Tag Archives: fishing

Who to blame for the Gulf of Mexico spill?

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As the leaking crude in the Gulf of Mexico chokes sperm whales, wipes out local fishing incomes and ruins tourist destinations, we’ll see continued debates over who is to blame. Obama is pointing at BP, insisting the company won’t be let off the hook. BP’s claiming that they weren’t really on the scene – Transocean were after all the drilling contractor. Transocean are saying they followed BP’s brief, but that Halliburton must have failed to set the correct cement plug – and Halliburton were after all also involved in the disastrous Timor Sea spill last August.

Greg Palast has a great piece on truthout making clear that BP bears central responsibility – as it did with Exxon Valdez back in 89. The company was the operator, prepared the spec, directed Transocean where & how to drill. This in a context where BP was cutting corners, drilling deeper than they were allowed, making cost-savings by not installing an acoustic trigger and was evidently not prepared to deal with a major oil spill. BP clearly isn’t a responsible operator – reaping mega-profits when all is easy before complaining that life is tough when something goes wrong.

But imagine if BP were “better”: if it had more staff on board, was more careful in observing correct drilling depths and didn’t push Transocean to make cutbacks. Either way, offshore drilling, especially deepwater offshore, is inherently risky. The oil companies are developing the technology to break through this frontier, reaching ever greater depths – BP’s Tiber find in August 2009 was 35,000 feet down, deeper than Mount Everest is tall, deeper than the previous record Tupi well off Brazil and several times as deep as the current Macondo failure. But as the operations become more complicated, the risks of failure increase. And when that disaster happens as it did in late April, dealing with it is wholly outside the oil companies’ expertise. The company described its mega-Thunder Horse project as “at or beyond the limits of the offshore industry’s experience”. BP has wells planned in the Gulf of Mexico, Brazil and Angola that are deeper and more complicated than what Deepwater Horizon was attempting.

John Gapper in the FT recognises this, and points out that the current blow-up is “less a reminder of BP’s legacy” of failures than an indicator of the future “oil supermajors face by drilling in such difficult spots.” He does not blame BP for being careless, recognising that the disaster is a result “of the inherent nature of the task. It may want to blame the past but the Deepwater fiasco looks ominously like the future.”

Clearly, BP needs to pay up for the losses & destruction caused by the current leak. And then we need to stop state & corporate efforts to open up more of the oceans to offshore drilling.

Community resistance in Rossport continues

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Maura Harrington – imprisoned for her opposition to Shell: “We all have successes and failures. I was a teacher, my failures work inside the gates at Glengad and Bellanaboy, my successes are outside the gates”.

Second email from George, supporting the community resistance against Shell’s gas plans in Rossport, Ireland:
I drove over to Rossport with Paul yesterday. As we drove alongside the estuary with its sandbanks in celtic designs we talked about the Six Counties. Paul said that he wished now that he had paid more attention to the situation there before because he felt similar things were happening here. ‘People in Ireland don’t like hassle, they wish the north would break off and float away’.

Martin asked me out on the boats again to help bring in a catch of mackerel for a restaurant. He’s offered me work on his boat. We went out with his daughter’s boyfriend this time. The wind was up and there was a strong swell outside the harbour. We dropped the lines fast over the side, watched the bubbles rise up as the weight sank. Martin used the fish scanner to spot the shoals without success. Instead we watched where the gulls were on the sea, and found fish there.

When the gas was discovered the local priest announced that the area ‘which previously only knew emigration and starvation would see jobs and prosperity’. Shell bought off local leaders, like the priest.

He went so far as to fly out in a company helicopter to bless the wellhead. Betty and Fritz arrived too late to a local consultation early on to see him at the bar surrounded by shell men buying him pints. It was enough, they said. At that time the only dissenting voice was Sister Majella, recently returned from Nigeria who warned they would ‘do to you whatthey did to the Delta‘.

Martin says they were never in danger of starving because they had the fish from the sea. Like Pat, he tried emigration, working for a time in New York on construction. He remembers leaving work in the evening with Irish workmates and going down to the British Embassy. It was the time of Bobby Sands’ hunger strike and they waved black flags waved in the streets.

Yesterday in Belmullet they jailed Maura and Niall for four and eight months respectively. We stood around Niall in court after the verdict as he gave instructions. One after another local people came up and shook his hand or hugged him. We hugged and he held onto my hand. Then he was taken out to a waiting cop car.

At the station I got permission to see Maura. She winked at me and gave a statement. In it, she reflected that the judge had asked if all her former pupils from her 36 years as a
teacher were potential anarchists. “We all have successes and failures. I was a teacher, my failures work inside the gates atGlengad and Bellanaboy, my successes are outside the gates”.She asked for a paper,
some money and cigarettes.

