by Carl Safina
I’m not saying it’s utter catastrophe for all of them. I’m not saying they won’t bounce back. I’m saying, Let’s not fool each other. Let’s attend to the matters to which the researchers are calling our attention. Let’s not be in denial of science, logic, and sense. That’s indecent.
BP’s CEO, Tony Hayward, insists there’s “no evidence” of hydrocarbon plumes in the Gulf. There are wiggly pigs, and then there are liars.
For an alternate take, we turn to Florida State University oceanographer Ian MacDonald: “These are huge volumes of oil, in many cubic kilometers of water.”
The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration acknowledges that it has “confirmed the presence of very low concentrations of sub-surface oil at depths from 50 meters to 1,400 meters.” In other words, from shallow waters down to around 4,000 feet. But they say it’s in “very low concentrations,” less than 0.5 parts per million. The thing is, a concentration of hydrocarbons in the range of less than 0.5 parts per million—say 0.4—is in the range of a notably polluted place like Boston Harbor. So one person could say, “It’s not going to kill everything,” and another could say, “The oil is polluting an enormous volume of water in the Gulf of Mexico.” They’d both be right.
From the federal government, we get both a little more minimizing—“We have always known there is oil under the surface”—and this honest admission of ignorance: “The questions we are exploring are where is it, in what concentrations, where is it going, and what are the consequences for the health of the marine environment?” So asks NOAA administrator Dr. Jane Lubchenco.
Those are the questions. If the oil stays suspended it will eventually dissipate throughout the world ocean in rather harmless concentrations—the dose makes the poison—or be dismembered by microbes. Another possibility is that the dispersed oil might sink to the seafloor. A fisherman I know on the West Coast e-mails me: “During the 1969 Santa Barbara blowout dispersants were used extensively. Several years later, some of the oil that had settled to the bottom eventually formed large clumps. In the early/mid 1970s I was working on drag boats in the SB Channel and we would periodically hit one of the clumps, which would render the net completely worthless. No way to clean that shit off the net. Union Oil wound up paying for a lot of nets, although not willingly. No one knows the effects on bottom life, although the English sole disappeared for years.”
At a press conference, Lubchenco, sounding like a bomb-sniffing canine working in a political minefield, says, “The bottom line is that yes, there is oil in the water column. It’s at very low concentrations.” That sounds like she’s minimizing it. But in her next breath she adds, “That doesn’t mean that it does not have significant impact.”
Taken together, a true enough picture. Depends on your definition of “significant,” but I’m satisfied. Even if she didn’t hit a home run, she touched the three bases of truth in this mess: it’s there; it’s at low concentrations except near the source; and it could still be a problem. I think that’s really as much as anyone knows. This isn’t a home-run situation.
Dauphin Island, Alabama. A pretty place. A mixture of fishing village and resort. A beach place with pines tall enough to cast shade across the road, a place that welcomes you with a sign proclaiming, “Fishing, Beaches, Bird Sanctuary.” The Oil welcomes you with a sign saying, “BP Claims Center.”
It’s June 8; today is World Oceans Day. I’m having a bit of a hard time, emotionally speaking, with that.
Away from the pines and alongside the sea oats, by 10:00 A.M. the sun is uncomfortably hot, its glare unrelenting, resolute.
I’m with filmmaker Bill Mills, a real pro who’s done a lot of work with National Geographic films and many others. He wants to interview a few people, and he’s toting his movie camera as we walk from the parking lot toward the water. Someone in the shade of one of BP’s little sun awnings starts yelling at us. Bill doesn’t even turn around. I glance over my shoulder. An arm-waving man, too lazy to come our way, demanding we come his way. Public beach, so screw him.
A light, ribbony slick gift-wraps the shoreline like a Big Present. A few hundred people are still putting a brave face on beachgoing. Determined to have their beach day. In their swimsuits. On their blankets. The sun still works for them. Admirable fortitude.
Not surprised to see oil globs splattering the beach. Surprised to see some kids in the water.
