Mobility

Bunny was surprised at how quickly some of these incidents, so consequential at the time, had been disappeared from the pool of generalized knowledge in which she swam. Exxon Valdez, of course she knew that — it was the prototype for malfeasance, the villain of her childhood. Deepwater Horizon, it seemed, would take a similar place in the collective mind. But Texas City? She had driven past it and never known. Piper Alpha? Bohai? Ocean Ranger? Kielland? The tragedy and waste and environmental degradation sobered her. And yet in the accounts found in the Turnbridge reading room these tragedies were made small against the inexorability of a steel tube drilling down thousands of feet, drilling sideways a thousand feet more, seeming to subvert the laws of geology or physics. Literal pipelines laid under the ground and spanning two continents, traveling under the ocean itself, to bring them their standard of living. There was no arguing with it, Bunny felt. Astronauts died going to space, she told herself.