Spill, Baby, Spill

The only thing remarkable about Deepwater Horizon is that it happened to blow up.

by Isaiah Thompson

"BP currently operates 156 sub-sea wells worldwide. ... In the next five years BP plans to increase the number of operated sub-sea wells to 320."

That's from "BP In the Arctic and Beyond: A World-Class Company for World-Scale Projects," released by BP circa 2004. (Download it in PDF form.) How bright the deep-sea drilling future must have seemed back then. And how oily-dark it looks now: Somehow, it took me six weeks to realize that the so-called worst environmental disaster in American history is really just a statistical blip, a predictable unpredictability against the number of wells operating out there, and the newness of this technology. The only thing remarkable about Deepwater Horizon is that it happened to blow up. And if another blowout preventer fails, or another well casing is faulty, and another well starts spewing? Two? Twenty?

"Hydraulic fracturing ... has never contaminated groundwater. ... Our top commitment remains producing these resources in an environmentally world-class way."

That's from a letter titled "'Fracking' is environmentally safe," to the Lehigh Valley Express-Times by Kathryn Z. Klaber, president of the Marcellus Shale Coalition, an industry group that lobbies for drillers. The letter appeared Friday morning. Later that day, a Marcellus Shale well in Clearfield County exploded, spewing from 35,000 to 1 million gallons of toxic fracking fluid for 16 hours. The well's owner, EOG, is investigating — can it be? — the blowout preventer and well casing. Another young technology goes horribly awry and, yet again, it already surrounds us. EOG operates 117 wells in the Marcellus Shale — at least one of which contaminated a different patch of forest in Clearfield County in August 2009, when it leaked drilling fluids into a forest spring. Some 2,000 new wells are on track to be permitted this year alone. The unique thing about this particular well? It happened to blow up, too. So did another one, on Monday in West Virginia: There, a Marcellus Shale well shot out a 70-foot tower of flame, burning seven workers.

"Isn't there more your paper can do [to] call for a halt to all [Marcellus Shale] drilling? I have never written a letter to the editor, never joined any activist group, just minded my own business and done my best to survive — but I have children."

I just happened to get that, a few minutes ago, by e-mail, from a stranger.