A Sea in Flames

by Carl Safina

  I am not impressed with the Coast Guard so far. Admiral Thad Allen becomes to me a one-dimensional government talking head: the Thadmiral. Does he deserve to be a caricature? Of course not; does anyone? But in my anger, that’s what happens.

  Under the Clean Water Act, penalties are based on the number of barrels deemed spilled. Those penalties range from $1,100 to $4,300 a barrel, depending on the extent of the company’s negligence. At, say, 5 million barrels, and if BP were found willfully negligent, it could face a fine of over $20 billion. So, yes, the dispersant is “working.” Get it?

  Dispersants begin accumulating well-deserved criticism. When broken up by dispersants, “The oil’s not at the surface, so it doesn’t look so bad,” says Louisiana State University veterinary medicine professor Kevin Kleinow, “but you have a situation where it’s more available to fish.” By breaking oil into small particles, dispersants make it easier for fish and other sea life to soak up the oil’s toxic chemicals. That can impair animals’ immune systems, gills, and reproductive systems.

  Marine toxicologist Dr. Susan Shaw says the dispersant “is increasing the hydrocarbon in the water.” Dr. Samantha Joye says, “There’s just as good a chance that this dispersant is killing off a critical portion of the microbial community as that it’s stimulating the breakdown of oil.” Louisiana State University environmental chemist Ed Overton is of the opinion that “we’ve gone past any normal use of dispersants.” LSU’s Robert Twilley wryly observes, “There are certain things with dispersants that are of benefit, and there are negatives, and we’re having problems evaluating those trade-offs.”

  News flash! A new study shows that dispersant is no more toxic to aquatic life than oil alone. Okay, thanks, but that’s not the question. The question is this: Is the mix more toxic to marine life than either alone? Part of the answer to that is: Yes, the mix is more toxic than dispersant alone, at least in lab tests. On the other hand, will dispersant, as its proponents insist, help speed the oil’s degradation into harmlessness? Maybe; but will it also speed oil-caused mortality first? The problem is, no one really knows what will happen out in the complex Gulf. Everyone’s guessing, and at best there are, indeed, trade-offs.

  “This is what we call the Junk,” Captain Keith Kennedy says derisively as he steers us from Venice, Louisiana, through the Industrial Canal. It’s hard to imagine a more awful waterfront, and the whole place smells like petroleum. That’s one reason a good chunk of southern Louisiana is called Cancer Alley.

  The angled light, yellow through the heavy haze of moist air, joins the sounds of gulls and engines to make a Gulf morning. Once upon a time there was a wild coast here. Must have been magnificent.

  Until a couple of weeks ago, Kennedy fished for redfish, “specs”—sea trout—and tarpon.

  “When I first heard about the blowout, I didn’t really think much about it. These things do happen. I figured they’d have it under control pretty quick. Their big metal thing didn’t seem to work. I have to believe they’re doing the best they can.”

  There is no single Mississippi River mouth. The mighty, muddy Mississippi speaks in tongues; her song is a chorale, her delta is a polyglot of channels. We’re gonna run down via the channel called the Grand Pass, and from there through the Coast Guard Cut to East Bay, directly confronting the open Gulf of Mexico.

  We pass a swimming alligator. A river otter pops its head up briefly. A peregrine falcon comes high over the distant marsh, assessing the shorebirds for any weakness.

  If oil comes into any of these channels, there is no way people can clean it from the intricate intimacy of these marshes.

  One area with many resting birds is boomed. But birds fly. We’re seeing pelicans, gulls, and terns diving. There’s a slick near the diving birds. It could be natural. I don’t see or smell any oil. There’s no rainbow sheen or scent. It’s very thin on the water, and at first Kennedy and I both think it’s a slick from a school of fish below.

  But then he spots some floating flecks that don’t look familiar. Using a bait net, Captain Kennedy collects one, then a larger blob. The stuff’s a bit gooey, the consistency of peanut butter but stickier. It smells like petroleum. It doesn’t dissolve in water. It’s hard to get off our hands. This is our first actual contact with the actual crude oil. It’s nasty stuff. Let’s hope we don’t explode.

