The Deepwater Horizon blowout is releasing massive poison into the Gulf of Mexico. Comparisons go to Bopal, 1984, and Pearl Harbor, 1941.
Bopal featured a Union Carbide gas attack that killed 8,000 and injured 120,000. Pearl Harbor was an aerial attack that relied on bombs and torpedoes and inept defense to kill 2,402.
Cast in terms of management failures, a culture of lies, and overall effects, Chernobyl in 1986 has to be the go-to model. Similar to the Pripyat River in the Ukraine, ground water along the littoral of the Gulf of Mexico will be the main target.
Russian term for this translates as "technogenic catastrophe." Big cancer numbers tend to get there.
Experts on Chernobyl have started to speak up. MBTF :::
The closest parallel between Deepwater Horizon and Chernobyl is the dominance of lies. From Grigori Medvedev's "The Truth About Chernobyl" reviewed in 1991 by William Bell:
Anatoly Andreyevich Sitnikov, deputy chief operational engineer, is one of those ordered in to inspect. "The destruction he saw surpassed his imagination. The massive lid of the central hall had been blasted off, and the pathetic remains of the battered concrete walls, their mangled reinforcing bars protruding wildly, looked like some monstrous flycatching plant, waiting for the chance to drag a living creature into its infernal belly. Dispelling this frightful image from his mind, but already feeling the embrace of hot nuclear tentacles on his face, hands, brain, and inner organs, Sitnikov carefully surveyed what was left of the central hall. The reactor had clearly blown up."
Of course, Sitnikov is not believed. Plant officials assure Moscow that the reactor is intact and the radiation levels are normal. Eventually, however, the full extent of the disaster is revealed, but only after men like Sitnikov have received fatal doses of radiation and the people of the towns beside Chernobyl have seen themselves, their gardens, their streets coated in nuclear fallout.
Mr. Sitnikov is doomed to die in the Number Six Clinic in Moscow. He has a lot of company.
The follow up to contain the radioactive poisons from the exploded reactor were delayed. Same old, same old come Deepwater Horizon. Here's a recount from Razer at WSJ:
"It will be interesting to see whether the Deepwater Horizon disaster, like the Chernobyl disaster before it, turns out to be the direct result of management decisions made by technical incompetents."
"About 11 hours before the Deepwater Horizon exploded, a disagreement took place between the top manager for oil giant BP PLC on the drilling rig and his counterpart for the rig's owner, Transocean(ic) Ltd., concerning the final steps in shutting down the nearly completed well, according to a worker's sworn statement."
BP management mirrored early Soviet dysfunction from the first days of seeing large-scale pollution.
Medvedev’s look ahead. A perfect mirror:
What, then, in my opinion, is the main lesson to be learned from Chernobyl? Above all else, it is that this horrible tragedy summons us forcefully to the Truth — to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. That’s the first thing. My second conclusion derives from the truth.
. . . Like all tragedies of the past, Chernobyl showed us how great is our people’s courage and how strong its spirit. But Chernobyl calls us to use our reason and our analytical powers, so that we will not forget what happened, and will look clearly at our misfortune and avoid glossing over it . . .
Accordingly, the main lesson of Chernobyl is to sharpen our sense of the fragility and vulnerability of human life. Chernobyl demonstrated both man’s immense power and his impotence. And it served as a warning to man not to become intoxicated with his own power, not to take that power lightly, and not to seek in it ephemeral gains and pleasures and the glitter of prestige. Since man is both the cause and the effect, he must be more responsible and scrutinize himself as well as the things he has made. When we remember that man’s works carry over into the future, with all its joys and hardships, we realize with horror that those shattered chromosome strands and those genes, either lost or distorted as a result of radiation, are already part of our future. We will be seeing them again and again in the years ahead. That is the most horrible lesson of Chernobyl.
You can get Medvedev's book here:
The Truth About Chernobyl at Amazon.
Says there are used copies up for $0.79 plus postage.
Now, what is the most grave risk ?
Well, the ground water around the Gulf takes that one. Hurricane season is coming up and the crude oil from this BP/Halliburton/Transoceanic attack could be driven ashore anywhere along the Gulf Coast.
Poisoned water will be kill thousands. Cancer will increase significantly, though legal causality will be impossible to prove.
Expect more lies. More spin from the corporate news writers and readers. More denial.
One question: is the Number Six Clinic still there in Moscow ? Any chance we could buy it, crate it up, move it to the Gulf Coast ? Those beds and those medical instruments know what to expect. Same for the sheets.
A stark reminder of Chernobyl might be the single best thing we could bring in.