Facebook Quietly Abandoned Drilling Gear Off the Oregon Coast
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:
Report: Facebook Quietly Abandoned Drilling Gear Off the Oregon Coast:
Facebook has boldly face-planted right into one of the few remaining types of fuckups it hasn't before: quietly abandoning a pile of drilling equipment under the ocean.
Per The Oregonian, Facebook subsidiary Edge Cable Holdings was in the middle of drilling to place a trans-oceanic fiber optic cable off the coast of Tierra Del Mar, Oregon when a drill bit became stuck on April 28, 2020, rupturing a pipe approximately 50 feet below the seafloor. The company moved on, but "about 1,100 feet of pipe, a drill tip, various other tools, and 6,500 gallons of drilling fluid" did not. Edge notified county officials of the accident on May 5, Department of State Lands spokeswoman Ali Hansen told the Oregonian, but declined to mention it had left large amounts of equipment on the seafloor until it told state officials on July 17.
Hansen told The Oregonian that Edge's delay in informing state officials "eliminated any potential options for recovery of the equipment," while the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers told the newspaper that Edge plans to just construct a separate pipe in 2021 without cleaning up after itself. Hansen's department has notified Edge it is violating permits by continuing to "store" its equipment onsite, the paper reported, as well as notified Facebook it had 30 days to pay damages, 180 days to remove their junk or get a new permit, and must accept any liability for the incident.
[...] Facebook disputed these accounts, saying the state had been notified earlier and adding that Edge had determined its sea trash wouldn't harm the environment.
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