As crude oil keeps gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, the Deepwater Horizon rig spill is looking like it could easily end up being one of the worst environmental disasters in our nation's history. What's especially tragic is that a device the size of a football might have prevented this from happening, had one been installed.
Now, I'm no oil drilling proponent but I do understand why we do it. What I can't fathom is why there were so few automated safeguards in place. According to the Wall Street Journal, the industry's Plan C for a disaster is a device is called an "acoustic switch." Plan A is a human-controlled shutoff. A secondary "dead man" switch shuts off the oil automatically should power and communication connections between the rig and the underwater unit get cut. The Deepwater Horizon's "dead man" switch failed. A final safeguard that Brazilian and Norwegian companies use is an acoustic switch, which is a device placed at the wellhead that can be controlled via acoustic pulses from a boat, tripping an emergency valve to stop the oil from flowing. While several countries require these devices on rigs, in 2003 the feds scrapped a law that would have required them here.
I'll leave the politics behind the decision for others to debate, but one of the arguments against the devices was apparently the cost: $500,000. That strikes me as spare change for a large oil company, especially since the cleanup is now costing British Petroleum 12 times that every day. Plus, the rig itself has a replacement price tag of $560 million. And, although oil industry officials say it's unclear whether the device would have actually worked, at the very least a plan to make them mandatory would have encouraged testing and innovation.
Based on the daily estimate, at least 2.1 million gallons of oil have leaked from the rig so far and the most serious wellhead leak isn't looking like it will be stopped any time soon. I desperately want to highlight some awe-inspiring technology that's being employed to turn this around and prevent more marine destruction. But I can't. Even the best we've got is hardly a match. In searching for any silver lining, a science writer I know told me that the only one he can see is that this could galvanize Americans to take a harder look at our fuel sources. This one is going to be hard in ways we can't even imagine yet.
Photo: The U.S. Coast Guard and federal agencies respond to the oil rig explosion that caused the spill. Credit: Otto Candies via the U.S. Coast Guard Press.
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