BP oil spill

Woodland Apple You know I think you're a good person and this is hard for me to say and I really hope you don't get mad...

If you spill a few gallons of oil into the water by accident yourself, you are liable to heavy fines or jail time, but not of you spill millions of tonnes. Who is above the law?

One death is a tragedy;
one million is a statistic.

One dubious post is annoying
A whole thread of it gets boring

Some are attuned to the possibility of looming catastrophe and know how to head it off. Others are unprepared for risk and even unable to get their priorities straight when risk turns to reality.

The Dutch fall into the first group. Three days after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico began on April 20, the Netherlands offered the U.S. government ships equipped to handle a major spill, one much larger than the BP spill that then appeared to be underway. "Our system can handle 400 cubic metres per hour," Weird Koops, the chairman of Spill Response Group Holland, told Radio Netherlands Worldwide, giving each Dutch ship more cleanup capacity than all the ships that the U.S. was then employing in the Gulf to combat the spill.

(...)

The U.S. government responded with "Thanks but no thanks," remarked Visser, despite BP's desire to bring in the Dutch equipment and despite the no-lose nature of the Dutch offer --the Dutch government offered the use of its equipment at no charge.