Sanctuary City: Chemical Rain

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Editor’s note: This is the third installment of Sanctuary City, a fictional futuristic serial which appears monthly in Ecolocalizer. Read the previous chapter here.

Chemical Dispersants & Acid Rain

At the beginning of the apocalyptic oil spill disaster, the criminal British Petroleum cartel flushed billions of gallons of untested chemical dispersants into the Gulf of Mexico in a feeble attempt to make the evidence of their catastrophe disappear. Each day millions of gallons of toxic crude and monstrous poisonous methane clouds continued to spew from the chasm that they tore into the earth’s crust back in 2010. The experimental chemicals created massive oil plumes beneath the water’s surface which spread for thousands of miles. Then the dispersants were absorbed up into the atmosphere and came back down as acid rain, scorching and withering all life that it fell upon.

The entire Gulf Coast was slowly melting away. Ghost towns spread across the southern seashore, as the ceaseless oily rain, toxic fumes and crude sludge infested the water and soil, killing all life and making all of the coastline uninhabitable. Hurricane season had then exacerbated what was already a horrendous situation, spreading the chemical toxins fast and furious further inland.

Billions of creatures perished. The whole southeastern seaboard had been turned into a polluted wasteland. Love Canal looked like a nature preserve compared to this annihilation and devastation. Millions of homeless oil spill refugees flooded into neighboring regions, in a desperate search for food, shelter and unpolluted water.

As the massive oil and toxic gas plumes continued to belch up from the sea floor, they tore a path of death and destruction across the planet. Yet, while this horrific catastrophe was still unfolding, BP pushed to overturn a moratorium on new offshore oil drilling, and immediately tripled their incredibly dangerous high pressure fractal gas mining operations across the continent.

Back in 2005, at the insistence of Dick Cheney, the “Halliburton Loophole” was inserted into the energy bill, which inexplicably exempted the entire petrochemical industry from the clean water act and all other environmental regulations. The result was a pervasive deadly pollution of nearly all of the water supply in North America. The groundwater in most places was now a toxic slurry of thousands of unstable chemicals, methane, petroleum and death. More often than not, most tap water flowing from a faucet would catch fire or even explode.

One Very Angry Beaver

Cedar suddenly got off her bicycle, sat down in the middle of the dirt road and stared blankly at a field of withered and dying plants. Large globs of strange gelatinous mucus were everywhere. What was this thick goo, some kind of chemical pollution? If the atmosphere here was already compromised, then the entire local water supply was in imminent danger as well. Now it was only a matter of time. She felt a wave of nausea crash over her as her innards wrenched themselves into a tight knot.

“Your kind has certainly fucked things up incredibly well.“

Startled by the sudden noise, Cedar was jolted from her morbid neuroses. She had thought that she was alone in the woods, and looked up to see who had spoken. Across the muddy road at the edge of the dripping forest, glaring at her intently, sat a very large and pissed off beaver.

You can read the next installment of Sanctuary City here.