Accidents on Oil Rigs? Business as Usual

by Jason Mark – September 2, 2010Follow Jason Mark on Twitter

My email accounts, Twitter feeds, and RSS alerts have been blowing up all morning with the news that an offshore oil production platform in the Gulf of Mexico exploded earlier today. Thirteen workers were evacuated off the platform, which is operated by Mariner Energy, and according to the most recent reports, a 100-feet-wide and one-mile-long oil sheen has been spotted not far from the accident site. Feels like déjà vu all over again.

Yet I have to wonder: Would this incident have even registered a blip on the national media’s radar screen had it not been for all of the attention directed at the Gulf oil industry because of the BP disaster?

Sure, this incident is frightening, and in that sense it’s newsworthy. But the fact is that fires, explosions, spills, and blowouts aren’t all that uncommon in the Gulf’s industrial archipelago, where some 4,000 oil and gas platforms clutter the seas.

In his ill-fated (and poorly considered) March speech announcing an expansion of off-shore drilling, President Obama said, “Oil rigs today don’t generally cause spills.”

Wrong! … It took my team of Googling monkeys about 10 seconds to reveal that accidents happen all the time in the ocean oil fields.

According to a report by the Houston Chronicle, there were 509 fires recorded on Gulf oil platforms since 2006. Nine of those fires were severe, and together seriously injured 12 people and took the lives of two.

In a July story The Washington Post found that a “steady stream” of accidents spilled 517,847 barrels of petroleum into the Gulf of Mexico between 1964 and 2009. A Shell pipeline leak in 1990 — only discovered after a helicopters spotted a 25-mile-long sheen in the water — spilled 14,000 barrels. Two years before that, an anchor busted into an underwater Amoco pipeline and set loose 15,000 barrels. And just last year, 1,500 barrels spilled into the Gulf after an accident. Hurricanes Rita and Katrina caused dozens of minor spills.

Mariner Energy, the company that operates the production platform that exploded this morning, has been involved with 13 accidents since 2006, according to the Houston Chronicle. Seven of those involved some violation of federal regulations, including a 2009 incident in which a methanol tank exploded and badly burned a worker.

There’s no escaping the fact that punching holes in the earth to extract oil and gas is dirty and dangerous. Accidents are simply business as usual. Which offers yet one more reason why we should act now to break our oil addiction.

Jason Mark, Editor, Earth Island Journal
Jason Mark is a writer-farmer with a deep background in environmental politics.  In addition to his work in the Earth Island Journal, his writings have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, The Nation, The Progressive, Utne Reader, Orion, Gastronomica, Grist.org, Alternet.org, E magazine, and Yes!  He is a co-author of Building the Green Economy: Success Stories from the Grassroots and also co-author with Kevin Danaher of Insurrection: Citizen Challenges to Corporate Power. When not writing and editing, he co-manages Alemany Farm, San Francisco’s largest food production site.

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