That's a picture of the sweet crude oil leaking out under the ocean where a floating drilling rig used to be. There's a 1000 barrels a day gushing out. As for stopping it, the New Orleans Times-Picayune says, "Officials said they were trying to stop the flow by using robot submarines to activate valves at the well head, but that would take 24 to 36 hours to complete. If that doesn't work, crews are also planning to drill a relief well to cut off the flow -- which could take several months."
The Rude Pundit's no mathematician, but a month of oil being pissed out at the rate of 42,000 gallons a day equals a fuck of a lot of oil. Hope everyone at Jazz Fest this week is enjoying those shrimp po-boys. Savor 'em, man, 'cause who knows what the fresh taste of sweet crude will be like over the next few years.
The workers who died in the Deepwater Horizon rig blast are not being memorialized and mythologized in the same way that the miners in West Virginia have been. Most of the people the Rude Pundit knows who work the rigs, who do seven on and seven off, who helicopter out to work, do it for the money because everything else was just gonna take too fucking long after high school. It's harsh, awful, dangerous work, and the workers don't get to go home after their daily shift. Like the Big Branch miners, they are doing it at the bidding of a large, uncaring corporation and because this nation is too proudly backwards to wean itself from the crude teat.
So disaster all around. Environmental, economic, emotional. As the President said in West Virginia yesterday, "How can we fail them? How can a nation that relies on its miners [or rig workers] not do everything in its power to protect them? How can we let anyone in this country put their lives at risk by simply showing up to work?" It's naive, though. We demand they they put their lives at risk so we don't have to change anything about our own.
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