by Carl Safina
A week in, as the sheer unstoppable quantity of oil breeches the confines of our ability to imagine what to do, the idea of skimming up most of the oil gives way to a desire to get rid of the oil, no matter how. Landry talks about burning it off the sea. Lighting the sea on fire. In 1969, the Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught fire. So shocked was America to see its waters on fire that the incident—along with an oil leak off Santa Barbara, California, the same year—helped precipitate the explosion of environmental laws that Republican president Richard Nixon signed in the early 1970s.
(Note to the young: If you wonder why we need a Clean Water Act—a reasonable question, since you’re lucky enough not to have seen America’s waterways as they were before—consider that the Cuyahoga River had ignited about ten prior times in the last century, and also consider this description from Time magazine, August 1, 1969:
Some river! Chocolate-brown, oily, bubbling with subsurface gases, it oozes rather than flows. “Anyone who falls into the Cuyahoga does not drown,” Cleveland’s citizens joke grimly. “He decays.” … The Federal Water Pollution Control Administration dryly notes: “The lower Cuyahoga has no visible signs of life, not even low forms such as leeches and sludge worms that usually thrive on wastes.” It is also—literally—a fire hazard.
Now Landry explains about burning this oil off the surface of the Gulf. She uses the term “controlled burns,” and says they would be done far from shore. As if nothing that breathes air lives out in the Gulf of Mexico. No turtles, say. No whales. She says that crews would make sure marine life and people were protected and that work on other oil rigs would not be interrupted. But can they protect sea turtles? Can they avoid interrupting dolphins and whales?
Two decades after the Exxon Valdez ran aground, its oil can still be found under rocks along Prince William Sound. Scratch and sniff.
There’s that terror here—that it will never be back to normal. Or that in the years it takes, communities will die and families disintegrate. But others begin saying maybe not. This isn’t Alaska crude. Gulf crude is “sweet crude”—gotta love these funky terms—while the Exxon Valdez disgorged heavy crude. This isn’t Prince William Sound. It’s hot here. What’s different is different.
“You have warm temperatures, strong sunlight, microbial action. It will degrade a lot faster,” says Ronald S. Tjeerdema, a University of California toxicologist who studies the effects of oil on aquatic systems. “Eventually, things will return to normal.”
But how long is eventually? One summer? A year? Five? Twenty? People know that before it returns to normal they are hurtling toward a time like no other, when everything they know and love is suddenly at risk.
We’re all aware that there’ll be oiled birds, dead turtles, the like. Some people ask, How bad? Most simply believe it will be real bad. Now we wait.
The Gulf of Mexico had gotten its own personal warning call in June 1979, when the Mexican drilling rig Ixtoc I blew out in about 160 feet of water. In the nine months required to stop the flow, it released 140 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf, the world’s largest accidental release up to then. It killed hundreds of millions of crabs on Mexican beaches and 80 percent of the invertebrates on Texas beaches. But other than that, its effects were poorly studied.
And since then, there’s been no new preparedness. No new techniques. No prefabricated deep-sea oil-capture technology.
What’s new is the depth of this well. A blowout this deep is new. But we shouldn’t be so surprised.
DÉJÀ VU, TO NAME BUT A FEW
March 1967. The supertanker Torrey Canyon, whose captain took a shortcut to beat the tide, strands in the Scilly Isles, spilling 35 million gallons of Kuwaiti oil. People watch in horror as oil kills about 25,000 seabirds and coats the shores of Cornwall and Brittany. There is no containment or cleanup equipment, no capacity to aid wildlife or even assess the spill. It’s the world’s first massive marine oil-pollution event.
January 28, 1969. A blowout at a drilling rig six miles off Santa Barbara, California, sends 4 million gallons of crude oil into the Santa Barbara Channel, where it fouls beaches in the Channel Islands and exclusive parts of the mainland coast. Residents and the country are horrified by the sight of thousands of dying seabirds, elephant seals, sea lions, and other wildlife. The disaster creates significant awareness of the vulnerability of nature, as well as an impetus for the major environmental legislation that followed in the 1970s. It remains the third-largest U.S. marine spill.
