A Sea in Flames

by Carl Safina

  Louisiana lives by oil and by seafood. But oil rules. Fishing has nothing like the cash, the lobbyists, the destructive sophistication of the pusher to whose junk we’re all addicted. But Florida lives largely by the whiteness of its sand. It has long eschewed oil. And the difference in what politicians will and won’t say about oil is stark.

  Florida’s Governor Charlie Crist returns from a little airtime over the Gulf. His message: “It’s the last thing in the world I would want to see happen in our beautiful state.” He adds, “Until you actually see it, I don’t know how you can comprehend and appreciate the sheer magnitude of that thing. It’s frightening.… It’s everywhere. It’s absolutely unbelievable.” Where oil money rules, governors are not at liberty to disclose such impressions. They’re probably not at liberty even to think them.

  “The president is frustrated with everything, the president is frustrated with everybody, in the sense that we still have an oil leak,” says a White House spokesman.

  But we’ve only just begun.

  When Obama announced that he was opening up large new areas for offshore drilling, he said, “Oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills. They are technologically very advanced.” That’s exactly right. Leaks, spills, and blowouts are never expected. Yet we know they happen. That should make us thorough in preparedness. But the human mind lets down its guard if big danger seems rare and remote.

  And so we did. In 2009, the Interior Department exempted BP’s Gulf of Mexico drilling operations from a detailed environmental impact analysis after three reviews concluded that a massive oil spill was “unlikely.” Oil rig operators usually must submit a plan for how they’ll cope with a blowout. But in 2008, the Bush administration relaxed the rules. In 2009, the Obama administration said BP didn’t need to file a plan for how it would handle a blowout at the Deepwater Horizon. Now a BP spokesman insists, “We have a plan that has sufficient detail in it to deal with a blowout.”

  Obviously, they don’t. Obviously, they aren’t.

  “I’m of the opinion that boosterism breeds complacency and complacency breeds disaster,” says Congressman Edward Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts. “That, in my opinion, is what happened.” Bush and Cheney’s ties to big oil and their destruction of Interior oversight are infamous. But Obama’s Interior secretary’s ties to big energy also make environmentalists uneasy. As a senator from Colorado, Ken Salazar accepted some of BP’s ubiquitous campaign contributions. In

  2005, Senator Salazar voted against increasing fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks, and voted against an amendment to repeal tax breaks for ExxonMobil and other major petroleum companies. In he voted to expand Gulf of Mexico drilling. And then as Interior secretary, he pushed for more offshore drilling. The Interior secretary now says there have been well more than 30,000 wells drilled into the Gulf of Mexico, “and so this is a very, very rare event.” The oil from those offshore rigs accounts for 30 percent of the nation’s domestic oil production, he notes, adding, “And so for us to turn off those spigots would have a very, very huge impact on America’s economy right now.”

  Probability, however, tells us that the spill’s a very, very inevitable event. Especially with 30,000 wells drilled and roughly 4,000 wells currently producing oil in the region. In 2007, the federal Minerals Management Service examined 39 rig blowouts that occurred in the Gulf of Mexico between 1992 and 2006. So a blowout every four and a half months. I guess most are quickly controlled. Why aren’t we ready for one that isn’t? A car accident is a rare event, but we use our seat belts and we like to know we have air bags.

  Rather than plan for the worst, Big Petroleum has indulged in—and been indulged by—a policy of waving away risks. In a 2009 exploration plan, BP strongly discounted the possibility of a catastrophic accident. A Shell analysis for drilling off Alaska asserts that a “large liquid hydrocarbon spill [hydrocarbon meaning oil and gas] … is regarded as too remote and speculative to be considered a reasonably foreseeable impacting event.”

  Foresee this: if you think it’s difficult to clean up oil in the warm, calm Gulf of Mexico, imagine trying to do it in Arctic waters with icebergs, frozen seas, and twenty hours of darkness.

