BP Gulf Disaster: "Connecting the Dots, Whistling Past The Graveyard"

“July 2010 saw extreme weather and the further apparent collapse of our planet’s eco-system come front and center. Despite these dire warning signs, the psychopaths in power continue to do their best to obfuscate the facts and embroil as many normal human beings as possible in conflict, strife, suffering and death.

On July 15th, three months after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded and sank to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, BP announced it had successfully capped the gushing oil well. Its vice president Kent Wells was so relieved that he said, “I am very excited that there’s no oil in the Gulf of Mexico.” It’s hard to know what to make of such a comment after his company leaked 5,000,000 barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Perhaps he thought that with the oil flow halted, BP was suddenly off the hook and free to carry on as normal? Apparently so, as the company announced several days later it will soon begin drilling to even greater depths off the coast of Libya. So did this latest effort to cap the well actually work? We can’t know for certain because we have to take BP’s word for it. Remember that it was in BP’s interest to underestimate the oil flow rate; the lower the oil flow rate, the less they have to pay the US government and the local Gulf population in fines and compensation. The true cost to the whole planet may be higher than anyone could have imagined.

Toxic Gulf: Successfully capping the well should have produced tremendous pressure under the cap, but when that didn’t manifest it became obvious that oil was leaking from elsewhere. Distrusting BP’s assessment, the US government sent its own monitors to the site on July 18th and immediately noticed that oil and methane was coming up from under the sea floor. By the time this news was leaked to the press, unnamed government officials confirmed that oil was “seeping a distance from the well,” possibly alluding to what oil industry insider Matt Simmons was referring to when he berated the absurdity of focusing on the capped well when there is another massive hole leaking oil “miles” from the Deepwater site. Once again, BP was caught lying through its teeth as CBS News also reported that oil and methane were detected surfacing three kilometers from the well head. Typical of the constant obfuscation we’ve been treated to since April, the Miami Herald reassured us that “detection devices have sensed naturally occurring seeps, which are a common phenomenon in the Gulf.” It’s ok, see, we’ve capped the leak at the well; all those other leaks are Mother Nature’s fault. Matt Simmons, incidentally, is now dead. He “drowned in his home” or “died of a heart attack”, depending on which report you believe.

Operation ‘static kill’ saw the well pumped full of heavy drill mud that will soon be joined by cement to, in theory, plug the well for good. This was attempted in May but failed as the pressure was too strong to insert anything into the well. The fact that it worked this time around reinforces the reports of leaks occurring in multiple locations around the well. The well itself was most probably damaged during the initial methane explosion on April 20th. This would explain the lower than expected pressure behind the recent cap. Oil and methane is breaching the well casing and finding its way through fractures in the seabed. Considering BP’s outright lies about the well head being sealed, what are we to make of the preposterous announcement on August 4th that not only had the well been permanently sealed, but most of the oil in the Gulf was now gone! Just like that! The White House claimed that “most of the oil was taken care of by Mother Nature – either consumed by deep-water bacteria or simply evaporating.”

Lies, lies and damned lies. Most of the oil is “gone” because BP has been bribing many scientists, the media are not allowed to film it and the toxic Corexit has dispersed it deeper into the water column. Psychopaths simply declaring reality to be the way they wish us to believe it to be does not make it so. Just think of how BP was caught ‘photoshopping’ images of the disaster not once, but on several occasions. Just as the media were barred from access to damaged sites, BP has now moved to control academic research into its mess. It emerged last month that the company has been on a spending spree to buy scientists’ silence and control all scientific research on the environmental and health implications of the disaster. BP brazenly attempted to hire the entire marine sciences department at one Alabama university as it prepares to fend off lawsuits, while scientists from Louisiana State University, Mississippi State University and Texas A&M have signed contracts with BP to determine how much ecological damage the Gulf of Mexico region has suffered. The contract “prohibits the scientists from publishing their research, sharing it with other scientists or speaking about the data that they collect for at least the next three years.”

It is just more of the same wishful thinking that epitomises psychopathy to believe the public’s perception of what is really happening in the Gulf region can be contained. The intensive use of Corexit to mask the visibility of oil means that the “75%” remains dispersed throughout the sea. The full extent of the problem remains hidden from view. But it’s only a matter of time before people know the truth as the toxic fallout impacts every aspect of their lives. Methane concentrations over 100,000 times the Gulf water’s normal limit have already altered the complex food web that forms the foundation of the Gulf’s ecosystem. A ‘dead zone’ caused by low oxygen levels now stretches over an area the size of Massachusetts from Louisiana west along the Texas shoreline. Public authorities reassure us that the water is safe yet test after test of oil and water samples reveal dangerous levels of toxicity. We should remember that the Bush government also told the American public that the air around ‘ground zero’ at the WTC was safe. Thousands of rescue workers still suffering from respiratory illnesses today are a testament to that particular flagrant and callous government lie.

