Oil firms give codenames to their drilling sites, to throw rivals off the scent of where they are finding oil. The US government, when it sold a Gulf drilling lease to BP in 2008, called the site Block 252. BP, to help raise money for United Way, let its employees bid for the right to choose a codename; the winning group of employees decided on Macondo, after the town in Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. No one could know how miserably appropriate the choice would be. Both García Márquez's fictional town and BP's Macondo were destroyed. The final twist of One Hundred Years of Solitude is relevant, too. A text that had been impenetrable is finally deciphered at the end of the novel. Written one hundred years earlier, it foretold the events that destroyed Macondo. When it comes to drilling for oil and the hazards of climate change, the texts that predict our future are accumulating. They are all too clear.This is interesting, you can find the stories at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/sep/29/what-happened-macondo-well/?pagination=false
Not many people realize about this disaster. You can Google the following terms; Macondo well, BP disaster, Gulf of Mexico tragedy and others.
