Obama's Chernobyl

Well I'm going to mention the elephant in the room. Hurricane season is starting now. There is millions of barrels of oil (still) floating around the gulf. If the Louisiana coast gets hit with a big storm, there is no known technology that can protect it. What we have seen so far is nothing. This spill has the potential to be an environmental disaster like nothing ever seen before. It has the potential to cover whole counties (Parish's) in crude oil. This is the nightmare scenario the oil company executives never mention. Right now a few thousand barrels have washed up on shore. It already looks horrible. Imagine the whole coast two or three miles inland covered like that. There is no way to clean that up. When people say that this spill is Obama's Katrina, I don't think they realize just what kind of horror they are wishing on the Gulf Coast. Try and imagine if hurricane Katrina had packed ten or fifteen million barrels of crude in her dress. New Orleans would never have been rebuilt, it would be lost forever. We could be looking at another Chernobyl. It really is that serious. Every building in New Orleans would have had to be leveled.

New Orleans is the most famous victim of Katrina, but the whole northern gulf coast of the got hit pretty hard. Mississippi and Alabama had plenty of flooding. Most of what got flooded there was farm land. If that same flood happens this year all that farm land will be unusable for decades. Nothing will grow in it and if anything does grow, you sure wouldn't want to eat it. The air will smell like the grease pit in an old gas station for years. No one will be able to live in any area flooded by a hurricane this year. Not that anyone would want to. Lets all pray that it doesn't happen. But the odds are it will. When it does we have to remember it was an act of negligence that caused this.

We can not afford to allow companies to do things with this much potential for damage, without some serious over site. I keep thinking back to a recent remodeling project I witnessed. The county inspectors could shut down that project because of any minor failure of the fire system. They checked every single sprinkler valve, to make sure it functioned properly. Why isn't this done with the blow out preventers, before they are installed? How could someone who was worried about profits and coming in on time, be the person with the authority to decide if safety tests passed? I seem to remember someone saying we shouldn't worry about whether government is too big or too small. We should worry about if it works. Well mister President it just failed in a big way. MMS is an embarrassment to our country. It should be an even bigger embarrassment to you. MMS is the kind of thing you were elected to change. Don't try to save it. Don't try to minimize the damage just start trashing it. Fire people! Charge people with criminal negligence! Do it now! Before the first hurricane starts heading for the gulf coast.