water unable to fly, their bodies coated with the poisonous substan
I have my own oil spill story, a very, very minor oil spill near Tampa, Fl. in 1970. A tanker ship spilled 20,000 gallons of crude oil into Tampa Bay, which washed up on beaches and coated a variety of sea birds.
I picked up an oil-coated duck at a volunteer center and took it to my Aunt Alice’s house where I was living after my parents divorce. We washed the duck in a kiddy pool with dishwashing liquid for more than a half hour. The oil stuck like glue.
The poor duck was not accustomed to being with humans and shook with fear. It vomited some oil. We wondered if the duck would survive.
The duck did survive. I don’t remember what we fed the duck but it adapted to living in the Florida room of my Aunt Alice’s house and swimming around in the plastic kiddy pool. After a few days, we took the duck to a clean beach along Boca Ciega Bay and released it and wished it well.
I had forgotten many details about the Tampa Bay oil spill until I found a St. Petersburg Times story by Scott Taylor Hartzell recalling the details. In 1970, the Tampa Bay spill was the largest in that state’s history causing $10 million in damage. In a thick fog, the tanker ship the Delian Apollon, ran aground near Florida Power’s plant on Weedon Island.
Hartzell’s news story recalls, “black goo nearly as thick as tar, tugboats labored 75 minutes to free the 6-year-old tanker. The 25,000-ton Apollon was hauled to the plant’s slip, where divers plugged the hole with rags and blankets.”
His story recalls volunteers from Eckerd College cleaning oily birds with cornmeal, salad oil and mild soap. Many of the 7,000 birds that were washed died anyway. More than 15,000 boats in the Tampa Bay area had to be scrubbed with solvent to remove oil.
Hartzell reported that then Florida Attorney General Earl Faircloth filed a $2-million suit against the tanker’s owner, J.C. Karras of Pireaus, Greece. Florida later settled for $150,000 cash.
Harzell noted the spill blackened 254,000 acres and killed about 11,300 seabirds.
The Tampa Bay spill was a drop in the bucket compared to the BP oil spill, which was estimated to have leaked at least 20 million gallons into the gulf as of the end of May. I can’t begin to imagine the impact of the gulf spill when a 20,000-gallon spill killed over 11,000 seabirds.
It seems our federal government is working with BP to shield the impact of the spill from our eyes.
The New York Times reported the media is being kept away from the spill. “Journalists struggling to document the impact of the oil rig explosion have repeatedly found themselves turned away from public areas affected by the spill, and not only by BP and its contractors, but by local law enforcement, the Coast Guard and government officials,” said reporter Jeremy W. Peters.
The federal government has been holding hands with the oil industry for decades but at its worst in the past 10 years.
“The truth is that right now we have precisely the regulatory system that the Bush-Cheney administration wanted: full of loopholes, full of cronies and lobbyists filling the very agencies that are supposed to be overseeing the industry,” commentator Arianna Huffington said on ABC’s This Week two weeks ago.
You may remember Vice President Dick Cheney’s Energy Committee which met with oil companies behind closed doors in 2001. BP was a part of those meetings shaping our nation’s energy policies.
The 2005 Energy Act contained incentives for deepwater drilling and limited how states could oversee oil and gas exploration off their coasts. Safety system regulations for offshore drilling platforms were weakened.
Last week, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found oil from the Deepwater Horizon is pooling in huge undersea plumes while BP is denying their existence. The bottom line is our government was bought and sold by the oil industry years ago.
Look at campaign contributions to presidential and Senate and House candidates from the last 30 years.
I don’t expect justice from this spill. I expect dead pelicans, dolphins, decimated fishing fleets, empty motel rooms and restaurants from Louisiana to Florida to North Carolina and maybe even in Cape May County if tropical weather activity pushes oil ashore here.
Oil is evil. It is the reason for the Persian Gulf War of 1990 and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. When this nation begins to spend trillion of dollars on alternative energy research rather than building bases in Iraq, then maybe oil won’t rule the world.