My previous post quantified the oii spewing from BP's Deepwater Horizon well. It didn't mention the 11 men killed when the platform blew up. This article remembers them. In the pictures I make - pictures of numbers - there is room for only one real person: the viewer. I try to make statistics meaningful in part so people can realise how impoverished they are - that's sort of the point. Any good statistician would do the same (not that I'm a good statistician).
The events in the Gulf of Mexico have reminded me of the Piper Alpha disaster. I was a student in Edinburgh (Scotland) at the time. The Piper Alpha disaster pretty much passed me by, but in Edinburgh, as in most cities in the time of Margaret Thatcher, there were many homeless people on the streets. One particularly pathetic beggar would hang out near a theatre I used to frequent. He came to be quite familiar to me.
A couple of years after the disaster I caught a documentary on TV which included first hand accounts of people who'd been on the Piper Alpha platform - people who'd seen their friends burn to death and expected the same would happen to them. The friendly beggar I'd come to know - and despise - was there. His dignified testimony revealed far more to me than the incompetence of Occidental. The programme didn't address what happened to the survivors, but anyone in Edinburgh could see for themselves.
We can choose when to see the world statistically and when to see real people. Corporations can't. Think about that. BP cannot see the men it killed nor the marine environments it's destroying. It knows they are dead and dying but it can't know what that means - it's a corporation.