Didn’t see the sign that said no swimming? It’s easy to miss: tiny, smaller than a stop sign. “The Public Is Advised Not to Swim in These Waters Due to the Presence of Oil-Related Chemicals.”
Just a small cover-your-ass sign in a community reluctant to admit that it’s ruined. Ruined at least for now. It could be much worse. Just go to Louisiana’s beaches. But what’s arrived here now is quite enough to spoil things.
A mom: “We come here a lot. It’s killin’ me to see this.”
BP workers in white suits rummage among the beachgoers like foraging chickens pecking at oil. Near the tide line they shovel oil blobs and oil-stained sand into plastic bags.
An old man says he was a newscaster for forty years, that’s enough of being on camera, so no photos, please. Now he casts a fishing line. “Other day I went fishing over there, where I’ve fished for thirty-five years. The place was full of tar balls and the fish I caught smelled like gasoline. I just had to leave!”
Tar balls I believe; there’s plenty. A fish that smells like gasoline? I’d have to smell that myself. Healthy skepticism is how I like to think of it. It means that, at least sometimes, I’m seeing through my anger.
Ashore, a wet boy, nineish, looks bewildered. Won’t go back in. “You feel it all over your skin,” he says. Another family’s kids are body-boarding, looking perfectly content.
Other creatures continue to work their world, their side of things. Least terns diving along the shore. The small fish. A school of mullet nose the surface. A small ray swims past: another hazard to swimmers. It’s a very alive place. That’s the point. The people and the others that live here. Everything that lives here.
A man emerges. I ask him if he can feel and taste oil. He says, “Oh, I can feel it on me. But as far as tastin’ it or anything, no, nothin’ like that.”
Mike, thirty-nine, wears American flag swim trunks. He stands with his well-tattooed arms folded. Feet oil-stained. “We come with the family on weekends. I’m worried this is the last time. Forget this oil; go solar power.”
You can clean a beach, but every wave brings a little more. The oil is still gushing, and there’s plenty more to come. Every day, oily sand goes out in bags. Bags and bags. Bag People.
The BP workers wander near. I ask what kind of work they would be doing if not for the Oil. “I have no comment,” they regurgitate.
“They tell you not to talk to anyone?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
The Oil is a big secret. Okay, I wouldn’t want my employees talking to anyone while on the job, either. But there’s a motive here: minimize the scope of information and opinion. Aren’t we really quite past the point where that can help even BP? What might these people say that we don’t already know? That the genie’s blown his cork, Pandora’s opened the coop, and the cats are out of their bags all over the region? Basic Privacy is no longer this company’s prerogative, and the pettiness does less to hide the facts than it does to expose the corporation’s desire to hide facts.
In a cloudless sky, a Coast Guard helicopter passes.
Outside one of the local churches, I meet Reverend Chris Schansberg. He’s forty-three, soft-spoken. “The first Sunday after the explosion,” he says, “I told our people, ‘Let’s get together and pray that the oil won’t hit the island.’ I don’t know why we focused on our island, but we did. And I was talking to the mayor later, and he didn’t know we’d prayed, and he said, ‘Y’know, it’s really remarkable that oil hasn’t hit the island.’ I know it hit the far west end. But on the oil-flow charts on the evening news, people were say
ing, ‘Now, look at Dauphin Island; there’s a seven-mile buffer between it and the oil.’ And apparently—to the glory of God—oil’s been flowing around us. Now, that’s a great victory. But of course, you have to answer, Well, why is it on the shores from Louisiana to Pensacola? That’s a deeper question.” Brief pause. “The oil cleanup workers come from everywhere, from Washington to New York State, Puerto Rico. I’ve seen loneliness, isolation, boredom—. Many of them have never seen heat like this. We have seen this as an opportunity to reach out toward them, sharing God’s love, giving out frozen Popsicles—.
“Someday, if not now, the people who’ve done this will be judged. I’m not saying it’s unforgivable. But they are accountable to God. If they tried to cut corners, if they failed in their stewardship, they will be accountable on the Day of Judgment. The Bible promises that when Jesus returns he will make all things right. And it really means everything. So if we still have oil in the Gulf when he returns—that’s it.”
