Obama fiddles on as the 43rd Presidency slowly slips beneath waves of oil in the Gulf of Mexico.
Do I really need to say more than defining moments for readers to know exactly what I'm talking about?
Mr. President if the worst man made environmental disaster in history is not a defining moment for your presidency sir I have no idea what the hell has to happen to make it on the list.
Not only has this president dropped the ball in handling the situation but the people around him are either too stupid to see it or they don't have the balls to stand up and say something. Mishandling the situation would be bad enough but for reasons I would LOVE to hear Mr. Obama explain he has refused to allow foreign ships to enter U.S. waters to help. Are you serious? Ships I should add that were designed specifically for dealing with oil leaks. Both the clean up and stopping the damn leak. Manned with experienced crews.
Skimmer vessels that could help save the coast lines, it's inhabitants and wildlife of over 25% of the continental U.S. Not to mention all the island and other countries that will no doubt see some part of the oil from this leak.
What the hell is going on?
Trust me I'm just getting started so please do hit the link and read on.
A 1920's protectionist trade law prohibits these foreign ships from entering U.S. waters and although the president has the power to suspend the law in situations like this he has refused to do so. Bush did it many times and needed no prodding to suspend the law after Katrina. Why on EARTH would the man refuse the aid our kind friends around the would are offering? Especially when we're not talking about aid in the form of supplies we already have here and are mobilizing "as we speak". No this is very skilled aid being offered during the worst man made environmental disaster in history.
Meanwhile oil continues to gush into the gulf at a rate that started out at Oh don't worry it's only 1000 barrels a day, we'll get it plugged and cleaned up in a jiff to a staggering 35,000 - 60,000 BARRELS of oil a day. That was the last official estimate from the head of the coast guard but MSNBC was reporting that the expert came up with that range said the coast guard misquoted him, that's the range for the LOW END of his estimate and he really has no idea just how how high the high end could be.
35,000 barrels a day. In US barrels that is 42 gallons per barrel. Imagine 42 jugs of milk right? Times 35,000 is 142,000 gallons. 35K is the lowest estimate, we have room, lets call it 150K gallons a day. PER DAY. For the last 60 days comes to a grand total of nine MILLION (9,000,000) US gallons of raw crude oil dumped into the gulf and counting.
One of the other things that has me pissed in all this is the people saying we should continue current drilling operations because of a fairly safe track record. I fully understand and support the plight of oil company workers who have been affected by this industry shutdown and if there are any kudos belonging to the Obama administration in this debacle is the agreement worked out with BP part of which is a $100 million dollar fund to make sure all these oil company workers now out of work get paid like nothing happened. I have no idea who's ideas belong to whom in this deal, whether it's a matter of BP stepping up with this plan to do the absolute right thing or if the White House had to negotiate for it. Either way I don't care BP is doing the right thing and the President made sure to get ample funds secured from BP to cover both those out of work oil workers wrongly affected by this and $20 BILLION dollars to go to legitimate claims made from people who's lively hoods have suffered. These funds are on top of BP paying the cost of clean up. Kudos to BP for doing the right thing and Obama for making sure everyone is covered. Back to what's pissing me off. What the people saying "keep drilling" don't understand is what they are really saying is the same the thing Russians said when they built nuclear power plants like chernobyl with no containment systems.
I saw an interview with one of the men who was on the clean up crew after the first accident exposed the reactor core at chernobyl who said the official Russian thinking on containment systems at the time was "Russian built nuclear power plants wont blow up, their Russian made". No kidding.
The Russians blew up some steam pipes or something doing some tests and it ripped part of the building off exposing the core to the atmosphere and tossing a radioactive dust cloud around the globe. It's bad but nowhere near the potential world of hurt a reactor core melt down like what happened at three mile island could have turned into. The core went into meltdown exposing the core but because we planned for the worst case scenario and built containment systems I don't have a constant green glow on the horizon to my west.
Our respective track records of "running reactors safely" had nothing to do with it. No the difference was we had a containment system that worked.
The oil industry has no containment system. It's 60 days later and you people have no idea how to stop the leak. I understand a problem of this nature and magnitude is always a unique situation that has to be assessed to find the right solution but oil companies have a responsibility to do as much research and development into dealing with worst case disasters like this.
