The Consequences of 'Drill, Baby Drill': More Than 90 Oil Spills a Day in the U.S.

By Kari Lydersen, AlterNet. Posted April 16, 2009.

The trans-Alaskan pipeline that carries oil from the North Slope to the southern port of Valdez is also vulnerable to spills and sabotage.

"It adds up," said Pam Miller, Arctic coordinator for the Northern Alaska Environmental Center. "Because of the remoteness of these fields and the lack of state personnel and motivation to do inspections and monitoring, the number of spills aren't declining. The upward trend has been pretty constant. It shows that oil by its nature, no matter how well done, is a dirty business."

The North Slope analysis includes on- and offshore accidents caused by corroded pipes and other problems. The federal government recently filed a lawsuit against BP over two oil spills from corroded pipeline totaling more than 200,000 gallons in March and August 2006. The state of Alaska is also suing BP, alleging negligence caused these spills and resulted in greatly reduced oil royalties to the state after operations were temporarily shut down. BP had already been fined $20 million for the spills after pleading guilty to federal misdemeanor criminal charges.

The Wall Street Journal reported the Justice Department had essentially backed down with this settlement, after initially considering felony charges that could have cost the company more than $600 million.

Any kind of settlement or payment is an exception. Normally, as long as a company reports a spill and is operating within its permit requirements, they are not fined or otherwise punished. "Sometimes they'll get a notice of violation, and they're given time to clean up their act, sometimes for a decade they're out of compliance," said Miller. "And there are very few (inspection) personnel in the field -- there's only one inspector for an oil field area larger than the state of Rhode Island. It's pretty much self-reporting by industry."

On the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and neighboring states, residents have learned they must do their own environmental monitoring to protect themselves from the effects of frequent spills and leaks from the extensive local oil industry. Coastal waters, marshes, rivers, agricultural fields and groundwater are regularly contaminated by accidents in the oil industry which release oil, diesel, other petroleum products and chemicals used in the refining process.

When a compressor blows, contaminants can be blasted into people's homes and gardens. In many cases, groundwater that provides drinking water to towns, subdivisions or trailer parks is contaminated. Usually this means the well will be plugged and the town connected to another water source.

Wilma Subra, a Louisiana chemist who works with community groups to do their own testing, said the source of the contamination is rarely investigated, and no company is held responsible.

Meanwhile, people who live in rural areas with their own wells, or in private subdivisions with a communal well, must often do their own testing and find alternate water sources. Sometimes the responsible company or the state provides bottled water, other times citizens are on their own and community groups step in to help, Subra said.

Spills, leaks and other accidents causing contamination are a regular occurrence along the Gulf Coast, even in normal conditions. But when hurricanes hit, the consequences are devastating. Oil platforms and storage tanks are uprooted or damaged, drums of chemicals or petroleum products are tossed asunder and pipelines are damaged. Waste pits or lagoons storing petroleum waste are overwhelmed by storm surges, washing the toxic brew into communities, rivers and fields.

About 9 million gallons of oil were spilled during hurricanes Rita and Katrina, with 113 offshore oil rigs destroyed, and much of that contamination still has not been cleaned up.

The town of Meraux, near New Orleans, was practically submerged by floodwaters mixed with oil from Murphy Oil's nearby refinery, eventually resulting in a $330 million class-action settlement. Then in 2008, hurricanes Ike and Gustav spilled more than half a million gallons of oil, destroying 52 oil rigs and damaging 32 out of the 3,800 in the Gulf.

Those hurricanes also stirred up contaminated sediment from past storms and mixed it with water or washed it onto land. Subra noted that cleanup efforts of the past year have been hindered by red tape, like the fact that certain funds are allocated specifically for contamination from one hurricane season or another.

"This just added onto what still hadn't been addressed from Katrina," said Subra. "They were finally getting around to looking at (Katrina's effects on) water bodies with FEMA funds. But then when the debris was added by Gustav and Ike, they were saying we don't have authority to use the money for that. How do you tell which hurricane it came from?"

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Kari Lydersen, a regular contributor to AlterNet, also writes for the Washington Post and is an instructor for the Urban Youth International Journalism Program in Chicago.

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