Fifty House Democrats begin calling for BP to suspend its planned dividend payout, stop its advertising campaign, and instead spend the money on cleaning up the ongoing Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Congressional Representative Lois Capps says, “Not a single cent” should be spent on television ads. If BP is so concerned about its public image, “it should plug the hole.” Yes, but—. Suspending a dividend payment would save BP something like $10 billion. The loss of prestige and stock value is a strong deterrent for not paying a dividend. But for BP, the silver lining would be pretty convenient cost savings. And it could simultaneously deflect its shareholders’ anger over plummeting stock value by blaming the mean old U.S. congressional Democrats.
The depth of 2009’s global recession sent global energy consumption down for the first time in twenty-seven years, but only by 1 percent. In the same year, China’s carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels rose by 9 percent. Global wind and solar generation rose by about 30 percent and 45 percent, respectively, enormous gains. Who says? A BP energy report says. The world’s oil reserves (including yet-to-be-developed Canadian “tar sands”) appear sufficient to last—at 2009 production rates—for forty-five years; gas will last about sixty-five years, and coal will last 120 years. After that, what? Do you or does someone you love plan to be alive forty-five years from now? This is our wake-up call. Don’t touch that snooze button.
By mid-June the cap is ferrying about 10,000 barrels of oil a day up to a tanker on the surface. The well is leaking much more than that.
Revisiting the basic question: How much oil? A team of researchers and government officials is finally studying the flow rate. Team member and Purdue University professor Steve Wereley says it’s probably somewhere between 798,000 and 1.8 million gallons—roughly 20,000 to 40,000 barrels—daily. He says, “BP is claiming they’re capturing the majority of the flow, which I think is going to be proven wrong in short order.”
Meanwhile, at the start of the second week of June, the tide begins leaving a splattering of oil blobs on Florida Panhandle beaches, from Perdido to Pensacola. Signs warn: Don’t swim. Don’t wade. Avoid skin contact with oily water. Avoid dead sea animals. Notes one: “Young children, pregnant women, people with compromised immune systems and individuals with underlying respiratory conditions should avoid the area.”
Some people are in the water anyway. I wouldn’t want to get in where I can see a sheen, but it’s probably not very toxic in small amounts for short intervals.
Tourism, though, has been completely poisoned. In Mississippi, Governor Haley Barbour angrily blames the news media for scaring away tourists and making it seem as if “the whole coast from Florida to Texas is ankle-deep in oil.”
The fact is, he’s right; it isn’t the same everywhere. As Thad Allen intones, “We’re dealing with an aggregation of hundreds of thousands of patches of oil that are going a lot of different directions. It’s the breadth and complexity of the disaggregation of the oil that is now posing the greatest clean-up challenge.” And so, some places are ankle-deep and some, barely freckled.
Pensacola Beach, Santa Rosa Island, Florida. The sand here makes the “white” sand back home on Long Island seem battleship gray. In bright sun it can be blinding. Workers have picked up the day’s dark tar balls. Mostly.
High-rise hotels and condos loom over the low-slung beach. They shimmer in the sunset. A huge restaurant with a huge fake crab is overbuilt and tacky. The whole place is not my cup of tea. But it’s not my home.
Listen to people whose home it is: “So, this is Santa Rosa Sound,” she says, as if presenting it as a gift. “Really precious.” Then, almost under her breath: “I don’t know, it may be twenty years before it ever looks like this again. The oil’s just a few miles offshore. Oh look—a dolphin.” A moment’s silence, then: “There’s no plan to help the dolphins.”
The evening breeze is still warm enough to raise a sweat. The clouds paint with pastels. A guy with a floppy hat, a waddling walk, arrives, sighs, “I’d like to take one last look at my heaven.”
BP’s full-page ad promises to invalidate their fears. “We Will Make This Right,” it announces, projecting confidence. But just below the horizon, flying under the radar, on everyone’s minds, on their nerves: oil blobs stalk.
At public faucets, moms rinse sand from kids’ toes. News vans, their satellite dishes turned to heaven as if in prayer, stand like military hardware on the eve of invasion. Ready to report attack. We breathe the parked vans’ continuous exhaust, their engines running their air conditioners and electronics.
