"BP's Temple of Doom"
By Alan Farago
We are like a pack of dogs holding our snouts aloft, sensing for something we can't quite smell but intuit. Mothers won't let children on the beaches. Fathers walk away from vacation deposits on Florida condominiums. Motel lobbies, empty. The cleaning ladies go over the same surfaces with disinfectants although no one has disturbed them. We've never pierced Mother Earth before, a mile underwater; this blowout, these toxins stored in hundreds of millions of years of geologic history: how dare we unlock the Temple of Doom?
One senses through these internet rumors, a mass alarm bell has gone off. It should stop ringing. When it does, the multi-billion dollar industries based on well drilling- for oil, for natural gas, for water, to retrieve, to store, to mine and extract- will grow fatter and wiser. They will organize a swing in the pendulum; back from chaos to order. Here is the hoped-for sequence. In August, BP engineers defeat the blowout, capping the well with intricate, remote-controlled surgery. Triumph by joystick. Accolades. Sighs of relief. Here is the technology. Here are the engineers who saved us from wrack and ruin.
This is in the future. Not in time for the November elections, but not far from them. The Gulf communities are still in a state of suspended animation. The Chambers of Commerce need to process that cleaning beaches is not something that only goes on twice a day, but will go on twice a day for years. If the experience of Alaska and the Exxon Valdez holds, there will be no choice but to live dirty. And dirty, we will. Mothers will scoot their kids into the water. There is no sea life, but it is still refreshing and the children will not be stopped. Gulf coast seafood restaurants will restock with more Asian farm-raised shrimp and tilapia. Machine made "crab" legs extruded from bits and pieces of trash fish. All-you-can-eat in Pensacola with clams from dirty water in the Phillipines, $10.99. New businesses will spring up, cleaning kids, pets and parents as they step from the beach. Anything is possible.
For now, tourism on the Gulf Coast is evaporating fast as organic compounds are volatilizing from the Deepwater Horizon. No one knows where they are going. Everyone is going, somewhere. Gradually, over time, the courts will intervene. BP will withdraw its subsidies, and life in the Gulf will return to this normal. Elected officials who railed against Big Oil will go to Washington or become lobbyists for Big Oil. This can all be anticipated, because it happens all the time."
Alan Farago, conservation chair of Friends of the Everglades, lives in south Florida. He can be reached at: afarago@bellsouth.net
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