Via John Cole... After the oil rig explosion in the Gulf, Transocean appears to have engaged in a deliberate scheme of isolation, sleep deprivation, and intimidation in order to extort signatures out of the workers. After being pulled out of the sea after the explosion, the workers were held on the ships offshore for 36-40 hours, denied access to phones or radios in order to call loved ones, drug tested, deprived of sleep, and then told to sign on the dotted line "or else". From the Guardian UK:

By Davis's estimate, it took 12-15 minutes to get from the rig to the work boat, but it would take another 36-40 hours before they were to return to shore â€“ even though there were dozens of boats in the area and Coast Guard helicopters airlifting the most severely injured to hospital.

Some of the men were openly furious, while others, like Davis, were just numb. He says they were denied access to the onboard satellite phone or radio to call their families.

When the ship finally did move, it did not head for shore directly, stopping at two more rigs to collect and drop off engineers and coast guard crew before arriving at Port Fourchon, Louisiana.

The company was ready for the men then, with portable toilets lined up at the dock for drug tests. The men were loaded on to buses, given a change of clothing and boxes of sandwiches, and taken to a hotel in Kenner, Louisiana, where finally they were reunited with their families.

Lawyers say the isolation was deliberate and that Transocean was trying to wear the men down so they would sign statements denying that they had been hurt or that they had witnessed the explosion that destroyed the rig.

"These men are told they have to sign these statements or they can't go home," said Buzbee. "I think it's pretty callous, but I'm not surprised by it."

Davis had been awake nonstop for about 50 hours by that point. He signed. Buzbee says most of the men did.

This statement seems to corroborate a story told previously by Christopher Choy, another Deepwater Horizon rig worker:

Choy, a young roustabout on the rig, was handed a form to fill out, asking what he'd seen. "They came on there, and they gathered everybody in the galley on the boat and handed out ... papers and stuff saying, '[These are] statements. You need to sign these. Nobody's getting off here until we get one from everybody.' "

But when Choy read the Coast Guard form, he didn't like what he saw. "At the bottom, it said something about, like, you know, this can be used as evidence in court and all that. I told them, I'm not signing it," Choy says. "Most of the people signed it and filled them out. I just didn't feel comfortable doing it." Choy shared his story at length with NPR and the PBS program NewsHour, in one of the most extensive interviews from a survivor of the April 20 rig blast.

The Coast Guard acknowledges it kept the men on the water in part so its investigators could get statements. But Choy says he thought the man who gave him the form said he was a lawyer with BP, the oil company. BP says it had no investigators or lawyers there.

It would be reasonable that the Coast Guard might want to interview the workers and get statements about the explosion and what was going on. Heck, someone from the government needs to be investigating at even this early point! But this doesn't quite sound like an investigation. This sounds like a corporate ass-covering maneuver with the Coast Guard looking on and providing a convenient excuse for the suits to hold the workers there and browbeat them into silence and indemnity. Then they were all drug tested, with those obvious implications (if you piss dirty, then obviously this was all your fault), and denied the ability to contact their families? Then, before they were allowed to go home, they had to go in front of Transocean lawyers yet again and have signatures demanded of them? Again from NPR:

But before they could go home, there was one more form and one more attempt to get the survivors to give information. At the hotel, there were representatives for Transocean who asked Choy to initial a line that said: I was not injured as a result of the incident or evacuation.

Choy had seen men with open wounds and burning flesh. He knew 11 of his friends were dead. He felt he was among the lucky ones.

Exhausted and just wanting to get home with Monica, he signed.

This is not only obscene, but it is criminal! Anyone involved, the actual lawyers or any other employees at Transocean (or BP or any other involved corporation) should be investigated and charged with Unlawful Restraint at the very least (and perhaps Kidnapping or Criminal Abduction). If the executives of the company knew about it, and surely they did if this level of thing was happening, then they should be charged as well.

Even if it is only Criminal Restraint, the penalties of which are often fairly light (fines and no more than 6 months in jail), it would send a message that this sort of corporate ass-cover is not acceptable.

Heck, with all of the hints of criminality surrounding this tragedy, they should indict the entire corporations (Transocean and BP, from what it seems so far) as criminal enterprises and prosecute them under RICO (which has predicate acts of extortion and blackmail).