  Speaking of the cold and the dark, “Drill, baby, drill” queen Sarah Palin just has to say something about all this. So she says we shouldn’t trust “foreign” oil companies such as BP. She says, “Don’t naively trust—verify.” Verified: her husband worked for BP for eighteen years. Palin blames “extreme environmentalists” (c’mon, Sarah, is there any other kind?) for causing this blowout because they’ve lobbied hard to prevent new drilling in Alaska. If you follow what she has in place of logic, it could seem she’d rather that this had happened in her home state.

  In and out of the comedy of horrors strides BP CEO and court jester Tony Hayward. “I think I have said all along that the company will be judged not on the basis of an accident that, you know, frankly was not our accident.” That’s what he actually says. Highlighting the failed blowout preventer, Hayward says, “That is a piece of equipment owned and operated by Transocean, maintained by Transocean; they are absolutely accountable for its safety and reliability.”

  Transocean’s president and CEO says drilling projects “begin and end with the operator: in this case, BP.”

  Take that.

  He says that Transocean finished drilling three days before the explosion. And he says there’s “no reason to believe” that the blowout preventor’s mechanics failed. That’s what he actually says.

  Halliburton’s spokesman says his company followed BP’s drilling plan, federal regulations, and standard industry practices.

  In sum, BP has blamed drilling contractor Transocean, which owned the rig. Transocean says BP was responsible for the well’s design and pretty much everything else, and that oil-field services contractor Halliburton was responsible for cementing the well shut. Halliburton says its workers were just following BP’s orders, but that Transocean was responsible for maintaining the rig’s blowout preventer. And the Baby Bear said, “Somebody’s been sleeping in my bed.”

  By the end of the first week of May, a heavy smell of oil coming ashore along parts of Louisiana’s coast begins prompting dozens of complaints about headaches, burning eyes, and nausea.

  Meanwhile, I hear on the radio that in an effort to do something, “People from around the world have been giving the hair off their heads, the fur off their pets’ backs, and the tights off their legs to make booms and mats to mop up the oily mess spewing out of the seabed of the Gulf of Mexico.” Whether any of this stuff was ever actually used, I can’t say. I never saw any; that I can say.

  By May’s second week, heavy machinery, civilian and military dump trucks, Army jeeps, front-end loaders, backhoes, and National Guard helicopters are pushing up and dropping down sand to keep an impending invasion of oil from reaching the marshes in and around Grand Isle, at the tip of Louisiana. Much of the mobilization falls to the Marine Spill Response Corporation, formed in 1990 after the Exxon Valdez disaster and maintained largely by fees from the biggest oil firms. Its vice president of marine spill response says that most of its equipment, including booms and skimmers, was bought in 1990. She says, “The technology hasn’t changed that much since then.”

  “This is the largest, most comprehensive spill response mounted in the history of the United States and the oil and gas industry,” crows BP’s CEO Tony Hayward, sounding proud when he ought to be aghast and horrified by the scale of the mess and the upheaval.

  Workers farther inland are diverting fresh water from the Mississippi River into the marshlands, hoping the added flow will help push back any oily water that comes knocking. “We’re trying to save thousands of acres of marsh here, where the shrimp grow, where the fin-fish lay their eggs, where the crabs come in and out,” says the director of the Greater Lafourche Port Commission. Enough Mississippi River water to fill the Empire State Building is now rushing into southeastern Louisiana wetlands every half ho
ur. “We have opened every diversion structure we control on the state and parish level to try to limit the oil approaching our coasts,” says the assistant director of the Office of Coastal Protection and Restoration, “nearly 165,000 gallons every second.”

  “It can’t hurt,” says a wetlands ecology professor at Ohio State University and an authority on the Mississippi’s interaction with the Gulf of Mexico. Oh, but it can.

  New fear factor: hurricane season. The image: hurricanes that could “churn up towering black waves and blast beaches and crowded cities with oil-soaked gusts.” The news stories carry attributions such as “experts warned.” And precise-sounding imprecision like: “As hurricane season officially starts Tuesday …” and “Last month, forecasters who issue a closely watched Colorado State University seasonal forecast said there was a 44 percent chance a hurricane would enter the Gulf of Mexico in the next few months, far greater than the 30 percent historic average.”

