Already, this oil spill is the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced. And unlike an earthquake or a hurricane, it’s not a single event that does its damage in a matter of minutes or days. The millions of gallons of oil that have spilled into the Gulf of Mexico are more like an epidemic, one that we will be fighting for months and even years.
(Obama, speaking from the Oval Office the other day, as well as most of the press.)
The worst environmental disaster involving oil, the Gulf of Mexico, and BP, maybe, but beyond that you're getting into flammable water here (see 1969, Cleveland). As followers of this blog's book list will know, exactly 100 years ago this August there was a fire in the Northwest that burned down a forest the size of Connecticut (but located, much more sensibly, in Washington, Idaho, and Montana) and later became the subject of a book by Timothy Egan entitled "Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America." Although, as it happened in just a few days, it may not rise to epidemicness in Obama's formulation, it laid down a pall of smoke clear across the northern tier and rained soot on New York City.
(Which reminds me of a New Yorker cartoon from the 1960's in which a New Yorkerishly frumpy couple sits having dinner on one of those tiny balconies attached to Manhattan high rise apartment buildings and one says to the other, "Hurry up and finish your soup, dear, before it gets dirty.")
And then, of course, there was the Dust Bowl, also chronicled by Egan in "The Worst Hard Time," an epidemic if ever there was one and, like the BP disaster, at least in part manmade, the consequences of which extended for a generation and beyond.
Which is to say, among other things, that more people should read more books, and also that the aftermath of BP's oil disaster is still beyond the grasp of imagination, and $20 billion is likely to be only a modest down payment on the cost.
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