  We pass a shack called Paradise, and another called Happy Ending. By now everything seems laden with portent; every sight and sign seems ominously like some metaphor of the all too real.

  A rather gratifying amount of public and media interest arises over the fate of the magnificent bluefin tuna, which grows to over half a ton and whose numbers have been demolished by overfishing. Swimming at highway speeds, they tunnel throughout the whole Atlantic, but when spawning on our side of the ocean they migrate into the Gulf of Mexico. And this is spawning season. And though they can live for decades and grow to fifteen hundred pounds, they start out by hatching from millions of minute eggs to begin life as tiny drifting larvae. At the Gulf Coast Research Laboratory, a biologist opines, “This places the young larvae, I think, in a precarious position in respect to the location and magnitude of the spill.” A tuna plankton expert here adds, “Large numbers of bluefin tuna larvae on the western edge of the Loop Current might be impacted by the oil spill as they move northward through the loop.” Finding and counting fish larvae is painstaking work. They’ll have to compare this year’s numbers to prior and subsequent years. It’ll take a while to learn more.

  Understanding accrues slowly. Reactions happen at a different tempo. In the third week of May, the government suddenly closes 46,000 square miles to fishing, or about 19 percent of the Gulf of Mexico’s federal waters.

  The Louisiana Seafood Promotion and Marketing Board whistles in the dark that seafood from the areas not closed is still both available and safe; and more than half the state’s oyster areas remain open. But as a local seafood market owner says, “Perception is everything.”

  And here’s a different perception of the whole situation. The delta’s Native Americans include the Pointe-au-Chien tribe. A century ago, Natives like them, isolated, illiterate, non-English-speaking, unable to get to New Orleans, missed the opportunity to claim land and territory after the Louisiana Purchase, in 1803—even though it had for millennia all been theirs. Much of southern Louisiana was claimed by the federal government, which auctioned a lot of it to land companies in the 1800s. Later, oil companies bought much of southern Louisiana. They swindled the Natives out of any crumbs they’d gotten.

  Native Americans have in the past accused land grabbers and oil companies of seizing waterlands that rightfully belonged to them. They sued to regain vast tracts now owned by big landholding and energy companies. Needless to say, they lost.

  “If you see pictures from the sky, how many haphazard cuts were made in the land, it blows your mind,” says Patty Ferguson of the Pointe-au-Chien tribe. “We weren’t just fishermen. We raised crops, we had wells. We can’t anymore because of the saltwater intrusion.” Sixty-year-old tribal elder Sydney Verdin feels a tingle of vengeful satisfaction. “I’m happy for the oil spill. Now the oil companies are paying for it the same way we’ve had to pay for it,” says Verdin. “I can’t think of one Indian who ever made any money from oil.”

  May 16. Out of the galaxy of goofy ideas, one that seems positively prosaic: they’ll stick a tube into the leaking pipe. Why didn’t any of us think of that? (Actually, of course, we did.) But their leaky tube is half-assed and it less-than-half works.

  Incessant national airing of live video shows a lot of oil streaming past the mile-long tube sucking some of the oil from the ruptured pipe up to a waiting ship. BP is in an interesting bind. They say they’re collecting 5,000 barrels a day through the tube. But for weeks they’ve been saying the well is leaking 5,000 barrels a day. Yet we can all see clearly on TV that most of the gushing oil isn’t going into the tube. Busted!

  A BP spokesman washes clean, sort of
, fessing, “Now that we are collecting 5,000 barrels a day” through the tube, “it [the amount coming out of the pipe] might be a little more than that.”

  A little more? It’s twelve times more.

  Spin cycle: “From the beginning,” intones the BP spokesman, “our experts have been saying there really is no reliable way to estimate the flow from the riser, so we have been implementing essentially a response plan.” Anyone Buying Propaganda?

  It gets better. Two days later, BP decides to announce that it is not collecting 5,000 barrels through the tube. “We never said it produced 5,000 barrels a day,” says BP’s chief operating officer. “I am sorry if you heard it that way.” Oh, it’s our mistake; we all heard it wrong. He says the tube is scarfing more like 2,000 barrels a day.

  Lying? I don’t know. But, well, actually, yes, since they did say, “we are collecting 5,000 barrels a day.”