Yesterday was the fifth anniversary of a pipeline explosion in Belgium which killed 24 people. To commemorate this
we organised a candlelit walk on both sides of the estuary. Every large gust of wind blew out most the candles, but people enjoyed being able to come together, particularly after court. In the rain afterwards fifty of us raised cups of tea and hot chocolate to Niall and Maura.

Free Speech Radio Network invited me to produce a feature on Rossport which I’m keen to work on but first I’m coming back to England next week for my sister’s birthday. Soon after that it’s the Climate Camps. I’m going to give a workshop on deportations on charter flights at the Irish Camp.

Industrialising the Cukurova

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After a cushy night on the Ankara – Adana Mavi Cukurova night train, we jumped straight into a coach headed east to Antakya. Once the grand city of Antioch benefiting from trade routes running between Europe & South Asia, medium-sized Antakya is the last Turkish town before Syria, and the source of an ongoing border dispute between Syria and Turkey.

With the temperature display hovering around 34 C, our bus passes field upon field of roasted brown sunflowers to our south, in the fertile Cukurova plain. After being reclaimed from marshland in the late 19th and early 20th Century, the plain became a malaria-filled hell for poor migrant workers from the mountains to our north and the site of local resistance against brutal landlords, described by Yashar Kemal in Ince Memed & other novels:
“I’ve been picking cotton in this accursed Çukurova for fifteen years […] and I’ve never known such a heat nor seen so many mosquitoes.” […] “We’ve never seen such wonderful cotton either, Anakız sister,” [Memidik] murmured. “The hotter the weather, the better the cotton crop.”
Today Cukurova’s soil produces the watermelons piled up outside London’s Turkish & Kurdish corner stores, and continues to rely on seasonal Kurdish migrant workers.

As the bus curves around the Bay of Iskenderun from North to East, orange groves with thick green leaves and purple thistles line the roadside, with teasing views of the sea through the trees. Six supertankers can be seen waiting just off the coast, ready to collect oil from BP’s Heydar Aliev Marine Terminal – named after the former Azeri dictator and father of the current one. Each ship will collect 500,000 barrels of thick black crude oil, before chugging across the Mediterranean and delivering its load to refineries at Fawley (near Southampton), Trieste or Augusta in Sicily over the next ten days. Together, the supertankers will move half a million tons of crude closer to the atmosphere.

Fourteen days previously, these 500,000 tons of oil were neither in barrels, tankers nor split up into any type of corporate storage container. They lay still, part of a large viscous mass of former organic material, thousands of metres deep beneath the Caspian, as they had for many millennia.

Thirteen days previously, the pressure changed abruptly with a strong suction force, and the crude began to move first sideways towards a funnel and then straight up – slurp – several kilometres through wide pipes – to the sea surface. One of BP’s Azeri-Guneshli-Chirag rigs out in the middle of the Caspian was sucking it up. Once on the move, BP didn’t let the heavy black liquid stop. Eight power stations forced the 500,000 tons at 6 kilometres every hour across the Azeri desert, Georgia’s Borjomi mountains & nature reserve, Turkey’s north-eastern plateaus, along the Euphrates and then down to the Cukurova – ready to be sold on in tanker loads of either 80,000 or 130,000 tonnes.

Across the bay, a plume of smoke ascends from Isken coal plant – financed by the Germany’s Export Credit Agency Hermes with over $700 million in 2000 and built by Siemens in the years after that. BP’s oil terminal and Siemen’s coal plant were followed by various other industrial projects. A myriad of confusing jetties now protrude out into the bay, one next to the other. Fisherfolk and villagers believe that the industrialisation of their coastline and resulting chemical emissions and discharges is causing crops to die and killing fish. Several cases have been filed in local courts demanding compensation.

Briefly, I catch a glimpse of Burnaz beach – used by the people of nearby Erzin to escape from the oppressive summer heat and dip into the sea. Although I can’t spot them at this distance, on a hot summer day like today there’ll be boys playing football in the sand, teenage girls rafting in the surf on inflatables and families introducing toddlers to the water.

The Turkish state and several coal companies are planning to build 5 new coal power stations [Termik Santral] on this four kilometre stretch. This will destroy Erzin’s beach and poison the nearby orange groves – the primary local product and source of income. The five plants together will total more than 4000 MW – more than Drax, the largest coal plant in Britain.