September 1969. A tugboat towing the oil barge Florida from Rhode Island to a power plant on the Cape Cod Canal snaps its towline. The barge runs aground on boulders, spilling 180,000 gallons at West Falmouth and killing lobsters, scallops, clams, crabs, marine worms, and fish such as tomcod and scup. Though relatively small compared to some other spills, this is among the best studied. Four decades later, oil still forms a visible layer four inches below the marsh surface. Burrowing fiddler crabs still try to avoid the oil, and react slowly to startling motions such as a predator might make.
December 15, 1976. The Argo Merchant, which has been involved in more than a dozen incidents, including a collision and two groundings, runs aground again, this time off Nantucket, Massachusetts, and sinks. Its 7.7 million gallons of spilled oil cause a slick 100 miles long, 50 miles wide. The ship’s résumé earns it a place in Stephen Pile’s 1979 Book of Heroic Failures, “written in celebration of human inadequacy in all its forms.”
March 1978. Oil again spoils the shores of Brittany, after the Amoco Cadiz loses its steering, snaps the towing cables of a rescue tug, and spills 69 million gallons of Iranian crude, which besmirches 400 miles of the French coast and destroys thousands of acres of oyster beds and thousands of fish, shellfish, and seabirds. Fish starve as their prey die, and fish populations remain depressed for two years. Where French authorities scrape oiled marshes, most never come back. Where they leave marshes alone, the ecosystems recover.
June 3, 1979. Ixtoc I, a Mexican drilling rig in about 160 feet of water, blows out and blows up, igniting an explosion and a fireball. The rig sinks. By the time two parallel relief wells plug it with 3,000 sacks of cement, it has hurled 140 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico, the world’s largest petroleum accident up until that time. Oil eventually decimates mollusks and intertidal vertebrates along the Texas coast. An American graduate student and a Mexican biologist airlift 10,000 endangered sea turtle hatchlings to an oil-free part of the Gulf.
Late 1970s. President Jimmy Carter envisions a future array of energy sources and represents this vision with solar panels on the White House roof. After Carter’s one-term presidency, Ronald Reagan has the solar panels dismantled and junked. By the end of 1985, when Reagan’s administration and Congress have allowed tax credits for solar homes to lapse, the dream of a solar era has faded. Solar water heating has gone from a billion-dollar industry to peanuts overnight; thousands of sun-minded businesses have gone bankrupt. “It died. It’s dead,” says one solar-energy businessman of the time. “First the money dried up, then the spirit dried up.”
1988. Occidental Petroleum’s North Sea production platform Piper Alpha produces about a tenth of all North Sea oil and gas. When it explodes on July 6, it kills 167 men.
March 1989. The 987-foot supertanker Exxon Valdez has just been loaded with 50 million gallons of crude oil piped across the vastness of Alaska from the North Slope to a terminal near the tiny village of Valdez, on Prince William Sound. After altering course to avoid ice, the crew fails to get the ship to respond to efforts to resume course. Bligh Reef opens the vessel’s belly, spilling at least 11 million gallons, which eventually reach beaches 400 miles—equivalent to the distance from Connecticut to North Carolina—from the grounded ship, fouling wilderness shores and killing extraordinary numbers and kinds of wildlife, from barnacles to salmon to killer whales, including roughly 2,000 sea otters and a quarter million seabirds. Hundreds of harbor seals die of disorientation and from brain lesions caused by
inhaling toxic fumes. In many ways, the Valdez spill remains the world’s most devastating and traumatic.
February 1996. The Norwegian-owned, Liberian-flagged, Russian-crewed Sea Empress grounds on the coast of Wales, spilling about 24 million gallons near densely populated seabird nesting rookeries, likely killing over 50,000 birds.