  It would make BP look better if its spin doctors can convince us they’re collecting less than 5,000 daily, whether it’s true or not. Trouble is, we can’t tell. Question is: Can we trust BP?

  “We cannot trust BP,” says Congressman Edward Markey. “It’s clear they have been hiding the actual consequences of this spill.” Purdue Professor Wereley, who’d estimated that the flow is more like 56,000 and 84,000 barrels daily, says, “I don’t see any possibility, any scenario under which their number is accurate.”

  Ian MacDonald of Florida State University, an oceanographer who was among the first to question the official estimate, concludes that BP is obstructing an accurate calculation. “They want to hide the body,” he says. Notes Congressman Henry Waxman, who chairs the House Committee on Energy and Commerce: “It’s an absurd position that BP has taken, that it’s not important for them to know how much oil is gushing out.”

  During the third week of May, Tony Hayward says, “Everything we can see at the moment suggests that the overall environment impacts of this will be very, very modest.”

  When CNN’s Candy Crowley asks Thad Allen for his response, the admiral responds, “Obviously they are not modest here in Louisiana. We don’t want to perpetuate any kind of notion at all that this is anything less than potentially catastrophic for this country.”

  Crowley responds with what most of us are thinking: “Well, this is why people don’t really trust BP, because here is the CEO of the company out there saying, ‘We think the environment impact will be very modest.’ ”

  Allen adds, “We’re accountable. And we should be held accountable for this. We are taking this very, very seriously.”

  Thank you, Thadmiral. It’s about time we got a government message in a plain-paper wrapper, and that we got to hear you come right out and say that.

  In brown and orange globs, in sheets thick as latex paint, oil begins coating the reedy edges of Louisiana’s wetlands. As crude oozes in the entrances, hope flees out the back door.

  The worst fears of environmental disaster are, it seems, being realized. “Twenty-four miles of Plaquemines Parish is destroyed,” rages a despairing Billy Nungesser, head of the parish. “Everything in it is dead. There is no life in that marsh. It’s destroying our marsh, inch by inch.” And because this is not a spill but an ongoing eruption, his prognosis: more of the same, coming ashore for weeks and months. Louisiana’s governor says, “This is not sheen, this is heavy oil.” He also fears that “this is just the beginning.” He wields the statistics at stake: 60,000 jobs in Louisiana’s $3 billion fishing industry; that Louisiana produces 70 percent of the Gulf’s seafood, nearly one-third of the continental United States’ seafood. In addition, throughout the Gulf of Mexico region in a typical year, commercial fishermen usually catch more than 1 billion pounds of fish and shellfish, and nearly 6 million recreational fishermen make 25 million fishing trips. (One cannot help wondering whether the sea creatures would rather face our oil or our nets and hooks.)

  The EPA tells BP: you have a twenty-four-hour deadline to choose a less toxic chemical dispersant. Dispersants have gotten our attention, but plenty of other chemicals—many of them similar—drain from America’s Heartland to America’s Wetland and beyond. Soaps, dishwashing liquids, and industrial solvents are all oil dispersants. Down the drain they go. Household cleaners, ingredients used to make plastics, and pesticides. Medical residue that goes from body to potty to Gulf. Livestock waste and traces of the drugs they’ve been given. Enough estrogen from birth control pills to bend genders and mess the sex of fish. Caffeine. Herbicides toxic to aquatic animals, by the thousands of tons. And good old (actually new, synthetic) fertilizers that cause algae populations to skyrocket, leading to an explosion of the bacteria that decompose them, which depletes the deeper water’s oxygen, killing everything. That’s the “dead zone” that happens every year in the Gulf (and now in hundreds of other coastal places around the world and is coming soon to a river mouth near you). The Gulf dead zone holds the distinction of first and worst, and this year it’s set to break a record: it’s about 8,000 square miles, the size of New Jersey. Or Massachusetts. (Some of us remember when it was a cute little dead zone no bigger than Delaware.) There’s actually a federal goal of shrinking it to less than 1,900 square miles by 2015. Agencies planned to accomplish that by getting midwestern farmers to put less fertilizer into the river system. But good luck. “It’s getting bigger over the years, and it’s extending more into Texas,” says Nancy Rabalais, director of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium. So one more thing is killing the Gulf, and it’s a big one: agriculture. Modern, industrialized, artificialized, corporatized, heavily lobbied agriculture. When the oil is gone, the water of the mighty Mississippi will remain all too fertile for the Gulf’s good.