Surveys conducted to assess the human impact have found that nearly half of working class people in the Gulf are reporting skin irritations and respiratory problems, to say nothing of the damage to their psychological and economic well-being during what should be peak tourist season. A Center for Disease Control study found that 10% of the population of Key West, Florida was infected with the dengue fever virus, a critter carried by mosquitoes which produces symptoms in humans eerily similar to the effects of exposure to Corexit and crude oil:

“The timing of this outbreak of dengue fever presents two additional problems; the symptoms of dengue fever are very similar to that of exposures to chemicals such as those contained in crude oil and the dispersants currently being used in the contaminated areas of the Gulf of Mexico, potentially making it difficult to diagnose the source of a sufferer’s symptoms. Worse yet, there looms the possibility that Corexit and other toxins present in the Gulf area may weaken the immune system, thus, setting the stage for more severe forms of the disease in people who are, or have previously been, exposed to the virus.

In a bizarre twist, the department of Homeland Security Administration then issued a “terror alert” concerning the findings, although it was never made clear why. Is it really ‘dengue fever’ that people in Florida are coming down with? Gulf residents are furious with BP and its cover-up of the magnitude of the ecocide, but we wonder how they might feel if they learned that dengue fever was deliberately introduced into Florida by the CIA in the 1950s as part of Project Artichoke: “Several CIA documents, as well as the findings of a 1975 Congressional committee, reveal that three sites in Florida, Key West, Panama City and Avon Park, as well as two other locations in central Florida, were used for experiments with mosquito-borne dengue fever and other biological substances.”

The experiments in Avon Park, about 170 miles from Miami, were covertly conducted in a low-income African-American neighborhood that contained several newly constructed public housing projects. CIA documents related to its top-secret Project MK/NAOMI clearly indicate that the mosquitoes used in Avon Park were the Aedes aegypti type. Specially equipped aircraft, in one of the larger experiments, released 600,000 mosquitoes over the area. In one of the Avon Park experiments, about 150,000 mosquitoes were dropped in paper bags designed to open upon impact with the ground. Each bag held about 1,000 insects. Besides dengue, some of the mosquitoes were also carrying yellow fever.

When tens of thousands of dead bloated Menhaden fish were spotted floating in shallow Mississippi waters in early August, the Department of Environmental Quality sought to pull the wool over our eyes with reassurances that the dead fish had escaped through the torn net of a fishing trawler. Try telling that to the dead turtles or the dead dolphins washing ashore. In any event, just days later another huge fish kill was reported in Gulfport, Mississippi. “Unprecedented” fish kills were already being reported in June. As we go to press, yet another massive Menhaden fish kill was reported way up the US coast off Massachusetts, although here the blame is being attributed to unusually warm water. Residents say they’ve never seen anything like it. Tens of thousands more dead Menhaden fish washed ashore at Delaware Bay in southern New Jersey on August 11th.

“Citing “incomplete forms,” BP announced July 12th that it would be drastically reducing its payments on oil spill claims to some 40,000 Gulf residents directly affected by the catastrophe. In tandem with the US government, BP went even further the following week: Gulf Coast fishermen and others with lost income claims against BP are outraged by a recent announcement that the $20 billion government-administered claim fund will subtract money they earn by working on the cleanup effort from any future damage claims against BP. Kenneth Feinberg, who was appointed by President Obama as the independent administrator of the Gulf Claims Facility for the $20 billion BP Deepwater Horizon oil disaster compensation fund, said yesterday that the wages earned by people working on BP’s cleanup will be deducted from their claims against the company.

This is what corporate entities do of course; cut costs and maximize profits. Why pay people to clean up your mess when you can conscript slaves from America’s vast prison population? With the highest rate of incarceration in the country, Louisiana’s inmates offer BP a great way to save money and write off the meager hiring costs against their (already low) corporate tax in the process. Those clean-up workers that were hired through regular channels are not faring much better. They are paid pittance, morale is low and when they fall sick, they are simply told, “We’ll call you”, which means that they have been fired for daring to become ill and thereby contradict the official line that chemical dispersants are safe. Others were simply fired for talking to the media. How long before stories like this become a regular event?”