Another Oil Disaster and Legal Violation

Once again, oil has created another horrific situation. Not so long ago, the hunt for oil in Iraq led the Bush administration into an armed conflict. The U.S. is trying to extricate itself from that oily mess.

Now, the BP oil pipeline is still leaking millions of gallons of crude into the Gulf. No one is exactly certain about the amount of gallons seeping into the ocean. But it doesn’t matter. You don’t have to be a scientist, or very intelligent at all, to know this is not a pleasant scenario for ocean life, coastal communities, and the planet in general.

Even worse, no one knows how to stop it. Thus, inanity enters.

How does a company get approval to operate something that they don’t know how to stop if an emergency occurs?

This one fact defies common sense.

It seems to me that our leaders and governments are either tremendously negligent or incompetent. Perhaps, those two things are that different in the end.

Let’s review: just over thirty years ago, the Exxon Valdez (a supertanker filled with oil) spilled over ten million gallons of crude into Prince William Sound, off the coast of Alaska. In response to that, the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 was created in large part to prevent such recklessness from happening again.

The Oil Pollution Act (OPA) provided new requirements for contingency planning by both the government and industry, called National Oil and Hazardous Substance Pollution Contingency Plan (NCP). It stipulates a three-tiered approach:

“1) Federal government is required to direct all public and private response efforts for certain types of spills.

2) Area committees—made of federal, state, and local government—must develop detailed location-specific Area Contingency Plans.

3) Owners-Operators—of vessels and certain facilities that pose serious threat to the environment must prepare their own Facility Response Plans.”

I took the liberty of highlighting number three above since BP has admitted that they had no emergency response plan. And yet, the government gave them approval for the oil recovery operation anyway.

On the premises of national laboratories and experimental centers, security clearance aside, no one is permitted to be there if one does not have the training to effectively deal with an emergency.

It appears from the 1990 OPA that both government and industry have failed us, not just the U.S. citizens, but the people of Earth, by acting irresponsibly.



Sources:
www.epa.gov/emergencies

www.en.wikipedia.org



www.earthactionrightnow.org