Summary: This sub-site tracks the events surrounding the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. View a live video feed. This seminal case study serves the agenda topic in Public Policy and the disabling analysis in World Sustainability. My intention is to gather basic sources for later. Please visit my Gulf Spill Comments page on our wiki.
The on-going oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico informs both of my summer on-line courses as they begin. As I compose this, the leak has been ongoing for over a month with no capping expected soon. The oil plume will engulf the Louisiana wetlands and threatens to spread to the Flordia keys. The volume of oil spill will soon surpass Exxon Valdez as the biggest oil spill in history. We can learn much by examining how this happened, how corporations and government respond, and what will change as a result.
Table of Contents
The terrible spill continues for over a month now as I prepare this page, May 22. This page will change as events dictate: note the version number in the page header and the date in the footer. Students are asked to comment on our course wiki. Please do visit and comment.
On April 20, 2010, the drilling rig Deepwater Horizon, owned by Transocean Ldt, a Swiss Company, and leased by BP, a British energy company, exploded, killing eleven platform workers and injuring at least seventeen others. The catastrophic explosion was accompanied by a failure of deep water drilling equipment owned by Halliburton at a depth of 5,000 feet below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. This released a gusher of oil that was blown by prevailing winds toward the nearby Louisiana coast. The wetlands are vulnerable to great damage from the spill. The coastal population depends heavily on the economic activities based on the ecological resources of the coast, so economic distress accompanies the impending ecological devastation.
BP professes that it will assume responsibility and has spent hundreds of millions on the containment and clean up. The British corporation, headquartered in London, has its critics, but we need to focus on adequate responses for both courses, Public Policy and World Sustainability. BP has been accused of grossly underestimating the magnitude of the leak. While PB estimated a spill flow rate of 5,000 gallons per day (initially only 1,000 gallons per day), some independent scientists estimated 100,000. and may have been reluctant to provide a live video stream of the leak, which has been placed on the BP web site. Further, the legal exposure of BP and others involved to compensate for damages will remain an open and potentially contested question. In testimony before Congress, executives of BP, Transocean, and Halliburton, the company actually handling the drilling, squabbled over blame. What turns out to be a legitimate obligation for BP will remain unclear for a long while. BP's statements have minimized the expected environmental damage. None of this appears to have shaken Louisiana's devotion to and support of the oil industry.
Calamities of this magnitude may or may not generate public policy responses (President George H.W. Bush did nothing after the Exxon Valdez tragedy, the worst spill on record until Deepwater Horizon), especially visible on the national level. The companies involved, especially BP, has come under intense criticism. So has the federal government for the apparent lack of proactive response by the Obama administration. Here are some of the responses: