BP Crews Burn Sea Turtles Alive; Cleanup Crews Sick

Environmental disaster a hallmark of awl bidness' shakeups

One of the really ugly scenes in the environmental disaster
that is turning the Gulf into a filthy, plugged-up toilet is
the wholesale slaughter of endangered Ridley's sea turtles.

In the controlled burns British Petroleum is carrying out to
attempt to control the goo their ruined hole is spewing into
Gulf, they are burning them alive.

They just can't escape when the boats pull up and surround
the spills to make a "burn box" out of fire resistant booms,
then tighten the circle down and touch it off.

Environmentalist boat captains who are struggling to rescue
and clean up the turtles report they are prevented from
doing so by BP boat crews working the burn boxes.

If you wish to protest, you can sign a petition, but to whom
will they send it and what will they do with it when they
receive it?

No doubt the issue will contribute to the kind of federal
court battle that Friends of the Earth mounted against the
Alaska Pipeline that triggered the moratorium for just long
enough to give the Ayatollah Khomeini time to marshal his
zealous forces to a fever pitch effective enough raise the
worldwide market price of crude to incredible highs in the
late seventies, thus ushering in a reign of terror that
persists, even today.

Incidentally, BP, a company that was founded to do business
with the Seven Sisters of the old Standard Oil Trust when
they decided to depose the constitutional government of a
socialistic President in Iran and replace him with a British
Army Sergeant Major they called the Shah, contributed major
bucks along with ARCO to help Friends of the Earth put on
the protracted legal battle.

It was even more effective than the environmental action put
on by the GOO (Get Oil Out) legal campaign of 1969, the one
that preceded the nationalization of the Libyan oil fields
when the blowout in the Santa Barbara Channel Islands
destroyed the abalone and red snapper fishing and killed off
sea birds and seals, sea lions and dolphins.

Environmentally aware medical authorities are predicting a
massive wave of sickness and economic devastation caused by
the pollution of the coast and the loss of fresh drinking
water resources. In fact, they are already overwhelmed with
sick workers who have become ill trying to clean up the mess
in Louisiana, Alabama and Florida.

Incidentally, the only thing BP will pay for in the way of
medical treatment is aspirin and band-aids. There's no way
they are going to admit that their crude causes people to
get sick and die from exposure to benzene and other deadly
hydrocarbons.

Not only will the commercial seafood industry be destroyed
for hundreds of years, but the subsistence-level population
that lives on the daily catch will sicken with incurable
diseases such as cancer, lung complaints like emphysema and
COPD and the effects of malnutrition, they say.

People who have lived for many generations in the
Atchafalaya Basin, the big swamp that separates New Orleans
from Baton Rouge, will have to seek new homes because the
government is buying up land worth $1,000 per acre for the
peanut picayune price of $125 in eminent domain proceedings
allowed by federal disaster law.

Is there an agenda?

We might not know until the historians of the next century
or the one after are able to pick up the pieces and examine
the records.

These facts are for sure.

Petroleum-based environmental disasters have preceded the
advent of each increment in the economic wars that have
taken place since the Suez Crisis of 1956.

If you don't remember the Exxon Valdez and the lessons
learned there, you won't remember the blowout in the Santa
Barbara Channel Islands of 1969 or the oil tanker collision
in San Francisco Bay the following year.

Maybe you can't see the forest for the trees and admit to
yourself that the assassination of JFK was a coup de etat
carried out by independent oil operators, the mob and the
CIA after the President went south in 1963 on a 1960
campaign promise to preserve, protect, uphold and defend the
massive oil depletion tax allowance the industry had enjoyed
for many years.

Was there a conspiracy? No way. This angry little nut from
New Orleans just decided one day to go to the Soviet Union
and marry the daughter of a man who managed a secret radar
factory specializing in the kind of sophisticated radio gear
used to shoot down an American U2 reconnaisance plane, come
home to America, buy a World War One surplus rifle for less
than $20 and shoot the most powerful man in America.

Who were his friends?

Well, Count Georges DeMorenschildt, a Dallas independent oil
operator from Europe with extensive ties to the American
intelligence community, spent a lot of time squiring the
dishonorably discharged Marine around Texas and Louisiana,
helping him obtain employment with a government contractor
that prepared top secret maps for the Defense Department and
other little doo dads like that.

So, what happened this time?

It's simple enough, according to eyewitnesses who will no
doubt tell their story in the resulting trials for wrongful
death and criminal negligence that will surely follow.

A Schlumberger logging crew carefully documented the fact
that though the Halliburton's cementing crew had done
everything they should have to plug the hole, the high
pressure of 1,400 p.s.i. in the hole just drilled by
"Deepwater Horizon" was subject to succumb to the kicking
pressure of natural gas and crude.

The light drilling mud that Transocean had pumped into the
hole was not getting the job done to contain the pressure.

It was time to go to a more expensive, heavier viscosity
drilling mud.

The BP company man elected to replace the lightweight
drilling mud with even lighter seawater, something the rig
superintendent considered suicidal.

After a long shouting match between the two of them, the
crew pumped the seawater in and the drilling mud out. When
the predicted blowout came, the adjacent vent hole and choke
hole could not muster the hydraulic pressure necessary to
automate the rams that would have cut the drill pipe and
capped the hole.

The gas ballooned out, blew the rig sky high and sank the
dynamically positioned platform in water a mile deep.

Curiously, the top executives of BP dumped their stock the
day before the disaster occurred.

Earth Day.

O.Henry would have blushed if he wrote that little story.

So much for dumb mistakes.

Did somebody say something about a $20 billion slush fund?

The Legendary can smell a government bailout all the way
from this desk.

Walk on, world. You'll have to pass me by on this one.