In the Gulf of Mexico, drilling has resumed near the site of the BP-operated offshore oil rig that exploded five years ago in the worst industrial environmental disaster in U.S. history.
Harper’s Magazine revealed a Louisiana-based oil company (LLOG Exploration Offshore LLC) purchased the area from BP and is now drilling into the Macondo reservoir.
The VP of deep water projects with LLOG, Rick Fowler says “Our commitment is to not allow such an event to occur again. LLOG staff keeps the memory of what happened … fresh in our minds throughout our operations, both planning and execution.”
Antonia Juhasz who wrote the article spent two weeks on a ship in the Gulf as part of a scientific research mission exploring the impacts of the BP Gulf oil spill. She participated in a dive in the Alvin submarine nearly a mile below the ocean surface, getting closer to the site of the blowout than anyone had ever been.
Juhasz says she went within two miles of the site of the blowout, which is as close as you can get, because the wreckage of the Deepwater Horizon is still there. The research group then made a curve around the site of the disaster, taking sediment samples all along the way. “When we got down there, you know, really, the most stark thing to report was that it—there’s basically nothing there. It’s a moonscape.
Basically, all of the sea life that could get out of the way of the oil got out of the way of the oil; everything that couldn’t was just, in Dr. Joye’s words, nuked and killed. And there is a blanket of oil, as much as two inches thick, covering 3,000 square feet of the ocean floor.”
Antonia Juhasz’s report is in the new issue of Harper’s Magazine – “Thirty Million Gallons Under the Sea: Following the Trail of BP’s Oil in the Gulf of Mexico.” She’s also author of Black Tide: The Devastating Impact of the Gulf Oil Spill.
(Source: Democracy Now)