Chapter 4 b

The sovereign state of the islands had not enough income to keep an educational system or a social system worth mentioning. Having the expenditure for contracting a company to get all that fuel out was totally out of the question. They have tried to get it founded from the US and Japan, but they failed. 

Nevertheless, at the beginning of 2008, a company based in the US offered a deal that could not be ignored. Namely, they would perform the recovery operations at 0 cost, just they would keep it for themselves and would have total freedom what to do with it. The government of the islands would cede some land for a while for the whole operation, for storage and living quarters purposes.

We should probably go one step backwards here.  Even if it was not the main focus, many religious organizations keep active missions in the Pacific. They are quite zealous with "their" islands and do not support the souls of their congregations being plucked bare by capitalism, that is what they are there for. Also there were ecologist groups. That is a little broad, as there where the typical tree huggers, just living like parasites there, to marine biologists, most related to universities, that should probably be called conservationists. All of them were worried about the crude oil seeping from the tanks. Well, not that much for the religious bunch... they are not concerned about earthy things but selling tickets to paradise, but about the souls of the islanders being tainted with money and prosperity. The coming company had meetings with all the collectives.The cost would not be covered by the recovered oil as such. The business idea was a different one. The method they would use was not entirely new, but it would be sold like that, and as humanitarian relief operation. Publicity, a documentary and then sold overpriced 0.2 cans of "war oil" to collectors.

For the Japanese war veteran associations, this was a war cemetery  , for the US ones, too, but mostly of the enemy so it was too, a monument to the American Victory. So it would have to be done fast, fait accompli

At the end, even the most anti-everything accepted it, the mother ship should be moored outside the lagoon. The religious groups were happy that the contact of the company would be limited to a couple of local guides, which at any rate were almost lost through the dirty contact with the outside world and the needed bureaucrats.

 

All in all, in February 2009 two ships arrived to the atoll. The mother ship laid anchor outside the lagoon, but right at its entrance. The other ship moored next to the new pier at the space that was conceded for the operation. Eventually a small container village started to develop within the fenced area, which was connected to the next village through a tenuous road.  The locals noted that, irrespectively of color and size, all containers had a logo stenciled on the sides, about the size of a magazine.

All the movement would be done by sea. Once the base was completed, there was a rotation. The specialists that would perform the extraction arrived. Then also the filming got underway.