In the latest episode of Alec Baldwin’s radio show Here’s the Thing, the actor and proprietor of one of the world’s most soothing voices interviews journalist Antonia Juhasz about her in-depth coverage of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. And, well, here’s the thing: The situation down there is still bad, future oil spills are pretty much inevitable, and BP’s tentative $18.7 billion settlement is probably way too low. That said, there are still plenty of good people in the oil industry who are just doing a job that someone’s gotta do until we kick this habit. Unfortunately, those people work for disgustingly rich and powerful companies that can pretty much do whatever they want.
Juhasz, who wrote the 2011 book Black Tide: The Devastating Impact of the Gulf Oil Spill and this recent feature for the June issue of Harper’s Magazine, took a submersible down to the site of the spill last year and found a pretty depressing scene. There were a few creatures here and there, she told Baldwin, but overall, there was way less life there than there should have been. She did, however, see a giant underwater cockroach and something called a vampire squid, which both seem fitting for the site of such a draw-dropping catastrophe.
Listen to the episode:
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