Why Ask Why?

But they do ask why. And when they ask you, you can offer them this article as the reason environmentalists are so determined to keep oil drilling out of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. From the Sierra Club, DRILLING CAUSES MAJOR CRUDE OIL SPILL NEAR ARCTIC NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE -- POTENTIALLY LARGEST IN ALASKA NORTH SLOPE HISTORY:

March 7, 2006. Last week during the Senate Energy Committee’s hearing on the Fiscal Year 2007 Budget, Chairman Domenici praised Secretary Norton and the Department of Interior for promoting "environmentally-gentle" oil development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Just days after these remarks, America got an unfortunate preview of just how "gentle" oil drilling operations could be if allowed on the Arctic Refuge’s fragile Coastal Plain.

On Thursday, March 2, a BP oil operator discovered signs of an oil spill at a caribou migration site on the snow-covered tundra of Alaska’s North Slope. Three days later, response workers finally uncovered the source of the spill – a breach in an oil transit pipeline feeding into the larger trans-Alaska oil pipeline infrastructure stretching some 800 miles across the state.

Clean-up crews have already vacuumed up more than 50,000 gallons of crude oil and melted snow off the delicate tundra, but at least one report from an industry expert has indicated that up to 798,000 gallons could be unaccounted for, possibly making this the largest crude oil spill in the history of the North Slope, and second in Alaska only to the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. Oil is still dripping from the breached pipeline and the full extent of the damage and affected acreage are unknown. The multi-agency spill response team will attempt to come up with an estimated spill volume in the next two days. (Read entire article)

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