Brittle Power- PARTS 1-3 (+Notes) - Natural Capitalism Solutions

106Disasters Waiting to Happenmandos trained to protect them, 61 are likely to prove ineffectual. Each platformhas a “safety zone” of about sixteen hundred feet, but trawlers havealready sailed illegally within a hundred feet because the fishing is richerthere. 62 There is nothing to stop them. The platforms are so vulnerable tomere collisions that the Norwegian Government first suspected sabotage (perhapsby a submarine) when a North Sea rig capsized in 1980 with the loss ofone hundred twenty-three crew. (The collapse turned out to have been causedby an improperly cut hole in one of the five supporting posts. 63 ) In 1980, agasoline tanker collided with an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico and burst intoflames. 64 Near misses abound.A single platform may cost upwards of fifty million dollars and carry overforty wells. 65 Junctions of offshore gathering lines frequently bring oil flows offifty to a hundred thousand barrels a day, or more, into a single, “totallyunprotected” line, often in shallow water or in swampy areas where heavyequipment, whether floating or land-based, cannot operate. 66 The Scottish“Tartan Army” demonstrated the vulnerability of offshore platforms’ umbilicalcord to the mainland when they twice bombed the pipeline which carriesNorth Sea oil one hundred thirty miles to the Grangemouth refinery. 67(Fortunately, they did not know enough about explosives to cut the line.)In northern waters, such as the Beaufort Sea and the North Sea, access to platformsfor protection and repair may be simply impossible for long periods.Winter waves in the North Sea, for example, average seven feet half the time andexceed fifteen feet a fifth of the time. Winter storms bring hundred-foot wavesand hundred-mile-an-hour gusts. 68 In current practice, platforms in and along theGulf of Mexico must be shut in and deserted during severe storms, as offshoreplatforms off New England and in the Arctic would surely have to be. This interruptsthe filling of natural gas storage, “depended upon more each year for peakload cushions,” and might lead to widespread shortages if a late hurricane in theGulf, for example, coincided with an early cold spell in gas-heated areas. 69As of mid-1981 the United States was getting nearly a sixth of its domesticoil from offshore. Yet the federal government had no contingency plans toprotect offshore platforms from attack—even in the Gulf of Mexico, where thegreatest resources of the oil and gas industry are near at hand to serve bothonshore facilities and the more than three thousand platforms. 70 This is a matterof considerable anxiety to the oil industry. The Coast Guard in NewOrleans has local plans which could, in good weather, bring a speciallyequipped vessel to a threatened platform—in eight hours. 71 (Any terrorists whocould not destroy a platform in eight minutes would be quite incompetent.)Yet a fire on a platform “is disastrous to the company owning [it]...and, if severalwere started, great economic stress could be placed on the companies