Comments on: Massive Coral Die-Off Found Just 7 Miles from BP Oil Spill Site

By: Brian Too

Brian Too — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 01:50:24 +0000

@25. John Routledge,

Your error is the same error that the oil companies made, which is an over-reliance upon fallible Blow-Out Preventers. The BOP’s were repeatedly advertised to the decision-makers and the public as “infallible”. That’s a crock and any engineer worth their salt knows it. All human technology is fallible and the BOP’s are more fallible than many ‘last line of defence’ systems.

By analogy. Suppose you carelessly drive straight for a wall, hit it, and your air bag fails to deploy. Your face gets messed up due to hitting the dashboard, worse than had the air bags deployed.

Who is responsible? The air bag manufacturer or automobile manufacturer for making (presumably) faulty equipment? Or you for carelessly driving towards the wall?

BP carelessly drove towards the wall and put all their proverbial eggs in the BOP basket. That’s a mistake they should pay for.

By: Eliza Strickland

Eliza Strickland — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 17:27:06 +0000

@ John Routledge: The government panel that investigated the spill faulted BP for "a culture of complacency" rather than a "culture of safety." From the LA Times coverage: "The panel's investigators uncovered "a suite of bad decisions," many still inexplicable, involving tests that were poorly run, alarming results that were ignored, proper equipment that was sidelined and safety barriers that were removed prematurely at the high-pressure well."

By: John Routledge

John Routledge — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 16:33:58 +0000

I’m still confused as to why people are so quick to blaim BP for the majority of the spill. The platform accident was almost certainly their fault, and not closing the valve on the way out may have been their fault, but then robots pressed the manual close button on the sea bed and nothing happened. That’s when the acident ended and the disaster began.

Why do you continue to blaim the driver when it has been repeatedly proven beyond all possible and reasonable doubt that the breaks simply didn’t work? Unless anyone wants to claim here that all the other oil multinationals were testing their BOPs 100 times more often than BP?

By: mattie

mattie — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 01:09:55 +0000

Hey – learned something new – admittedly I should have looked up deep water coral before posting. To the highly learned posters/editors – please accept my apology! Good to live and learn… I hope my post was clear in regards to my belief that this oil spill and the dispersant used is already causing damage and will no doubt cause more. Not sure if ‘scott’s’ comment was aimed at me, but I certainly did not defend BP or even watch fox news…
Never mind, and thanks again to the editor and others for providing links on deep water coral

By: Luke Thomas

Luke Thomas — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 16:24:47 +0000

COOL! Let’s hope all the wildlife dies in the Gulf. That way you don’t have to worry about it anymore and DRILL BABY DRILL to your heart’s content!!

By: Eliza Strickland

Eliza Strickland — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 15:50:39 +0000

@ Mattie, YouRang:

Here’s some info about deep water corals. They grow more slowly than tropical corals because they don’t have zooxanthellae that live on them and feed them.

– Eliza, DISCOVER online news editor

By: jcook

jcook — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 15:47:23 +0000

Here are some links:

http://www.safmc.net/ecosystem/HabitatManagement/DeepwaterCorals/tabid/229/Default.aspx
http://coris.noaa.gov/about/deep/

By: YouRang

YouRang — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 15:42:43 +0000

Amen Mattie. I came to look at this article because I had never heard of coral that wasn’t living in a symbiotic relationship with algae. Jcook claims there are other corals.

By: scott

scott — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 15:31:49 +0000

This article proves one thing…there are a lot of idiots, easily fooled by what they say on FOX NEWS who will defend any big corporation and know very little about science and biology and seem to be on here to do just that…defend poor BP and large polluting companies, jumping to their defense. Put a plate of gulf oysters in front of him and offer him a vacation in an affected area and I bet he would think twice about if the oil is really gone and everything is just fine.

By: jcook

jcook — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 14:57:32 +0000

Deep water corals can grow as deep as 6000 feet.