A long history
June 17, 2010 (Thursday)
A 1953 movie, “Thunder Bay,” starring Jimmy Stewart, deals with the subject of offshore drilling vs local Louisiana fishermen. Set in the year 1946, ex-Navy engineer Steve Martin (Stewart) comes to a Louisiana town with a dream: to build a safe platform for offshore oil drilling. The project is opposed by the fishing community and there you have the plot.
Maybe it’s a perfect time right now to dust off the old movie and show it on T.V. I don’t recall seeing it, and I don’t know if I would agree with any points it makes, for or against anything, but I just found interesting the fact that a movie was made 57 years ago that foreshadowed the human conflicts now taking place.
You may be surprised to learn that the first submerged oil wells in salt water were drilled from piers (connected to land) over the Santa Barbara Channel in California.
In the first quarter of the 20th Century, wells were drilled in tidal zones along the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coast. In 1937 drilling was done from a fixed platform one mile off the Louisiana coast in 14 feet of water. From that beginning, a huge number of oil wells now exist in the Gulf of Mexico. The deepest is in one and one-half miles of water.
Everyone who fishes the waters of the bays and the Gulf is familiar with the many oil rigs, because they are places where the fishing is good. The pilings make natural reefs, around which develops a chain of marine life. We’ve come to accept the platforms as part of the environment. Accidents hardly ever occur, but the happenings of recent weeks show that it only takes one unfortunate event to affect adversely the lives of many people.