Beauty and Oil Fires

I have a confession. I’m fascinated by oil fires. They have a mesmerizing beauty like nothing else. Werner Herzog did a great film called Lessons of Darkness about oil wells after the first Gulf War. Did we learn a lesson?

Flare at Plastics Plant

Today there are two big fires, one in Jaipur India, and the other in the Timor Sea, north of Australia. They hardly warrant a blip on our celebrity-obsessed media and consciousness, after all, Mark Sanford’s exploits in Argentina or Brad’s current status with Jen is much more interesting and relevant. And of course the plentiful TV programs about the nice little animals, although gently cautionary about imminent concerns, reassure us that all is well. Because if I can see the pretty polar bears, I know it will all be ok.

TAR SANDS - Part I

June 22, 2009

The Alberta Tar Sands defies comprehension on many levels, starting with the fact that most people don’t even know of their existence. It is possibly the largest oil reserve in the world, and the largest environmental disaster. The impact is systemic, affecting every facet of the environment: air, earth, and water, and causing everything from global warming to mutations. The issue is all the more egregious because the authorities are ignoring the law and allowing this travesty. As is so often the case, the public is unaware of the colossal damage done to provide the calories we crave.

The Tar or Oil Sands are found in an area in Alberta, Canada, in which there is a large volume of bitumen, a tarry hydrocarbon, trapped in the earth. Extraction involves the strip mining of vast regions that are both valuable Boreal Forest habitat and precious water resources, rendering them desolate, lifeless moonscapes for eternity. The material extracted must then be reduced to the usable hydrocarbons, a process that uses tremendous amounts of water, energy, and oceans of toxic chemicals. The largest dam in the world was constructed just to retain this toxic waste from but one of the tar sand refineries. These unlined “impoundments” leach toxins into the groundwater, and since they are really just dikes constructed of earth, this type of construction tends to fail with disturbing regularity, which would release the sea of toxic sludge they contain into the Athabasca River. Toxicity is so high in these lakes that the wildlife coming into contact with them immediately dies; the oil companies hire people to remove the dead ducks floating in the goo. Of course, just sitting there, the vast reservoirs of toxic sludge are releasing benzene, a known human carcinogen and active global warming agent. When asked, the companies involved proclaim their intentions to remediate this waste, which sounds as believable as saying they will mop up the ocean.

Refining the tar sands is done in several stages at numerous facilities in Canada and the USA, each refinery a major polluter in its own right. The first new processing facilities to be built in the USA in 30 years are being built for tar sand “synthetic crude.”

The communities near the Tar Sands operations are primarily first nations people with limited political voice and little means to fight the industrial giants operating in their lands. Cancer rates in these communities are far above the norm, with rare cancers occurring repeatedly. Doctors who try to sound the alarm are ignored or ridiculed.

HOUSTON

September 27, 2008

Houston and the Gulf Coast of Texas have possibly the largest concentration of petro-chemical facilities in the USA. Of the 150 refineries in the US, 26 of them are located in the greater Houston vicinity, and an additional 28 are located outside of Texas, but still on the Gulf Coast. With the approach of Hurricane Ike, America, knowingly or not, quaked at the thought of this uncontrollable threat to its petrol supply like a junkie watching his dealer be arrested. Ironically, our petrol use is what causes the very threat that can so easily disrupt our supply.

Having been to Houston to photograph the industry in 2006, I wanted to go back and see the result of Ike on the industries and surrounding communities. The Parras Family is involved with various environmental groups that focus on the environmental and health impact on minority groups, and they generously offered to put me up. Alas, I had no time to stay in Houston and visit, as I was off to Brazil the next day, so the only option was to fly down, do the shoot and come back in less than 24 hours. Of course, my flight was delayed, yet Brian Parras of Clean patiently met me for my late-night arrival at the airport.

We made it back to Brian’s house, albeit after midnight, where we met Brian’s father, Juan. Unfortunately, Juan, a relentless defender of the environmental rights of immigrant groups with whom I had communicated for years, could not stay up to chat with Brian and me, so after a beer and a bit of conversation, Brian, Leandra (his girlfriend) and I retired in anticipation of our 5 A.M. wake-up call. A few short hours later, Brian and I were barely awake and stumbling towards his car, off to meet our pilot, Eric Hake, who stepped in to fill the void after our first pilot backed out, literally as I was on the commercial flight from New York.

After the media buildup of the storm and its aftermath, I expected to find a devastated city surrounded by a petro-chemical industry overturned and in disarray. My experience is that the media tends to exaggerate any event to such an extreme that it is dubbed the "event of the century." What I found around Houston was a place that had been hit by a bad storm. My interest is environmentally harmful industry, and I did find tanks partially shredded (though mostly older ones, already rusted), and in particular, the demolished cooling fan unit of a power plant, but largely, industry was back in business. There were plants with flaming stacks pouring acrid smoke into the wind streams going straight to Houston, and bulldozers moving material back and forth into the holds of waiting ships, but all of that is expected. What was interesting were the locations where I remembered piles of dry material (like sulphur) that were no longer, and tanks of liquid waste once full were now empty.


One would expect that high winds would blow away any uncontained dry material or open bowls of liquid; the question then arises: where did it go? Once blown away, these materials quickly “disappear” into the surroundings, though dissipate is more descriptive, yet the effects linger for years. The environs and neighborhoods bordering Houston’s petro-chemical industry have long suffered the brunt of their discharge, and this instance was no different. Reports have come in of offshore rigs destroyed, massive spills from offshore sources, as well as tremendous leaks and spills within the industrial area. Here is an interesting article from the Houston Chronicle.

The bottom line is, with climate change predictions and increased storm activity and the fact that most of our refineries on which our society depends for its function are in coastal areas with high probability of this storm activity, there is a dual threat to our environment and security. This Houston trip produced some great images, but not the smoking gun I thought would be uncovered.

I loved this sunken ship; imagine the spill that occurred when it went down...