So, I spent a few minutes in Google Earth and Photoshop during my lunch break today. It can be very difficult to imagine the true scale of the catastrophe happening down in the Gulf of Mexico, since generally the maps you see all are out over the open water with few geographic reference points that make sense to mere mortals. I thought it might be helpful to those of us up here in Maine to compare it to our local coastline. I was inspired by this cool tool built by Paul Rademacher, which unfortunately has not yet been updated with the most recent observational data available. So, I took the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill observation map from Google Earth, which was just updated yesterday (05/17/2010) with new observational data, and layered the oil spill size overtop of the same-scale map of Maine's coastline. Despite following the growth of of the oil slick fairly closely, I really wasn't prepared for what I found.

First, we have the map of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Slick itself:

And here we have the map of the coast of Maine:

Obviously, I rotated the graphic of the oil slick itself to line it up with the Maine coastline, but I didn't scale or transform the image in any other way.

Making matters even worse is the fact that this only really shows an estimate of the size of the surface oil slick (and probably a conservative one at that). With typical "shallow" oil spills, such as those from an oil tanker, most of the oil stays on the surface of the water. The oil glugs out of the containment system on the ship, and pretty quickly settles up to the surface of the sea. Everyone knows that oil floats on top of water! Unfortunately, the spill happening (and continuing) at a depth of 5,000ft changes the rules quite a bit due to currents, pressure, thermal layers in the ocean, and the hundreds of thousands of gallons of dispersants we've dumped into the ocean. As discussed in an article this weekend in the Christian Science Monitor, the "real" spill is actually quite likely below the surface of the water, and growing at an even more catastrophic rate.

The oil that can be seen from the surface is apparently just a fraction of the oil that has spilled into the Gulf of Mexico since April 20, according to an assessment the National Institute for Undersea Science and Technology. Significant amounts of oil are spreading at various levels throughout the water column, says the report, which was posted online a week ago but first published by The New York Times Saturday.

The research, combined with other emerging data, could fundamentally alter researchersâ€™ understanding of the oil spill. It suggests that vastly more oil than previously reported could be spilling from the wellhead and the attached riser pipe that now lies crumpled on the seafloor like a kinked and leaking garden hose.

Moreover, it suggests that serious environmental degradation could take place in the open ocean, creating massive â€œdead zonesâ€ where no creature can live because of the lack of oxygen in the water. The spread of oil at all levels of the Gulf also could become a concern for shore communities in hurricanes, which stir up the water column as they come ashore.

Well, great. That map looked bad enough, but now it appears that even this doesn't fully capture the scale of the disaster. This undersea oil plume was apparently discovered by the National Institute for Undersea Science and Technology (NIUST), which has been maintaining a blog about their work with regular updates (via Jim White at FDL). As reported by the USA Today:

In the first on-site measurements of the oil spreading below the surface, researchers found the plume of crude stretches 15 to 20 miles southwest from the site of the damaged wellhead and is about 5 miles wide, said Vernon Asper, a University of Southern Mississippi marine scientist leading the research.

The plume is compact, much thicker than the lighter remnants reaching the surface and suspended in about 3,000 feet of ocean, he said. A deepwater current is dragging it out to sea. The underwater oil cloud is not connected to the surface slick â€” now the size of Delaware and Rhode Island combined.

"This [underwater] plume is some of the heavier products of the oil that won't reach the surface," Asper said in a radio-telephone interview from aboard the R/V Pelican, a 116-foot research ship at the site of the spill. "We think this oil is going to stay down there. It doesn't look like it's coming to the surface."

It would seem that oil staying down under the surface might help matters a bit, but really we have no idea what the impacts of this might be. And then, at the surface, BP is dumping tons of surfactants on the oil that has reached the surface, in an effort to break it up and disperse it. As discussed over at FDL, these dispersants have already been shown to reduce the ability of water to absorb atmospheric oxygen. It is quite likely that this will have a tremendous and devastating effect on the oxygen levels underwater, perhaps creating a "dead zone" the likes of which the world has never seen. And, on top of it, we don't really know where this underwater column of oil will end up. The deepwater currents are pulling it out into the ocean, where it will likely get caught up in the complex ocean current system and dragged across the globe.

Driving home the point that we really aren't seeing the full size of the impact via these "size of such-and-such state" surface maps? The first tar balls washed ashore in Key West on Monday.

But don't worry. Transocean Ltd., the Swiss firm that owned and operated the oil rig, had a closed-door meeting on Friday where they announced they would be distributing approximately $1 billion in dividends to shareholders. More of the ongoing corporate strategy of privatizing gains and socializing losses!

Or, others would just call it what it really is: Looting.