Gulf oil gusher in perspective (June 25)
By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune
Like that of the disaster in Haiti, news coverage of the Gulf oil gusher will soon subside. You can only say “the oil gusher is bad” so many times before people will start to think of something else.
One of the things that makes coverage of such an event not altogether believable is the tendency of reporters to exaggerate when describing it.
The other day, I heard, and then read that the Gulf oil gusher is “the worst environmental disaster in history.”
Well, unless you’re only 2 years old, that just isn’t true. Hurricane Katrina, for example, was far worse, as was Hurricane Ike that preceded it. An unnamed hurricane that hit Galveston in 1900 killed 8,000 people and virtually wiped that city off the map. Hurricane Andrew, in 1992, caused $26.5 billion in damage to the Miami, Fla., area. That $26.5 would be like $50 billion today.
The eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980 killed almost 60 people in an instant, and only in the past few years has the vast forest and river system it destroyed began to recover.
When Krakatoa, in Indonesia, erupted in 1883, it caused incredible environmental da-mage throughout the Pacific area, and the smoke and ash resulted in global cooling and crop failures. Some 3,000 people died immediately, and countless bodies washed up on beaches for years.
Let’s not forget the quakes of the last century in San Francisco and the Los Angeles area.
And let’s not forget the almost forgotten Haiti, not all that far from the Gulf oil gusher, where (depending on who is estimating) 220,000 people died and more than a million were left homeless.
In the Gulf gusher, 11 people died in the initial explosion, a tragedy to be sure. Economic problems have resulted from the oil sheen, but those who have suffered have a good chance of being made at least partially whole.
We have to keep things in perspective.
