By bearbait, 5-22-10
The US lost over 1800 ships in WWII. Finding the total sunk world wide is hard to do. The US submariners lost 52 submarines while sinking well over 5,000,000 tons of Japanese shipping, an amount larger than their total available bottoms in 1940. As to the daily sinkings off the US East Coast from 1940 to when we entered the War, and then the daily losses to the U-Boat wolf packs as we tried to convoy war material and food to England and Russia, which were ships from many nations involved in the war, and the total destruction and oil releases into various oceans from the warm tropics to the super cooled Atlantic routes to Archangel and the British Isles, and every body of water in between. Oil was not the only cargo lost, and I can't even imagine some of the stuff that had to have been lost.
I have never seen any studies that enumerate and evaluate the environmental damages from WWII ships sunk at sea and on the beaches of the battlefields. I think I read that almost two hundred at Normandy were sunk. No matter, the losses were catastrophic in today's language, and the long term impacts are unknown, or at least no telling and apparent daily. And so it will be with the Gulf spill. I sometimes wonder if the Exxon Valdez cleanup effort made the situation worse, not better, and the way to deflect litigation is to make any effort, good or bad, but an effort at clean up. Is our litigious society so combative that we daily are involved in defending not the environment, but our collective asses, from attorneys intent on turning disaster into profits?
Any venture comes with risk. If we run our society to reduce risk, that is smart. But to run it to have zero risk, or if there is risk, not do whatever, then we slowly strangle in the tethers of our societal restraints, and some other entity will come along to take over and put the pieces back together, and most likely not in a configuration that most will appreciate. We do have to be rational, if that is now possible in these United States.
I listened on Public Radio to a scientist who said that two Very Large oil tankers had collided near Trinidad a few years back, in a spill of huge dimensions, and in ten days, the oil slick could not be found. Warm water, Arab light crude, aerosols, bacteria, and the oil had either become greenhouse gases or been eaten by bacteria. He said that Pemex, the Mexican oil cartel had also had a big blowout spill, and that oil had been devoured by micro organisms in the warm waters of the Gulf. He also said the daily "seeping" from oil reserves untapped in the Gulf were in an amount greater than that being released by the BP well, and that keeps the bacteria numbers substantial and available. Not that I condone, want, cheer, or value any oil spill for any reason, but we do have to be rational. Or is it we can't "waste a perfectly good crisis" as Rahm Emanuel believes?