A Big Protest is scheduled for here, now, this moment. But so sparse are the protesters—fewer than twenty, among several hundred beachgoers—that even the organizers cannot locate them.
Finally, the protesters. There they are. Here they come. They have signs—“Save the Dolphins”—and a little theater; a woman wears a black veil of mourning. They group up and knock on a media van. There’re enough of them to fill a frame. Passable for local news. Dutifully reported. Story filed: “Local People Do Not Like Oil on Beaches.” Basically Pointless.
One police car stands idling, its occupant utterly relaxed, a bit bored. The woman beneath the veil says, “We already got the police here—and I ain’t even showed my ass yet.”
Oh boy. Time to go.
Restaurant. “The oysters are from—?”
“Texas,” says the waiter. “We might have a month left there.”
Realtor, late forties, energetic blonde, clear blue eyes, too much Sunshine State sun, a tough cookie: “People come for the beaches. If they can’t put their feet in sand, they won’t come.” She’s already refunded 75 percent of this season’s rental down payments. Her home sales are in cardiac arrest.
Activist folksinger to me: “Do you think we can save the dolphins?”
“If it gets down to them needing to be saved? No.”
“There should have been a plan.” She wipes her face, gazes out toward the dock. “It’s weird to fight as you’re grieving the loss of your own place. With global warming, you feel some distance. But this. When the rig sank on Earth Day, I cried myself to sleep. We take turns picking each other up.”
Others chime in. “If the wind tonight was off the Gulf like last night, we couldn’t sit here. The smell was thick. We’ve all been exposed.”
“People are sick. More people are gonna get sick. I took two reporters out and they both got sick. One was in the hospital. Karen right there’s got chemical burns from picking up four dead turtles.”
“This is war. This is all-out war. This is a story that has to be told. And a powerful, very powerful group does not want this story told. I’m just me. I’ve been helping where I can. But my phone’s having problems. My sister’s been helping, too, and her e-mails are getting kicked back to her. I’m not paranoid, but what if somebody’s interfering with our communications? Do you know how I could find out? Since the day the president came through, my phone really hasn’t worked very well. I don’t know. But that’s what’s happe
ned.”
“Every time the oil moves, they change the no-fly zone. They don’t want us to see.”
“How many notebooks do you fill up before you have a book?”
“Karen’s trying to get her kids out of town. There’s nothing for them to do. Everything we do is sailin’, crabbin’, boatin’, shrimpin’, surfin’.”
“I’m really worried about Lori; these dolphins are like her children.”
“If a kid says the water tasted soapy, is that dispersant?”
This is the conversation now.
But while we talk, the water still looks fine. The pelicans unruffled. Gulls galore. Dolphins roll within a hundred yards of the restaurant deck. All looks safe. Nothing feels safe.
The real estate agent says, “If this keeps up much longer, we’re dead. I have people who, if they can’t rent their houses, they’ll get foreclosed. They don’t have the money to refund deposits. And they can’t sell; who’s gonna buy anything now? Everybody’s hit. The gas stations. The laundry services. Even the hairdressers depend on tourists. Gonna be a ghost town.”
Another volley of comments from around the table. “I never thought this could happen.”
“I’m stayin’ to the end. Till they make me leave. This is my home.”
“This was my dream. I’m really mad. I’m upset enough to have dessert.”
On the futility and utility of helping wildilfe, a debate: More than a thousand birds in the Gulf region have been collected alive with visible oil. Serious question: Should they be cleaned or killed? Two years after a 1990 spill in southern California, fewer than 10 percent of oiled brown pelicans that had been cleaned remained alive, and they showed no signs of breeding. “If nothing else, we’re morally obligated to save birds that seem to be savable,” says one bird worker. Several hundred Gulf sea turtles are also getting aid. But a University of California professor who worked to save animals after the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 says cleaning wildlife gives a false impression that something can be done. To which the director of the International Bird Rescue Research Center retorts, “What do you want us to do? Let them die?”