March 23, 2005. An explosion at BP’s Texas refinery kills fifteen people. Determined: “willful negligence.” BP’s $108 million in fines fail to return any of the workers to their family dinner tables but stand as the United States’ highest-ever workplace safety fines. Those record-setting fines represent less than 2 percent of BP’s $6 billion profits for the first three months of 2010.
2005. Great Britain’s Health and Safety Executive issues a warning about a Transocean-owned rig leased by BP in the North Sea, saying the rig’s remote blowout-preventer control panel had not been “maintained in an efficient state, efficient working order and in good repair.” The office also accuses Transocean of bullying and intimidating its North Sea staff.
2006. BP spills 200,000 gallons of oil in Prudhoe Bay. The North Slope’s biggest spill, it is caused by corrosion in poorly maintained equipment. BP is eventually ordered to pay $20 million in fines.
September 14, 2007. In a letter, the Fish and Wildlife Service agrees with the Minerals Management Service’s conclusion that deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico poses no significant risk to endangered species like the brown pelican and the Kemp’s ridley sea turtle. The agencies consider only spills totaling 1,000 to 15,000 barrels. And they say such spills would have less than a one-in-three risk of oiling the critical habitat for either of the endangered species.
October 2009. An environmental assessment for an area of the Gulf covering the site of the Deepwater Horizon blowout (Lease Sale 213) says, “The effect of proposed Lease Sale 213-related oil spills on fish resources and commercial fishing is expected to cause less than a 1 percent decrease in standing stocks of any population, commercial fishing efforts, landings, or value of those landings.” It concludes thus: “There would be very little impact on commercial fishing.”
November 2009. A BP pipeline ruptures in Alaska, releasing about 46,000 gallons of oily gunk onto the tundra.
January 2010. In a letter to the president of BP Exploration (Alaska), Congressmen Henry Waxman and Bart Stupak refer to “a number of personnel incidents involving serious injury or death” and question whether proposed BP budget cuts might threaten the company’s ability to maintain safe operations.
March 4, 2010. President Obama lays out a Gulf Coast plan, “to deal with the catastrophic dangers of rising sea levels, hurricanes, and erosion, and invest in restoring barrier islands and wetlands in Mississippi and Louisiana.” The White House adds, “Unless we stem the rapid rate of loss, Gulf ecosystems and the services they provide will collapse.” And the Department of the Interior adds, “Finally, a president that has said we are going to take charge of this.” This is not about concern over oil leaks. The concern: the Mississippi River Delta has been slowly falling apart for more than half a century. Causes: levees and flood controls built since the 1930s also starve marshes of the sediments and nutrients that created and maintained them; 14 major ship channels have been gouged through the wetlands to inland ports to facilitate Mississippi River commerce; and countless canals and channels have been dug by oil companies for boats, pipelines, and oil-rig servicing.
March 25, 2010. Three U.S. senators—Massachussetts Democrat John Kerry, South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham, and Connecticut switch-hitter Joe Lieberman—are trying to draft bipartisan climate-change legislation capable of getting sixty votes to overcome a filibuster. It’s the year of filibusterphobia. Graham’s main concern is that depending on foreign oil is a security threat. The environment isn’t uppermost in his mind. Considering these things, their bill includes environmental compromises so big, oil rigs could sink in them. So those three senators get a letter from ten Democrat senators. The ten warn that expanded offshore drilling could put their states at risk from oil spills, threatening fisheries, tourism, and the coast—a “national treasure that needs to be protected for generations to come.” Senator Bill Nelson of Florida says the letter means “in a nutshell: No oil rigs off protected coastal states.” Florida’s beaches are its white gold. The senators’ letter says the best way to lower oil costs is through energy efficiency and conservation.
April 4, 2010. The 700-plus-foot Chinese-owned coal carrier Shen Neng 1 slams into Australia’s Great Barrier Reef at full speed. The impact ruptures the vessel’s fuel tanks. It’s carrying 300,000 gallons of heavy fuel oil to run its engines while hauling 65,000 tons of coal.