There is strong local opposition in an area not known for resisting, with local residents particularly worried about the health impacts. The first demonstration had up to 1,000 people on it, with several protests since, led by the Erzin Volunteers Group. National support has come from Greenpeace Mediterranean in Istanbul, with the Rainbow Warrior arriving to block coal deliveries to the existing Isken plant in September 2008.
Over 40 new coal plants are planned across Turkey – almost all to rely on imported fuel from South Africa and Russia. Local community campaigns resisting the proposed plants have sprung up everywhere, and are increasingly linked up.

The Cukurova is known for its oranges and its prawns – the heavy industrialisation heralded by BP’s arrival threatens to change this.

Fishing in Rossport

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This will be the first in a series of emails from my friend George who is in Rossport, County Mayo, Ireland, supporting the local community in their resistance to Shell’s plans to build a high pressure gas pipeline through their village.

Martin O’Donnell is Pat O’Donnell’s brother, whose boat was sunk by masked thugs in June.

Walking along the road from Poll a’tSomais putting up signs on the telegraph poles and talking to people in their gardens and on the road. Bridgette Mc’grath saw us on the road and came outside to pick out which sign she wanted outside her pub: ‘No Consent’. Further up Eamon brought us a ladder to help us nail ‘Shell Out’ to a pole outside his house.

On Tuesday I went out with Martin O’Donnell, the chief’s brother, in his fishing boat. St. John and I drove over to Porthurlain early in the morning where the fishing boats are moored. Martin was already out on his boat, ‘You’re late!’, when we arrived and picked us off the jetty, the motor giving off black smoke.

His two crew, Sandy and John leant on the rail. Sandy was my age, and had been fishing with Martin for five years. John was an older man in yellow oilskins who had been with Martin for twenty years. We motored out of the harbour rolling slightly with the swell. Just outside the harbour we stopped. John and Sandy brought down the lines from the reels above our heads. Each line had hooks and brightly coloured lures attached to it. They lowered the lines over the side, hand over hand. When they came back up each hook had a mackerel on it. The fish were pulled through rollers and dropped into buckets. Then the line was dropped again. They flapped about in the fish boxes drumming the sides, all shining in the morning sunshine. But Martin was dissatisfied, ‘not big enough’.

So we left to pull up nets. Sandy hooked the marker buoy and attached the end of the net to the winch. Martin went below and started the motor. The nets reeled in. Full of red crabs. John and Sandy pulled these out of the nets and snapped the claws off and tossed the shell over the side. Gulls gathered. They filled a box with crab claws. The crabs damage the nets explained Martin. They were hoping to catch monkfish and flatfish. We did catch some – Martin pulled a monkfish out of the nets and showed us the lines of sharp teeth. They have a lure they dangle in front of their mouths which they use to catch unsuspecting small fish. But mostly we caught crabs.

Each green net is a mile long and we pulled in five on tuesday. After the first net we motored along the coast, past stacks and arches in the cliff and the green fields above. We passed a basking shark- a large shadow beneath the surface. The next net was worse than the first. About halfway through the winch motor stalled. We looked over the side and hanging below us in the water was a grey ray with a wingspan as long as a dining table, still alive. Martin shook the nets and it swam free. We caught dogfish too and threw them back.

But the fishing was bad. ‘There’s a recession out here too’. The government subsidy is down, fuel prices are up, and the catch is down.

Martin thinks this is why most of the fishermen accepted Shell’s money, ‘They don’t think longterm. I want to preserve this way of life.’ There used to be 38 fishing boats at Porthurlain, now there are just 15. Just three years ago the government banned salmon fishing locally, a large source of income. If the refinery discharge pipe goes into the sea, Martin fears the market value of the fish will drop further.

I was in the wheel house talking with Martin when there was a call from the deck. Just alongside the boat was a pod of dolphins. They swam close, almost touching the sides and jumping through the wash from the motor. John and Sandy gutted the fish on deck. The gulls swooped on the scraps in the water. They filled around three boxes of fish and another of crab claws. ‘A lot of hard work for nothing’.

Back on shore these were packed in ice and sent to Dublin to the fish market. I made some recordings and then helped haul in the nets, some with little more than seaweed in. In the final net we pulled up a crayfish which martin gave to the solidarity camp. Like some giant red insect.

A lot of the fishermen have lost gear during the Solitaire’s work. He lost nets and others lost their pots. Martin turned to me while we were untangling one of the nets ‘I think we’ve lost the battle at sea, George’. He was clearly frustrated with the fishermen he feels sold out to Shell.

Speaking to Betty yesterday, she also felt that if the fishermen had worked together they could have stopped the Solitaire. But people here are preparing for the land based actions.

I kayaked around the headland into the other bay recently. The water there was as clear as it was the first time we paddled out in Broadhaven, you could see the bottom even in the deepest part.