Gulf Oil Disaster: Causes and Effects

Seunghwan Lee Professor Poe En 102 11/08/2010 Causes and Effects of Gulf Oil Disaster As the situation of environment is becoming worse than ever these days, the explosion of Deepwater Horizon ship has been making things the worst with the enormous damages since this incident happened on April 20th 2010. This disastrous accident happened under the 2nd biggest oil company BP’s poor responsibility. According to this accident, about 30 laborers died or got deadly hurt then the ship started to sink down couple days after the exploding.

As an unofficial said that it was spilling out 35,000 to 60,000 gallons of oil for a day from the borehole in deep sea. (“Oil estimate raised to 35,000-60,000 barrels a day”) In fact, however, it was hard to estimate how speedy the oil was spilling since it started to spill out from too deep. This problem brought controversy nowadays since the police were not even sure how big this trouble was. This disaster is still causing the end of marine animals, fishing industries, tourism and even wild animals’ place to live by marine pollutions.

Although the situation is not easy to bear, if people know what exact causes and effects of this accident, there must be the way to be closed for solution. The BP’s efforts to resolve is not actually seemed that it’s able to cover the seriousness of this accident any soon since it’s like uncountable costs would be charged to clean up the oil and restore the damage. Furthermore, some experts predict that more than 100 years will be needed to make it up.

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However, these days, BP is putting efforts to burn up the oil on the sea. That indicates they try to cover their fault step by step. Figure 1.

This is how the BP is burning up the oil which is flowing on the sea. now all holes are blocked but 560millions of oil already spilled out (Bourne). Nevertheless the BP’s efforts, there still are many reasons that lead this problem stuck. One case of it is the “Not Me” Blame-shifting between BP and Halliburton. Since BP is claiming that what Halliburton did was too unstable and Halliburton is claiming that they have tested enough times to make sure that it is safe, both companies are teasing themselves to shift the responsibilities to each other without knowing that it makes the progress of resolving slower than they planned.

Halliburton is an oil company that has failed few times to block the holes with cement then it caused more spilled oil than BP expected. After all, BP became to be responsible for the most of cleaning up cost under the law. Also some contractors had to face the rest of costs; those contractors include Transocean, the rig’s operator; Halliburton, the company responsible for cementing the well; and Cameron International, the maker of the blowout preventer, a device designed to shut off a well. Krauss and Elisabeth) (“The Latest Gulf Outrage”) Although many people cancelled their vacations due to the spill, hotels close to the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama reported dramatic increases in business during the first half of May 2010. However, the increase was likely due to the influx of people who had come to work with oil removal efforts. Jim Hutchinson, assistant secretary for the Louisiana Office of Tourism, called the occupancy numbers misleading, but not surprising. Because of the oil slick, the hotels are completely full of people dealing with that problem,” he said. Then added “They’re certainly not coming here as tourists. People aren’t sport fishing, they aren’t buying fuel at the marinas, and they aren’t staying at the little hotels on the coast and eating at the restaurants. ” (Reed) As it sounds like, this disaster took the beauty of nature which helps people to rest. It is also caused of health consequences.

As of May 29, ten oil spill clean-up workers had been admitted to West Jefferson Medical Center in Marrero, Louisiana. Two of the cleanup workers had to have hard time suffering from symptoms of dehydration. At a press briefing about the May 26 medical evacuation of seven crewmembers from Vessels of Opportunity working in the Breton Sound area, Coast Guard Captain Meredith Austin, Unified Command Deputy Incident Commander in Houma, LA, said that air monitoring done in advance of beginning work showed no volatile organic compounds above limits of concern.

No respiratory protection was issued, Austin said “because air ratings were taken and there were no values found to be at an unsafe level, prior to us sending them in there. ” (Elizabeth) Figure 2. This is the Picture of damaged bird which shows how serious the situation is (Witt). The Political Buzz Examiner Ryan Witt reports that even though 70% of spilled oil has burned, the remaining 30% of oil left on the sea still 5 times larger than the last biggest oil spill Exxon Valdez.

As the picture shows that what the animals go through is not any kind of game for the companies that are responsible on it. No one can even sure that how hugely people have been destroying the environment according to Witt’s comment of “There may be much less environmental damage that was previously anticipated, or there may be much more, that we simply do not know yet. All the scientists agree that more studies and research will have to be done to see what the long-term environmental impacts of the spill are. ” (Witt) Same happens for the fishes.

For instance, six months into the BP oil spill, satellite data from the European Space Agency says that 20 percent of juvenile bluefin tuna have been killed by BP’s oil spill and more than half of blue fin tuna is died by the sea pollution in the past 30 years. Blue fin tuna has been banned fishing since it has been declining too much but this once people’s mistake reduced the 20% of valuable lives. This can be described as tragedy. Including oiled blue fin tuna, for polluted fishing industry harm estimated cost about $2. 5 billion. McDermott) BP has done unforgivable tragedy way too far. No matter how hard they try to clean the ocean up, it’s mostly like impossible to make things right at this point. In the other word, BP has become a terrible murderer that killed uncountable lives and environments. Unfortunately, furthermore, they were harmed more than ever by themselves either. There actually is no way to fix this situation up. However, to think positively, if they turn their mind as it was big lesson to not make the same happen again, it could be the big opportunity to step up.

It might be too cruel to give the BP lessons from this incident but, no matter how huge the fault is, it’s always better to get a moral after the error.

Works Cited “Oil estimate raised to 35,000-60,000 barrels a day” CNN 16 June. 2010. Web. 8 Nov. 2010. Bourne, Joel K. Jr. ”Is Another Deepwater Disaster Inevitable? ” National Geographic, Oct. 2010. Web. 8 Nov. 2010. “The Latest Gulf Outrage. ” New York Times 29 Oct. 2010: A30(L). The New York Times. Web. 8 Nov. 2010. Reed, Travis. “Spill hasn’t yet emptied hotels on Gulf Coast”. The Sun News. Associated Press. 5 May. 2010. Web. 8 Nov. 2010. Elizabeth, Grossman. “BP Lies about Air Toxicity as Gulf Workers Are Hospitalized”. The Faster Times. 1 June. 2010. Web. 8 Nov. 2010. Witt, Ryan. “NOAA Report on Gulf Oil Spill Draws Criticism for Many Assumptions. ” Examiner. com. 5 Oct. 2010. Web. 8 Nov. 2010. McDermott, Matthew. “One-Fifth Of Juvenile Atlantic Bluefin Tuna Killed by BP Oil Spill” Treehugger. 20 Oct. 2010. Web. 8 Nov. 2010 Krauss, Clifford, and Elisabeth, Rosenthal. “The price and who pays: updates from the Gulf. ” New York Times 13 May 2010: A18(L). The New York Times. Web. 8 Nov. 2010.