Deepwater Horizon, Chernobyl, Bhopal
The crisis stage of the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster may be coming to an end, if all goes well, but the consequences of the massive oil and gas spill will unfold for the foreseeable future. The environmental devastation, economic damage, social changes and infrastructure implications are difficult to predict, but it's quite certain that the regional effects will have global consequences. There have been any number of attempts to use historical analogies—case studies of the past—to gauge the political and environmental effects of this catastrophe, but most of them seem to fall short. The Exxon Valdez spill has been mentioned as the most recent large-scale petroleum event, though the scale and location are rather different. Hurricane Katrina/New Orleans levee disaster has been brought up, both as the most recent Gulf region analogue and as the most recent large-scale federal government disaster response. The potential political consequences have, creatively but not terribly convincingly, been compared to the Iran hostage crisis. I'm sure I've missed a few others, but two which I think are worth considering are the nuclear power plant disaster at Chernobyl in 1986 and the Union Carbide gas leak at Bhopal in 1984.
The Chernobyl accident deserves very serious consideration as a parallel case, both for the structure of the event and the nature of the damage. First and foremost, Deepwater Horizon and Chernobyl both were energy production disasters, striking at the heart of the modern industrial system. As in the current crisis, there was an initial catastrophic failure caused by weak design and exacerbated by inadequate safety mechanisms. The Russian case was actually the result of a safety test that went horribly wrong, but in both cases safety mechanisms that should have been rigorously tested were overlooked and additional safety mechanisms that should have been in place were not due to lax oversight. Both BP's rig and Chernobyl's reactor fire required immediate heroic efforts—including deaths of workers and first responders, as well as technical and scientific creativity—to find a limit to the catastrophe, to reach a point, in other words, where the situation would not continue to get rapidly worse.
This did not mean that "the worst was over" in the past, any more than capping the well means that the oil spill disaster is in the past. It merely means that there's a physical limit, now, to the death and destruction which we might see. Chernobyl's local effects took time to understand—and are still debated—but involved at minimum scores of deaths, the displacement of tens of thousands of people, destruction of ecosystems and the loss of industrial productivity due to power losses. The release of radiation into water systems and into the atmosphere above Europe forced agricultural changes, destruction of crops and avoidance of milk in the short-term, long-term loss of fisheries in some areas, and a measurable increase in certain kinds of cancer and genetic abnormalities. Maintaining containment on the destroyed reactor and the materials within required ongoing monitoring and massive engineering efforts, some of which are still being carried out to avoid further accidental destruction.
The next phase of our present crisis will involve mitigation and recovery efforts, as well as a great deal of helpless desperation as events unfold. The environmental damage will certainly be immense, and the cautionary loss of fishing in the Gulf of Mexico means that there will also be social and economic damage, as well as food shortages. Not that we'll notice those food shortages much in the United States—shrimp and fish prices will rise for a while, probably, along with oil and transportation prices—but the need to replace Gulf fisheries with other sources of protein, and the attendant rise in prices, will both limit access to food among the global poor as well as creating an economic opportunity for fishing communities and industries elsewhere (and the attendant potential environmental degradation from overfishing those regions, of course). As with the Chernobyl situation, there is only so much that can be done to mitigate the damage, and there will be sacrifices and suffering for people very distant from the point of origin. In fact, as with Chernobyl, we don't know at this point how bad it will be, because the exact scale of the leak, the direction it will take, the amount it can be mitigated offshore, and the damage done by mitigation itself, are all unknowns.
As with Chernobyl, this is an international event: not just because BP is a British oil company, but because the spill is in international waters, it will affect global shipping and fisheries, and may well affect Caribbean waters and other nations with Atlantic coastlines. The damage is not limited to the United States, any more than the Soviet Union contained all the victims of Chernobyl, but the full extent will only be revealed slowly and painfully. Another international effect of Chernobyl was a global slowdown in new nuclear power plant projects, as governments, communities and insurance underwriters became more cautious about atomic energy. It's entirely possible that the BP incident may produce similar shifts in the oil industry, though that remains to be seen: at the very least, it's unlikely that many new deep water drilling projects will be allowed to go forward without much more substantial safety systems, inspections and liability clarifications in place.
The Chernobyl disaster was caused by a government-owned power plant, and governments are notoriously hard to hold fiscally responsible, especially in other jurisdictions. While the costs of containment have been shared by the international community, for fairly obvious reasons, the costs of mitigation, relocation, agricultural product destruction, etc. have been borne by the jurisdictions where the damage has occurred. The Deepwater Horizon rig, though, was owned and operated by British Petroleum, one of the largest multinational corporations in the world. This is where the comparison with the Union Carbide failure in Bhopal, India may be instructive.
As an American corporation with headquarters in Houston, BP America is certainly subject to civil and criminal jurisdiction in the U.S., but at some point courts in the UK and U.S. may have to come to some agreement about jurisdiction over the entire corporation. In the Bhopal case, after the Indian government passed a law giving the government the right to act as a kind of class action representative for all victims, U.S. courts consistently referred the issues to Indian courts. It took several rounds of negotiation and litigation before a final settlement was made, a settlement that Union Carbide, now subsumed under Dow Chemical, considered eminently reasonable but one which has left both victims and many observers dissatisfied. Two decades later, a Yes Men satire briefly crashed Dow's stock value by falsely announcing a new settlement two dozen times larger and substantiating it with a mock Dow website documenting the extent of the environmental and medical damage done by the gas leak. Despite the settlement, Indian authorities also initiated criminal manslaughter proceedings, still ongoing, against Union Carbide executives, with international warrants outstanding for the arrest of several responsible figures.
The U.S. government has opened investigations into the possibility of civil and criminal proceedings, and Congress is considering modifying the civil liability in the case of offshore drilling. Union Carbide, like Exxon, was able to negotiate a settlement that preserved the value of the company. Arthur Andersen, on the other hand, collapsed and disappeared as a corporate entity when investigations into its role in the Enron debacle were announced. BP America is a substantial company producing something real and holding property, equipment and rights of great value: while it could lose stock value, or even be forced to divest itself of assets, it is unlikely to disappear entirely. Still, a great deal depends on both the approach taken by the U.S. government to BP America in terms of liability and responsibility as well as the way the petroleum industry changes in response to the disaster and its legal, environmental and insurance fallout.
Despite the value of these analogies, we are clearly charting new territory, historically speaking. Petroleum is fundamental to the chemical industry and energy economy in a way that nuclear energy was not. The Gulf of Mexico is a valuable fishery as well as a major route for international shipping; all of that may now have to change, not to mention the tourist economy—one of the most valuable service sectors in many parts of the nation —of the Gulf coast possibly as far as Florida, or even beyond. The now-obvious risks of deep-sea oil exploration may raise the cost of oil, gas, plastics, fertilizer etc. in the long term, with both obvious and subtle effects on global economic and social processes. Despite the recent focus of writers like Jared Diamond on the collapse of societies major and minor from environmental factors, there are many societies which have changed and adapted successfully to shortages, disasters and other changes. Humanity is an immensely creative and adaptable species, which is part of why the study of history and the present, not to mention the future, is so unpredictable.