Tag: gulf

Company Store

BP is housing hundreds of oil-spill clean-up workers on the Louisiana coast in “flotels” – 40-foot-long corrugated steel boxes that contain dormitory style beds

I hope they’re deducting a generous room and board allowance from what is inevitably temporary and benefits-free pay, which, of course arrives in the form of scrip. Spendable at company stores everywhere! Ask your employer about scrip!

You suck 16Bbl, and what do you get? Why, it’s great, and great looking and can be towed to an oil spill near you. Who says they’re not innovating?

BP’s Oyster

According to the New York Times, the oldest oyster-shucking operation in the country shucked its last oyster on Thursday. Towards the end of the piece is this quote from the requisite owner/operator:

We were just hopeful they would have capped that thing by now [such that we wouldn’t be forced to shutter the business]

Uh, even if they had completely and forever capped it yesterday, your business model (harvesting food products from the gulf) is over. Probably for decades. Remains unclear to me why the media, so obsessed with idiotic minutiae, utterly fails to comprehend The Big Picture. All these gulf-based industries except oil are going away. And in terms of those living on the Earth today, they are likely going away forever. Oh, right, “obsessed with idiotic minutiae.”

MSM: If you want a guvmint-should-be-doing-more story, how’s about the guvmint should be actively retraining these folks, starting now for some sort of useful job that they’ll be doing for the rest of their lives, because shrimping, shucking oysters, and the various other food-related gulf industries are over. Forever. It’s just that the media, and by extension America, doesn’t seem to grasp this yet.

Towering Inferno

Deepwater Horizon officially an Irwin Allen film, at least according to these excerpts from Mother Jones; all they need is a bit of stage direction:

FADE IN: INT CONTROL ROOM

on the morning of the day that the rig exploded [Installation manager Jimmy] Harrell had a “skirmish” over drilling procedures during a meeting with BP’s “company man,” well site leader Robert Kaluza. “I remember the company man saying this is how it’s going to be,” [Douglas Brown, the chief mechanic on the Deepwater Horizon] told the panel. As Harrell was leaving the meeting, according to Brown, “He pretty much grumbled, ‘I guess that’s what we have those pincers for,’” referring to the blowout preventer on the sea floor that is supposed to be the last resort to prevent a leak in the event of an emergency. The blowout preventer failed following the explosion on the rig, causing the massive spill.

INT: CONTROL ROOM; fire is plainly visible outside the windows. EXT. commotion is heard throughout. Jimmy Harrell, a top employee of rig owner Transocean, speaks to HOUSTON via SATELLITE PHONE

HARRELL: Are you fucking happy? Are you fucking happy? The rig’s on fire! I told you this was gonna happen.