14 year long oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico could be the worst in US history - Sensationalist Headlines

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/a-14-year-long-oil-spill-in-the-gulf-of-mexico-verges-on-becoming-one-of-the-worst-in-us-history/2018/10/20/f9a66fd0-9045-11e8-bcd5-9d911c784c38_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.5c9b5987b0ca NEW ORLEANS — An oil spill that has been quietly leaking millions of barrels into the Gulf of Mexico has gone unplugged for so long that it now verges on becoming one of the worst offshore disasters in U.S. history. Between 300 and 700 barrels of oil per day have been spewing from a site 12 miles off the Louisiana coast since 2004, when an oil-production platform owned by Taylor Energy sank in a mudslide triggered by Hurricane Ivan. Many of the wells have not been capped, and federal officials estimate that the spill could continue through this century. With no fix in sight, the Taylor offshore spill is threatening to overtake BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster as the largest ever. As oil continues to spoil the Gulf, the Trump administration is proposing the largest expansion of leases for the oil and gas industry, with the potential to open nearly the entire outer continental shelf to offshore drilling. That includes the Atlantic coast, where drilling hasn’t happened in more than a half century and where hurricanes hit with double the regularity of the Gulf. Expansion plans come despite fears that the offshore oil industry is poorly regulated and that the planet needs to decrease fossil fuels to combat climate change, as well as the knowledge that 14 years after Ivan took down Taylor’s platform, the broken wells are releasing so much oil that researchers needed respirators to study the damage. The Taylor Energy spill is largely unknown outside Louisiana because of the company’s effort to keep it secret in the hopes of protecting its reputation and proprietary information about its operations, according to a lawsuit that eventually forced the company to reveal its cleanup plan. The spill was hidden for six years before environmental watchdog groups stumbled on oil slicks while monitoring the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster a few miles north of the Taylor site in 2010. The Interior Department is fighting an effort by Taylor Energy to walk away from the disaster. The company sued Interior in federal court, seeking the return of about $450 million left in a trust it established with the government to fund its work to recover part of the wreckage and locate wells buried under 100 feet of muck. Taylor Energy declined to comment. The company has argued that there’s no evidence to prove any of the wells are leaking. Last month, the Justice Department submitted an independent analysis showing that the spill was much larger than the one-to-55 barrels per day that the U.S. Coast Guard National Response Center (NRC) claimed, using data supplied by the oil company. In 2010, six years after the oil leak started, scientists studying the BP spill realized something was amiss with the oil slicks they were seeing. “We were flying to monitor the BP disaster and we kept seeing these slicks, but they were nowhere near the BP spill,” said Cynthia Sarthou, executive director of the Gulf Restoration Network, which monitors the water from boats and planes. Satellite images confirmed the oddity. It would take another three years before the government revealed an even deeper truth. Taylor Energy had been playing down the severity of the spill. An Associated Press investigation in 2015 determined that it was about 20 times worse than the company had reported. Pretty large and in-depth article

when i see big pools affected by oil like that there's like some primal desire "oo what if we set it on fire"

What in the god damn. How does something like that happen for so long with no one knowing

When I see big pools affected by oil like that I think of small 0.0001 percent of the population is hiding this and fucking everyone over just to make sure they don't lose profits for 14 fucking years. Like I hate violence, but even a part of me when reading stuff like this wishes there was some button that could just wipe off people that exist to make these decisions. "We didn't want to lose our reputation and money so we thought long and hard on it and decided you're all not worth us losing a dime." Fuck every single last one of them, and go make them drink a gallon of this water.

Well I mean you "can" drink it in the same sense that you "can" eat a pound of cyanide. And these people can (read: should) go ahead and do both for all I care.

It was known by the energy company and the US government. They both ignored it.

Quite frankly, the whole world would be a lot better if these powerful corporate fucks who try to make as much money as possible by doing the most disgusting shit possible didn't exist. Nothing of worth a damn would be lost.

Since 2004 and three presidents did nothing

Well in the article the guy who started the company died two months after Ivan and the company was working with the Coast Guard to make a half assed attempt at fixing it, opening a $666 million dollar trust with the government to pay for the response. They did manage to cap a few of the wells but not all of them. The companies assets were eventually sold to a Korean consortium and was reduced to a single employee who is the President- William Pecue. He wants whats left of the money back because he claims it was an act of God and that it'll never fully get sealed up. So they're basically like "Eeeuh yeah it's fucked we tried." The platform sank in 2004, and they alerted the Coast Guard about it. The Coast Guard and other Federal agencies along with Taylor Energy went to work trying to figure out what the fuck to do, but didn't completely follow the rules laid out in the Clean Water Act. Technically speaking, Taylor Energy doesn't have to make a big public scene about it, but it was definitely unusually hush hush. to make matters worse, it's a complicated fix. The platform was attached to 28 individual wells in like 2 miles of depth. (18 of the wells were actively producing) So on the surface it looks like this: https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Taylor_MC20-e1455921697454.png But underwater it looks like this: http://www.oil-gasportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Immagine39.png (Except snaking around to 28 wells) So when the mudslide happened, not only did it take out the platform itself, but it also buried all the wells, too. So now you don't know where they're leaking, which ones are leaking, or how bad they're leaking. So they started by removing the sunken platform and then set off on how to stop the flow. Since you have no idea whats going on in the mess of wrecked platform and now-underground wells, you can't safely dredge out the area to get to them without risking breaking the well completely and having a BP-tier disaster on your hands where the thing is just bleeding out freely. So you can't go down, dig them up, and cap them. They decided to drill intervention wells and were able to cap 9 of them in this way. Then, they got lazy and claimed they couldn't do it for the remaining wells, instead they built a dome to contain the leak but it was mostly ineffective and now the one-man defunct company doesn't want to bother anymore and wants the remaining money back. https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/231/999/ba5.jpg Shown above: William Pecue President Taylor Energy.

@OvB I'm glad that you exist.

Taylor Energy declined to comment. The company has argued that there’s no evidence to prove any of the wells are leaking. ...