Death by a thousand spills: How corporate branding and media strategies downplay the risk of offshore oil spills in Canada

Abstract

On 15 November 2018, Newfoundland experienced its largest oil spill. The disaster saw the SeaRose platform disperse 250,000 litres of oil into the Atlantic. Despite the accident’s unprecedented nature, Husky Energy (the company responsible for the spill) minimized the public’s perception of potential ecological risks by transforming the disaster into an everyday fact of life. Focusing on Husky’s mediation of the spill, this article shows how Husky’s visual representation of small offshore spills erases their actual impact as cumulative environmental hazards. The regularity of ‘minor’ oil spills, I argue, forms a category of chronic disasters obscured by an ‘emergency frame’ that defines ecological catastrophes as acute, traumatic and exceptional. Unlike eruptive and explosive spills, Husky visualized the SeaRose spill as a benign event, drawing attention away from the ongoing and incremental nature of oil pollution. In this way, Husky’s representation of the spill produced more public relief than alarm.