Mark Howell's - "View From the Hill"
Sunday, May 2, 2010
'Drilling Is Dirty, Dangerous and Doesn't Deliver'

By Mark Howell

So the fluke has happened. An oil rig in the Gulf has exploded and sunk, its wellhead still gouting.

The word fluke is billiard slang for "dupe stroke," echoing a fish that's easily caught. Fluke is what the likes of legislators such as Rep. Dean Cannon and Sen. Mike Haridopolos have said is the only possible thing that could ever cause an oil-rig to screw up.

Shares of oilfield service companies Halliburton and Cameron Corp. went south last week following reports linking them to the sunken rig, which is owned by Transocean Ltd. and contracted out to BP. Halliburton did a variety of work on the doomed Deepwater Horizon and Cameron, with $500 million liability insurance, supplied its so-called blowout preventer. Maybe they, too, thought that only a fluke could mess things up.

Thirsty BP has evidently been playing the energy game in oil (as hungry Massey Energy has in coal, that other flukish business up there in Virginia) just like greedy Wall Street and the banking industry played the money game, which is to go flat out until you crash.

The U.S. Minerals Management Service has counted 509 fires on oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico since 2006.

We're not alone. In the West Atlas spill off the Australian coastline, a similarly flukey pressure surge -- plus fluke human error -- led to a spill that coated the ocean for 73 days and created a slick still visible from space today.

The spill threatening Gulf waters and beaches and habitats is tragic and wholly unnecessary, said Adam Rivera, an advocate at Environment Florida. "Lovers of clean beaches will be sick with grief if the spill becomes entrained in the Gulf stream and reaches the Keys," said Rivera. "Those who know the truth must make the most of this chance to reaffirm to fellow Floridians: Drilling is dirty, dangerous and it doesn't deliver."

While oil continues to spill into the Gulf, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announced final approval of the Cape Wind offshore wind project in Massachu-setts.

Florida's elected leaders, said Rivera, "from the legislature up to President Obama himself, should focus on our state's potential for clean wind energy, rather than bring dirty, dangerous drilling to our coastal environment."

Sean Morton, superintendent of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, told Solares Hill last week that the sanctuary was supportive of alternative energy sources and has already permitted a project requiring some engineering underwater, an electricity-generating prototype that utilizes ocean currents off Bahia Honda.

The Florida Legislature rejected strong standards for clean renewable energy in 2009 and 2010. Legisla-tion intended to generate 20 percent of Florida's electricity instead became the Florida House of Representative's vehicle to bring offshore drilling within three miles of Florida's coastline in the 2009 legislation session.

In 2012, which is when the Obama Admin-istration's plan would let oil companies drill in the Gulf, Massachu-setts residents will be the first in the nation to get energy from offshore wind power.

Cape Wind, originally proposed in 2001, is a 130-turbine wind power development on Nantucket Sound off the coast of Cape Cod. It will provide clean, renewable energy to power 75 percent of the homes on Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket.

Its windmills will be located about five miles off Cape Cod and their closest point to land. On a clear day they would appear as specks on the horizon from Nantucket.

In Florida, the 2008 Navigant Consulting study commissioned by Gov. Crist's Energy Action Team found that the potential for offshore wind in the Sunshine State is second only to our potential solar photovoltaic resource. It projected more than 120,000 gigawatt-hours available to be harnessed from wind by 2020.

Parallel to this, the recent Collins Center for Public Policy report commissioned by the Florida Senate found that drilling in state and federal waters would have "no discernible impact on petroleum prices at the retail level" and "no discernible impact on the state's or the country's dependence on foreign oil."

Spill, baby, spill ... As we write, the slick in the Gulf is already the size of Miami-Dade County and will soon be big enough to include Broward and Monroe.

Just in from Louisiana, news from former Keys resident Capt. Lynda Schuh at her home in New Orleans: "Hello there. I walked into the courtyard today and was smelling oil. Took me awhile to realize it was from the spill and probably the burn. We're away from the coast pretty far, maybe a two, three hour drive to the marsh lands.

"It is very, very bad. This is nesting season for much of our bird and wildlife."

• • • • •

On Jan. 28, 1969, an oil well blew out on a drilling platform in the Santa Barbara Channel. Millions of gallons of crude oil belched up from the ocean floor and spread into a toxic slick for hundreds of square miles along the Southern California coast.

How soon we forget.

But Bud Bottoms has never forgotten. A native of the area, he co-founded Get Oil Out (GOO) and wrote, illustrated and published a children's story, "Davey and the GOM," about the "long tubacles" and "mucky clutches" of the Giant Oil Monster.

"My book tells how one boy stopped the GOM," Bottoms told Solares Hill last week. But the situation in the Gulf today is "déjà vu GOO," he lamented. "How sadly ironic that it occurred during the 40th anniversary of Earth Day."

He asked us to "keep up the good work. Like in the Biblical story of David and Goliath, we, as Davey, must overcome the Giant Oil Monster."

mhowell@keysnews.com