  To the ambiguity and imprecision, add unnecessary intonations of worrisome complexity: “The high winds may distribute oil over a wide area,” says a National Hurricane Center meteorologist, adding, “It’s a complex problem that really needs to be looked at in great detail to try to understand what the oceanic response is when you have an oil layer at the sea surface.”

  To most normal people faced with the real event of an out-of-control mess, especially people who’ve survived hurricanes, that kind of noninformation stokes anxiety, provokes fear—and gives no one a clear clue about what to do. Does one make decisions based on the difference between 30 and 44 percent? News you can use, it isn’t. It’s news that can help ruin your health.

  Insult to injury: “Safety first,” says a BP spokesman. “We build in hurricane preparedness, and that requires us to take the necessary precautions.”

  By mid-May, something like 10,000 people are Being Paid for cleanup efforts around the Gulf. BP has little choice. Anything less, there’d be riots. Most are fishermen riding around looking for oil, dragging booms that don’t collect much oil, or putting out booms that can work only on oil that hasn’t been dissolved by dispersants. About a million and a half feet—roughly 300 miles—of boom is already out along the coast. Other people are out picking oil off beaches with shovels.

  How much oil are we dealing with? This gets good: Purdue professor Steve Wereley performs computer analyses on the video of the leaking oil to see how far and how fast particles are moving (a technique called particle image velocimetry). His conclusion: the well is leaking between 56,000 and 84,000 barrels daily. His other conclusion: “It’s definitely not 5,000 barrels a day.”

  Just a few days ago, during congressional testimony, officials from BP, Transocean, and Halliburton estimated a “worst-case” scenario maximum flow of 60,000 barrels a day. Yet a BP spokesman says the company stands by its estimate of 5,000 barrels per day. There’s “no way to calculate a definite amount,” he says, adding coyly, “We are focused on stopping the leak and not measuring it.”

  That’s Bull Poop. As the director of the Texas A&M University’s geochemical and environmental research group points out: “If you don’t know the flow, it is awfully hard to design the thing that is going to work.”

  Killing the well is proving difficult. Killing public confidence is easier. The fact that the real flow will turn out to be sixty times what BP was first saying, and twelve times the Coast Guard’s most oft-repeated estimate, does the trick handily.

  LATE MAY

  Another discovery, another debate, more resistance from BP about disclosing how much oil is leaking. Scientists from the University of Georgia, Louisiana University, and elsewhere, aboard the research vessel Pelican, report finding—well, let them tell you: “There’s a shocking amount of oil in the deep water, relative to what you see in the surface water,” says Samantha Joye, a researcher at the University of Georgia. “There’s a tremendous amount of oil in multiple layers, three or four or five layers deep in the water column.” “Tremendous” meaning plumes as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide, and up to 300 feet thick. She reports methane concentrations up to 10,000 times higher than normal.

  Dr. Joye says oxygen near some of the plumes has already dropped 30 percent because of oxygen-using microbes feeding on the hydrocarbons. In an e-mail, Joye calls her findings “the most bizarre-looking oxygen profiles I have ever seen anywhere.” She notes, “If you keep those kinds of rates up, you could draw the oxygen down to very low levels that are dangerous to animals.” Some parts of the plume had oxygen concentrations just above levels that make areas uninhabitable to fish, crabs, shrimp, and other marine creatures. “That is alarming,” she says, adding that some of the Gulf’s deepwater corals live directly below parts of the oil slick, “and they need oxygen.”

  But what are “plumes”? We don’t quite get from the scientists an indication of how dense they are. Are we talking murky clouds? Tiny amounts detectable only with instruments? Enough to kill plankton? Small fish? Even a 10-by-3-mile plume is only a fraction of the Gulf. Are there other, more widespread plumes?

  Plume definition: something flowing within a different medium.

