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Macro: Slippery memories of the BP Gulf Oil disaster

September 10, 2010

It’s almost as if all that oil down there in the Gulf has simply disappeared.

Never mind the new reports of about three quarters of it having dissipated, been siphoned off or chemically remediated, or the assurances from the White House to Louisiana and other coastal states that there will probably be no long term damage; I’m thinking about the slick at its peak that embodied our panicked collective conscious during most of this summer. Quickly rising to the status of the worst environmental disaster in history, the Deepwater Horizon explosion of BP’s oil rig has consumed the media, our president, and a large swath of the Gulf of Mexico for a frenetic three-month glimpse into what could be our environmental future.

But what comes now that the well has been pumped with mud and cement and the immediate threat of ecosystem and economy collapse has passed?  Besides the lengthy litigation process to address all the damages done, and the years locals on the Gulf will now spend in court fighting BP lawyers, it behooves us to consider what lessons may be gleaned from our experiences with that shiny slick.

We have notably short attention spans, which really aren’t entirely our fault. When our news sources tend to move from disaster to disaster, one of the few capabilities we feel we have as individuals is simply to wish for hope. Now that we can listen to radio news again in the car without being reminded of plumes of petrol every time we press the gas pedal, what was largely out of sight to begin with for most people resumes its place as also out of mind.

But there is something different this time. With a spill of this magnitude, and so close to many of our major population centers, tourist locations, and places of significant ecological importance, we seem to be reluctant to simply let this one go.
And right on the heels of BP capping its well, another oil rig mishap — this time Mariner Energy’s Vermillion Rig, which caught fire on September 3rd — is rekindling the frustration and fear of earlier this year.

There’s an unnerving sense of hope in these accidents. Each recovery feels more and more fortuitous, less and less due to our own technological know-how. If there is anything that BP has shown us it is how little we know about the chaos of these accidents, the degree to which oil coats all it touches.

As always, we must be wary of quick fixes. We must be wary of buying into the phrase so often uttered of “we’ll know better next time.”

The machine is certainly flawed, and I would be skeptical of any statement containing “safe” and “deepwater drilling” together. Undoubtedly we’ll hear it. Probably by the end of the year as oil companies band together to overcome the Federal Government’s current moratorium on offshore drilling.

But for all of us not involved in the dollars of profit and barrels per day, it’s about preserving our collective memory, keeping it vital and unyielding. So long as we continue to remember the could-haves in the Gulf, and those days of taught unease when no one quite knew what would happen next, we cannot be forced to forget.