Posted by Tina
Offshore oil rigs are not dangerous to the environment. This isnt just an opinion, it’s backed up by 60 years of incredible success in Louisiana. Front Page Magazine offers the facts mixed with a fun look at Hollywood and environmental skeptics from LSU:
Hollywood Once Hailed Offshore Drilling, by Humberto Fontova
Louisiana has been well ahead of the learning curve for decades, and offers ready proof regarding its much-hyped “perils.” The first offshore oil production platforms went up off the Louisiana coast in 1947.
By 1953 Hollywood (no less!) was already hailing the pioneering wildcatters who moved major mountains technological, logistical, psychological, cultural to tap and reap this source that today provides a quarter of America’s domestic petroleum, without causing a single major oil spill in the process. This record stands despite dozens of hurricanes including the two most destructive in North American history, Camille and Katrina repeatedly battering the drilling and production structures, along with the 20,000 miles of pipeline that transport the oil shoreward. This is the most extensive offshore pipeline network in the world. ** Half a century later, with 3203 of the 3,729 offshore oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico studding her coastal waters, Louisiana provides almost a third of North America’s commercial fisheries. A study by LSU’s sea grant college shows that 85 percent of Louisiana’s offshore fishing trips involve fishing around these structures. The same study found 50 times more marine life around an oil production platform than in the surrounding mud bottoms. That this proliferation of seafood might come because rather than in spite of the oil production rattled many environmental cages and provoked a legion of scoffers. ** They scoffed as we rode in from the airport. They scoffed over raw oysters, grilled redfish and seafood gumbo that night. More scoffing through the Hurricanes at Pat O’Brien’s. They scoffed even while suiting up in dive gear and checking the cameras as we tied up to an oil platform 20 miles in the Gulf. ** But they came out of the water bug-eyed and indeed produced and broadcast a program showcasing a panorama that turned on its head every environmental superstition against offshore oil drilling. Schools of fish filled the water column from top to bottom from 6-inch blennies to 12-foot sharks. Fish by the thousands. Fish by the ton.