30 Million Gallons Under the Sea: Five Years After BP Disaster, New Drilling OK'd by Spill Site

[red dog 1]

Democracy Now
May 14, 2015


Drilling has resumed near the site of the BP-operated offshore oil rig that exploded five years ago in the worst industrial environmental disaster in U.S. history.
A Louisiana-based oil company purchased the area from BP and is now drilling into the Macondo reservoir.

BP insists most of the oil has now dissolved or evaporated and did not settle on the ocean floor
.
AMY GOODMAN:
"But that's not what our guest found.
Antonia Juhasz spent two weeks on a ship in the Gulf of Mexico as part of a scientific research mission exploring the impact of the BP Gulf oil spill.
She participated in a dive in the Alvin submarine nearly a mile below the ocean surface, getting closer to the site of the blowout than anyone had ever been."

ANTONIA JUHASZ:
"The Alvin submarine is the first and last human-occupied submarine still available for research, so it's an incredible experience to go down in it.
And Dr. Samantha Joye, one of the leading experts on oil and gas in the Gulf of Mexico, who has lead the research looking at the impacts of the BP disaster, was my guide, with our pilot, Bob Waters, who's both, thank goodness, an engineer and a pilot, so if anything goes wrong with the sub, he's there with us.

So we went within two miles of the site of the blowout, which is as close as you can get, because the wreckage of the Deepwater Horizon is still there.
It took two hours to get down
We then made a curve around the site of the disaster, taking sediment samples all along the way.
And when we got down there, you know, really, the most stark thing to report was that it --
there's basically nothing there.
It;s a moonscape.
Basically, all the sea life that could get out of the way of the oil got out of the way of the oil,
everything that couldn't was just, in Dr. Joye's words. 'nuked and killed'
And there is a blanket of oil, as much as two inches thick, covering 3,000 square feet of the ocean floor."

Read entire transcript of interview, Watch video, Listen to audio:
http://www.democracynow.org/2015/05/14/30_million_gallons_under_the_sea

[Hoppy]

1. Thank you, Barak.