  For vigilance, we the people pay taxes that support our government’s defense of our interests. Among the vigilant defenders is that government agency called the Minerals Management Service, a branch of the Interior Department. Its mission, if it decides to accept it: make sure extraction of oil and other nonliving resources is done well, done safely, and done to certain specified standards. And yet in at least one region—though there’s no evidence that this was an issue in the Gulf—the MMS got a little too informal when it mattered. In 2008, it came to light that eight MMS employees had accepted lavish gifts and had partied with—and in some cases had sex with—employees from the energy companies they regulated. A formal investigation found the agency’s Denver office rife with “a culture of substance abuse and promiscuity.” The report further noted, “Sexual relationships with prohibited sources cannot, by definition, be arms-length.”

  On May 19, Interior Secretary Salazar announces that he’s dividing the disgraced Minerals Management Service into three units. One might say he’s dispersing the agency. The agency had been created by Ronald Reagan’s infamous Interior secretary James Watt. That explains some things. The current agency’s three missions—energy development, enforcement, and revenue collection—“are conflicting missions and must be separated,” Salazar says. Applause. No more sex, drugs, and rock-and-oil. In a few days the agency’s chief will quit under pressure.

  The agency has been collecting royalties from the companies it regulates. That lowers the incentive for strict safety oversight. The new idea: there’ll be a Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (this one will inspect oil rigs and enforce regulations), a Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (this one will oversee offshore drilling leasing and development), and an Office of Natural Resources Revenue (to collect the billions of dollars in royalties from mining and drilling companies extracting resources from American territory).

  In Grand Isle and Barataria Bay, Louisiana, hideously oiled gulls and pelicans struggle to keep the life they’ll lose. Parent birds have brought to their eggs coatings of oil, blocking oxygen from entering the shell. Chicks that manage to hatch will know only a short life on the gummy surface of a petroleum-coated planet. Behind the lines of useless boom, oil coats the marsh cane.

  “It took hundreds of y
ears to create this,” one fisherman says, low-balling the time required by about six thousand years. “And it’s gone just like that.”

  Meanwhile, President Obama announces that automakers must meet a minimum fuel-efficiency standard of 35.5 miles a gallon by 2016. Savings over the five-year phase-in: 1.8 billion barrels of oil. That means saving a million barrels of oil daily, about seventeen times faster than it’s leaking from the blowout.

  Gulf breezes smell of oil. Marshes smell of oil. And “All systems are go” for the seventy-fifth annual Louisiana Shrimp and Petroleum Festival. Says the festival’s director, “We will honor the two industries as we always do.”

  On May 24 in Port Fourchon, Louisiana, seven Greenpeace members board the ship Harvey Explorer that’s heading north in July to support drilling operations in the Arctic. In oil from the blowout, they write, “Is the Arctic Next?” on the hull. They’re all charged with felonies.

  No one from BP, Transocean, or anyone else has been charged with anything. That’s our government Bullying People. (It’ll take about three months for the squeaky wheels of justice to dismiss the charges.)

  A house divided: Coast Guard admiral Thad Allen says on May 23 that BP’s access to the mile-deep well means the government could not take the lead to stop the leak. Yet a few hours later outside BP’s Houston headquarters, a tough-talking Interior secretary Salazar (who early in the crisis vowed to “keep the boot on the neck” of BP) says, “If we find they’re not doing what they’re supposed to be doing, we’ll push them out of the way.” This prompts the Thadmiral to wonder out loud to reporters, “To push BP out of the way would raise the question of, ‘replace them with what?’ ” He adds, “They have the eyes and ears that are down there.”

  Okay, at least now he’s pretty much acknowledged who’s really in charge. Fact is, the government, as the Christian Science Monitor puts it, is “incapable of taking over from BP at the wellhead and unwilling to displace the web of contractors leading the cleanup at BP’s behest.”