Another day, another disaster

After grumbling about the multitude of emails clawing for my attention, money, action and compassion, I received one yesterday that delivered hard news.

Today, USA Today reports:

Shell oil spill recovery continues in Gulf of Mexico

LAFAYETTE, La. — Shell Oil Co., continuing to respond Monday to an oil discharge in the Gulf of Mexico, reported it had collected about 76,600 gallons of an oil-water mix through Sunday evening.

Shell said Thursday that a discharge of about 88,200 gallons occurred some 90 miles south of Timbalier Island, off the Louisiana coast, creating an initial oil sheen of about 2 miles by 13 miles. The company identified the source of the problem as a flow line that connects to a tension leg platform at the Glider Field.

Production was shut down initially Friday, but resumed Sunday at the nearby Brutus Field. No additional discharges have been reported after inspection of subsea infrastructures at the Glider Field, where production remained closed Monday.

I had to search for the news. It didn’t come at my via my Google news page, wide variety of daily news subscriptions nor through my visits to various news sites.

Perhaps it doesn’t garner as many clicks as does news of Trump and his ex-girlfriend’s claims of mistreatment or reporter fabrication (depending on what you believe)  or any other important political game of the day. What sad news that all is.

Shell reported the oil was not expected to reach the shore. No one was killed, fortunately. It wasn’t dramatic, by news standards, and so it’s received minimal coverage. Does that make it less vital of a concern? If a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it, does it still make a sound?

It is ‘Yet Another Oil Spill Wreaks Havoc on The Gulf of Mexico and Nearby Coastal Communities.’ These events are tragic; they have cumulative effects and each and every one is incredibly detrimental to our sea life, our environment and our lives.

“You sit down for dinner and you watch the news and you see another spill with tens of thousands of gallons of oil and reports that no one is hurt or the leak has stopped and you know, just from experience, that that’s probably not true,” Colette Pichon Battle, executive director of the Gulf Coast Center for Law and Policy, told ThinkProgress “Who is really going to be hit? It’s going to be our Native American communities that live on, and depend on, the coast. It’s going to be the poorest people on the coast that depend on the ecosystem to be healthy.”

Someone will be hurt from it.