  The farther from the source of the blowout, the less concentrated the oil and gas hydrocarbons in the plume. Currents determine where plumes go. Dispersants also break up oil. If oil gets broken into very small droplets, say 1 micron in size, it no longer floats but dissolves into the seawater. “Clean” seawater contains oil concentrations less than 1 part per billion; in every billion drops of seawater there’s less than one dissolved drop of oil. A polluted place, like a city harbor, may have between 100 and 800 drops of oil for every billion drops of seawater. You can also think of it as, say, 100 to 800 gallons of oil in every billion gallons of seawater. A billion gallons occupies about 5,000 cubic yards, or a space 100 yards long, 50 yards wide, and 1 yard deep. Two hundred gallons of oil would take up one cubic yard.

  A bit of comparison. The Ixtoc blowout discharged a maximum of about 30,000 barrels per day. The present blowout is leaking perhaps twice that amount, so at any given distance from the blowout, our concentrations should be higher. Within a few hundred yards of the Ixtoc blowout, oil was 10,000 parts per billion. About 50 miles away, it was 5 parts per billion. Because the concentration gets lower and lower as oil travels away from the blowout, nobody knows much about how toxic the plumes of oil are.

  They used to say “dilution is the solution to pollution,” and sometimes that’s right. If you think of a pollutant as anything that overwhelms the environment’s ability to harmlessly absorb it, dilution can work. (Animals’ bodies, though, often reconcentrate pollutants, much to their harm, so dilution isn’t always the solution.)

  BP’s chief operating officer continues insisting that there exist no underwater oil plumes in “large concentrations.” He says that this may depend on “how you define what a plume is here.”

  The way University of Georgia researcher Dr. Samantha Joye defines a plume, one large concentration of hydrocarbons from the blowout stretches at least 15 miles west of the gushing oil well, 3,600 feet beneath the sea surface, 3 miles wide, and up to 1,500 feet thick. The way University of South Florida researchers define a plume, there’s an even larger plume stretching more than 20 miles northeast of the oil well, with the hydrocarbons separated into one layer 1,200 feet below the surface and another 3,000 feet deep.

  “The oil is on the surface,” says BP’s somnambulant CEO Tony Hayward. “There aren’t any plumes.” That’s certainly interesting, coming from someone whose company is blasting dispersants into the oil right at the seafloor as it emerges from the broken pipe, to keep the oil below the surface, and sending planes to carpet-bomb the slicks with more dispersant to sink the oil that has risen.

  So how do you define plumes? In some places there’s enough oil to discolor the water. But in most places, water samples come up clear. Yet the dissolved hydrocarbons show up vividly on instruments, and in some samples you can smell them. That’s plumes.

 
Plumes are more evidence that there’s more oil leaking than we’re seeing. Because the Purdue University estimate and these reports of massive plumes seem so at odds with BP’s continual 5,000-barrel-a-day drumroll, scientists want to send sophisticated instruments to the ocean floor to get a far more accurate picture of how much oil is really gushing from the well.

  “The answer is no to that,” a BP spokesman says. “We’re not going to take any extra efforts now to calculate flow there.”

  That’s just outrageous. Now I’m really angry. How does BP get to decide who can have access to the seafloor? The corporation has a permit to drill, and a responsibility to clean up its mess. Why does the government keep deferring to it? Why is it allowed to dictate what does and doesn’t happen on public property? Why do our public agencies keep allowing it do whatever it wants?

  There’s at least one quite likely explanation for the discrepancy between what the Purdue scientist measured from the video of the leaking pipe and what BP is saying about what’s on the surface.

  And here it is: “It appears that the application of the subsea dispersant is actually working,” says BP’s chief operating officer. “The oil in the immediate vicinity of the well and the ships and rigs working in the area is diminished from previous observations.”

  And, considering that all the oil we can’t see is polluting the Gulf, we can reasonably ask, In what way is that “working” for BP?

  “The amount of oil being spilled will help determine BP’s liability,” confirms retiring U.S. Coast Guard admiral Thad Allen. But despite “overseeing the operation” on our behalf, Allen seems to be doing nothing—incredibly enough—to ensure that we actually send down some instruments designed to get the best possible estimate of how much oil.