Today is the 91st day of the BP (British Petroleum) oil spill. The number of gallons of oil released into the gulf is 183,613,150. It’s enough to fill 306 Olympic size swimming pools. It’s 12 cans of oil for each person in USA. It’s enough to change 30,602,191 hummers. And it costs $13,714,066,173, it’s $ 74,68 per one balloon. And these numbers are increasing each day.
How much we will pay for lost lives? Nobody can answer this question, because nobody knows which kind of consequences we will have to face with.
The catastrophic explosion that caused an oil spill from a BP offshore drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico has reached the shoreline. Efforts to manage the spill with controlled burning, dispersal and plugging the leak have so far been unsuccessful. This oil spill has now obtained the dubious distinction of being the worst oil spill in US history.
The National Wildlife Federation reports that already more than 150 threattened or endangered sea turtles are dead. And 316 sea birds, mostly brown pelicans and nothern gannets, have been found dead along the Gulf Coast as a result of the spreading oil.
As much as we’d like to forget it, the Gulf Coast is prime hurricane country, and if a storm blows in, the result could be devastating. The presence of oil could lead to a more powerful hurricane because crude accumulating at the surface could be raising the temperature of the surrounding water.
Maybe people who live in Ukraine don’t really care about numbers of dead pelicans, but each of us still remembers our own tragedy on the 26th of April in 1986 by name Chernoble. So let’s compare these both horreble events. I’m sure that the better part of you will blame me that it’s not the same, but the consequences are the same. Nature, animals and people are dying slowly. But the difference, I think, is hided in that fact, that our people were doing their best to stop it, left their lives, their health and future in that walls. But in the case of Mexico problem, BP still thinks about the plan of managing with billions of oil in the sea. It’s easy for them to loose money than to be responsible for the dissaster they did. And it’s not the first trouble of BP in these kinds of issures. In 2005, a massive explosion occurred at the company’s Texas City, Texas, refinery, killing 15 b workers and injuring 170 others. The company was fined $87 million for negligence. A year later, the company ran into problem again when it was cited for leaking around 4,800 barrels of oil into Alaska’s Prudnoe Bay, due to a corroded stretch of pipeline. The company was warned about the corroded pipe four years earlier but did nothing to fix it- and was fined $20 millions for ignoring opportunities to prevent the spill.
So what can we believe in today? What are the ways out of these tragedies?
Unfortunately, I don’t have the answers, but I know for sure that first we have to do is to be human! In any case of our life I wish us to remember about it same as to remember about our “small brothers”-animals and nature. Because some day we will wake up without lovely light of the sun on our face, without the morning song of a bird, without smell of the flowers, without rainbow in the sky after summer rain…
Let’s wake up and understand that money is just papers that can either give or take our lives.