UPDATE: Fake! http://m.gawker.com/5916661/hilarious-video-of-shell-oil-party-disaster-is-fake-unfortunately

Epic Shell Oil PR fail celebrating their win to drill for oil in the Arctic. Watch it quick, because I suspect it will be taken down soon. Details:

Last night Logan Price, a Seattle Occupier who’s now living in New York, managed to infiltrate a private party thrown by Shell Oil at the Space Needle to celebrate the launch of its Arctic drilling program. He caught this amazing video.

“It all started with a malfunction…. of the event’s centerpiece, a scale model of the Kulluk, one of the rigs heading up north, which was sitting in a basin of liquor (rum and coke?) next to an ice sculpture in the shape of an iceberg.

I guess the photo-op was meant to be a symbolic tapping of the Arctic. There was a ridiculous three-foot-high scale model of their Arctic drilling rig, the Kulluk, and the mini-rig had a tap to pump liquor for the guests.

“The guest of honor was an elderly Japanese man introduced as the original Chief Engineer of the Kulluk rig who used to work at Mitsui back in the ’80s. But when the man went to turn on the ‘rig,’ the liquor went everywhere - and the first to be hit was another elderly guest, the widow of the man who’d actually designed the Kulluk back in the 1980s.

“The guy in charge kept asking the old engineer to fix it but he obviously had no idea how to turn it off. Shell’s PR people got REALLY worked up, and the designer’s widow started yelling. At this point the guy who was presenting the new ad campaign told me to turn off my camera and got pretty aggressive.”

Sure, it’s funny. But remember, it was Obama that opened up oil drilling in the Alaska.