from ecocide

Deepwater Horizon was built in South Korea, registered in the Marshall Islands, owned by American drilling company Transocean, and was operated by BP, once known as British Petroleum. The enormous oil rig was installed off the coast of Mississippi to drill history’s deepest oil well. Greed, a lack of oversight, misplaced trust in unproven safety precautions and our society’s demand for more oil collided on April 20th, 2010.

The rig’s explosion killed 11 people immediately and caused one the largest ecocides on our planet yet. There are still questions regarding the long term impact of the 210 million gallons of oil that flowed into the Gulf of Mexico for 87 days, and of the chemicals dispersed to try to make it disappear.

Some of the cleanup attempts might not have made any appreciable difference. Improvising, people patrolled beaches of the Gulf Islands National Seashore with a bucket and a deep-fryer strainer taped to a broom handle. Where the oil washed ashore, so did pieces of the rig itself.

This is foam that provided buoyancy. Without this foam, the structure became too dense, sinking to the seafloor. It remains there, an unseen monument to our over reliance on fossil fuels. I picked up this piece while responding to cleanup efforts on little islands off the coast of Mississippi. The federal agency I worked for at the time is currently being dismantled.

Paul O’Dell in the Gulf Coast, Mississippi