First week of April 2010. The Government Accountability Office reports to Congress that the federal Minerals Management Service’s Alaska office hasn’t developed any guidelines for determining whether proposed developments comply with federal law. The GAO complains of “absence of a process.”
April 14–15, 2010. The Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service approves a series of permit changes that will help BP speedily conclude its over-budget drilling operation being conducted on Transocean’s Deepwater Horizon drilling platform. BP has already secured a “categorical exclusion” from environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act.
2010. Another BP platform, called Atlantis, has been operating with major apparent safety irregularities. One man who called attention to them has been laid off. He is suing BP. He says, “I’ve never seen this kind of attitude, where safety doesn’t seem to matter and when you complain of a problem and try to fix it, you’re just criticized and pushed aside.” In 2008 a manager wrote an e-mail warning of “potential catastrophic operator errors” and said that operating the rig while “hundreds if not thousands” of critical engineering drawings for its operation were never finalized is “fundamentally wrong.” The Atlantis well is capable of pumping a lot of oil, estimated at 800,000 barrels per day when fully operational. Says the man who’s been laid off, “If something happens there, it will make the Deepwater Horizon look like a bubble.”
PART TWO
A SEASON
OF ANGUISH
MAYDAY
Perhaps no pause has ever been as pregnant. Before May Day, hotel owners, fishermen, and restaurateurs—and most of the rest of the country—begin an anxious watch of satellite images and maps of how the oil is spreading, and models of how the oil could spread. The mere thought. The fear that it could all be lost. The fun, the wildlife—and the revenue they represent—ruined.
It begins looking like it could wash ashore heavily within days, coating fragile wetlands, ruining the Gulf’s famous oyster beds, and redacting the whiteness from heretofore dazzling beaches. In fact, our minds spoil those beaches before any oil reaches them. The siege mentality seizes up our thinking.
So by May Day, a certain passion play has been written: the greed of men, the sacrifice of life, utter unpreparedness compounded by inability to respond, and a blanketing dread.
“I am frightened for the country,” says the assistant chief of the National Ocean Service, David Kennedy. “This is a very, very big thing, and the efforts that are going to be required to do anything about it, especially if it continues on, are just mind-boggling.” And Florida’s Governor Charlie Crist wonders if anyone, really, could be doing enough in this situation. “It appears to me,” he said, “that this is probably much bigger than we can fathom.”
A New Orleans businessman who loves the bayou and loves his fishing tells me, “We got hit with the country’s worst natural disaster; now we’re getting hit with the worst man-made disaster. We were finally getting past the Katrina aftermath and the stigma, with the Saints winning the Super Bowl, and many businesses finding the stimulus dollars well spent.” He tells me, “We just had this great glow going. And now it’s just starting to dawn on folks what this oil might mean. It’s the rest of my lifetime, anyway.”
He says that people are “hu
gely frightened” of both the disaster itself and the media’s ability to exacerbate the situation.
“This is the worst possible thing that could happen to the Mississippi Gulf Coast,” says a man in the tourism business. “It could kill family tourism. That’s our livelihood.”
The person I’m staying with overnight in New Orleans says, “Everyone’s deeply vested in the enjoyment and all the livelihoods and businesses that have been made. This is an outdoor lover’s paradise. Everything revolves around seafood, wild food, the marshes, the coast. I mean, people are very scared that it will change a way of life. You’ve got to get outside this city, go down to those areas. You’ve got to feel that.”
And so, I do.
I am now bouncing around the southern Louisiana delta region, through the mixture of poverty and affluence (mostly poverty) and the many visible reminders of Katrina. People who’d been rebounding post-Katrina now feel truly scared that their economy and their future are ruined forever. It’s quietly horrifying.
Seeing families in small boats, local people crabbing in the canals, and the enormous pride with which people rebuilt waterside fishing retreats that Katrina had wholly swept away, I feel many connections between the people here and my own loves.
For all its self-image as the laid-back land of the Big Easy, the Gulf Coast of Louisiana is a brutal and brutalized place. The work hard, the options few, the stakes high, the damage and the scars deep.
