Paul Holmes: Desperate battle to contain disaster

Galveston, oh Galveston

I still hear your sea waves crashing

While I watch the cannon flashing

I clean my gun and dream of Galveston.

I still see her standing by the water,

Standing there looking out to sea.

And is she waiting there for me

On the beach where we used to run?

Well, that was 1968. If she were standing there now she would be looking out upon a part of the United States in crisis.

She would be looking, possibly, at any number of the 4000 oil rigs operating in the sea along the Gulf Coast.

She would be looking along a coast which is entirely made up of inlets and lagoons, low coastal islands and marshes, perfect territory for giant, creeping oil spills to wreak havoc and destruction.

This is a coast that is home to a rich diversity of bird life and fish.

It is home to the American shrimping industry. This is the coast along which, between Florida and Texas, are seven of the busiest ports in the entire United States.

Along that coast is the American petrochemical industry.

And right now, she would know that this coast, this sea and that industry are in a crisis the like of which, hurricanes excepted, it has never known before.

Who actually knows how many hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of litres of crude oil have gushed up from that mangled, manky well, Deepwater Horizon, 1500m below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico? Well, no one really.

It is certainly the gravest oil spill in decades anywhere and it may be the worst of all time.

We are looking at a catastrophic environmental disaster that has the capacity not only to cause millions of dollars worth of economic destruction along the Gulf Coast but one that could do terrible damage to BP itself, the owner of the well, in terms of compensation, reputation and clean-up costs.

And lawsuits and massive compensation there definitely will be. President Obama has made it clear right from the start of the disaster that the well and the oil disaster are the responsibility of British Petroleum.

Right now BP is trying everything to stem the flow from the well. The effectiveness of the construction and lowering of the giant dome the company has built to cover the rupture is unknown technology.

The BP chief, Tony Hayward, describes the project as having no guarantee of success. He said it is only one of the battlefronts and they're not counting on it. No one has ever had to stop a gusher 5000 feet below the sea.

Someone from the company said the other day that plugging that well was like doing keyhole heart surgery blindfold with submarines a mile under the water.

But Tony Hayward remains optimistic about man's engineering capability. "It's like Normandy. We know we're going to win. We just don't know when." Perhaps he's right. Throughout history, man's capacity to engineer has been truly sublime.

Even if the dome works - and we shall know, apparently, early this coming week - it will still only contain some 85 per cent of the gushing crude. There remain doubts about whether the dome will work so far beneath the sea.

This dome business has never been done before. There are worries that ice may form and block the pipe carrying the crude up to the oil tanker with its multi million-litre storage capacity.

It is also said that the combination of water, gas and oil might explode. David Clarkson, a senior BP engineer told the New York Times that he is worried about every part of it all.

Meanwhile, turtles are crawling up the beach covered in oil. Already a couple of dead gannets have been found as the gargantuan oil slick the size of a small country makes its way slowly to shore.

A reporter for the British newspaper, the Independent, flew over the 50 odd ships involved out there in the battle to stem the flow and was shocked by the sheer scale of the floating poison. He described it as Martian red. He saw a whale floating, dying on its side.

But while Tony Hayward of BP is fighting the battle under the water, he is also fighting on another front as well.

He is pointing the finger at Transocean, the owners of the rigs, the company to whom BP contracts to get the oil safely out of their oceanic fields.

Says Hayward: "This was not our accident. This was not our drilling rig. This was not our equipment. It was not our people, our systems or our processes. This was Transocean's rig. Their systems. Their people. Their equipment." So take that.

Now it emerges that British regulators have twice disciplined Transocean for their failure to maintain satisfactorily the safety of their blowout preventers.

And it was the drastic failure of the blowout preventer which caused this Gulf rig to explode, kill 11 men and allow the giant submarine oil leak in the Gulf.

What's more, Transocean's boss appears too have been aware of the safety concerns about blowout preventer maintenance. Last year he banned executive bonuses because he didn't think the executives were up to speed on safety practices.

Most of us will not have heard of Transocean. Neither had we heard, before it ran aground in Alaska, of a ship by the name of Exxon Valdez. In the same way that Exxon Valdez has come to mean one thing round the world, the same fate may befall Transocean.

Not that one need feel sorry for BP. Never forget that BP is simply the reincarnation of the old Anglo-Persian Oil Company, set up by the British in the first years of the 20th century and granted a licence to plunder oil reserves in Iran, or Persia as it was then called.

They got the oil for a song. They virtually stole it. Eventually the Iranians grew smart to what was going on. After World War II, a democratically elected prime minister, the only such political leader they ever had, Mosadegh, began to insist the British did a share deal with Iran or do a 50/50 split on oil revenues.

Anglo-Persian would not budge and dug in. Mosadegh toured the world putting his case. In 1953, Prime Minister Churchill told President Dwight Eisenhower that Mosadegh was going communist.

Mosadegh was going nothing of the sort. Mosadegh had contempt for socialism. Mosadegh just wanted a fair return and his people loved him for it.

Anyway, Churchill's ruse did the trick and the CIA went into Tehran and organised Mosadegh's overthrow. Mosadegh was a goner. The Iranians have never forgotten what the British and the Americans did. You could say that BP was behind the Iranian resentment of the West that continues unabated to this day.

None of which helps stop the flow of crude oil1500m below the sea in the Gulf where the desperate battle goes on, where there are no easy solutions, if there are any at all, and where BP is fighting an international public relations nightmare.

Galveston, oh Galveston, I am so afraid of dying

Before I dry the tears she's crying

Before I watch your sea birds flying in the sun

At Galveston, at Galveston.

Galveston tells the story of a lonely soldier. I hope he made it back from Vietnam. The Gulf Coasters might need everyone they can muster for the clean up.