01 May 2010 3:15 PM
Check the moral values: tin the tuna, eleven souls are lost
Or maybe you didn't see the line at all. The environmentalists and their Democrat friends in Washington are so concerned about shrimp dying that the loss of 11 husbands, brothers and sons seems hardly worth mentioning. Certainly a confused seabird covered in oil touches more Green hearts than a picture of a grieving blue-collar widow outside a Gulf coast bungalow.
Yes, of course, the explosion is an enormous financial disaster -- just ask any pension fund with a holding in BP -- and a disaster for the wildlife, and for the people who must make their livings along the coast. But I would be willing to kill every gannet from Galveston to Pensacola if it could restore those 11 men to their families. There is worse heartbreak in this than just the loss of animal life and loss of share price.
One ought to remember, too, the heartbreak of the men who designed the rig. Usually I would only mourn the loss of a great church or an historic house by fire. But this rig was magnificent. For it to explode into an inferno -- the flames were visible 35 miles away -- list and sink, is a technological tragedy.
Deepwater Horizon was no mere platform of the kind we were used to in the North Sea. It was a floating rig. It had no anchors, it was not moored, yet it could operate in depths of 10,000 ft. What was described to me as a 'triply-redundant computer system' used satellite positioning to control powerful thrusters to keep it within a few feet of its correct location at all times.
All-in cost to BP of running it for just one day? Close to $1m -- that's £650,000. Everything about it was of the latest, most sophisticated technology. Yet somehow oil and gas got into the well-bore. Despite blowout preventers, dead-man systems, panic buttons, none of these safety mechanisms was activated. The blowout was just that fast.
Tomorrow morning, oil rig workers all over the world will wake up knowing all that -- that there are some blowouts, some infernos from which technology can never save them. Yet they will still get up and start their work on the rigs. Technology is brilliant. But courage is even better.
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