A Sea in Flames

by Carl Safina

  There’s no one here to watch the sunset, stroll hand in hand, look for shells, or take an evening dip as the day releases its hot irons of heat. One woman leads her small son along the sand. Having a hard time negotiating the corrugated ridges and dips of tire tracks in soft substrate but trying to make a go of it, he follows like a toddling bear cub. She tells me she can last a year like this; after that they don’t know. Says we can be here, but can’t go past the berm to the water. It’s patrolled. I see one distant vehicle moving on the sand. When she leaves, I walk over the berm anyway; I need a closer look. Nearer the water the entire beach is oiled. Long, dark band of stain. Fresh blobs and splatters.

  Rather surprisingly, the water seems like water. Where the waves lap, there’s some clarity to it. And I can see some crabs, alive. The Oil comes and goes in great waves. Unpredictable foe.

  A few days ago, oil slurped the shore so thickly here that pelicans looked cast in bronze. Horrible. That massive murk has moved. The water from the shore outward remains slicked and splatter-dappled, but it’s not a black lapping mat right now.

  Two middle-aged women get out of their car. Just drove sixty miles. “I never thought I’d see anything like this! It used to be a sand beach. You could come out and have parties and picnics and swim. This is really—”

  “You think God would do something about this.”

  “The hurricane season, it could pick up all that oil out there and put it all over everything.”

  A small band of souls come out to set up their volleyball net in the tire tracks. Resolute, jaws set for fun.

  Outside a cottage, a sign: “BP Headquarters.” Its arrow points directly down into an actual toilet bowl.

  Closer to the east end of the island and on the north side, mullet jump. Gulls loaf. They look okay. Terns fishing along the bridge offer cheer that even here life continues. Overhead, those pelicans are all soiled. But still flying, at least. At least for now.

  Speckled Trout Lane. Bayside Circle. Redfish Lane. Pete’s Wharf Lane. Sunset Lane. A place for sun and fun. Was. News networks, their trucks parked at cottages, provide some owners with summer rental income. At other cottages, camouflaged fat-wheeled trucks. Varied contractors and the National Guard.

  Overhead, a frigatebird. Really brown pelicans. Distinctly dingy, they skim over the slick surface. I fear for them.

  On a lawn, a graveyard of white crosses memorializes these departed: “Beach Sunsets,” “Sand Between My Toes,” “Marlin,” “Sand Castles,” “Dolphins,” “Bluefin Tuna,” “Crabbing,” “Shrimp,” “Sailing,” “Beach Sunrises,” “Summer Fun,” “Sea Turtles,” “Picnics on the Beach,” “Floundering,” “Flying a Kite,” “Sand Dollars,” “Oysters on the Half Shell,” “Boogie-Boarding”; there’re about four dozen more.

  Nearby, a much larger cross says, “In Memory of All That Was Lost; Courtesy of BP and Our Federal Government.” Another cross marks the passing of “Our Soul.” Another roadside sign: “BP—Cannot Fish or Swim. How the Hell Are We Suppose to Feed Our Kids Now?” Signed by the owner. A hurting, hurting place.

  Based on the latest flow rate estimates of up to 60,000 barrels per day, the fine for the escaping oil alone could be $260 million per day. Anyone still doubt that BP has been trying to hide the body? Criminal penalties, if fully imposed, could cause the costs to balloon to more than $60 billion, dwarfing an escrow account the White House wants BP to establish for paying claims of economic loss.

  The government will likely use BP’s prior criminal record, such as BP’s guilty plea in the 2005 refinery explosion that killed fifteen people in Texas City, to argue that the Deepwater Horizon disaster resulted from a corporate culture that lets hurrying and cost-consciousness jeopardize safety.

  BP’s carefully crafted public image of friendliness belied its egregious record for serious safety problems. The Economist reports that between June 2007 and February 2010, BP received an astonishing 97 percent of all operational safety and health citations for “willful” and “egregiously willful” breaches of the rules at American oil refineries, adding that this is “a remarkable share even allowing for close scrutiny after Texas City.”

  But the laws that would be brought to bear generally don’t have felony provisions that would lead to jail time for executives, and where they do, prosecutors would have to directly connect a defendant with a crime.

  On Capitol Hill, congressional Democrats Henry Waxman and Ed Markey blast the heads of ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, BP, and Shell Oil for producing “virtually identical” disaster response plans. All discuss how to protect those famous walruses in the Gulf of Mexico. The congressmen excoriate the oil titans’ “cookie-cutter plans,” citing sections that have “the exact same words,” indicating an investment of “zero time and money.”

  It will turn out that five giant oil companies all got their response plans from the same tiny Texas contractor. The firms all assured the government that they could handle oil spills much larger than the one now threatening the region’s environment and economy. And each time, the Minerals Management Service approved the plan and gave the go-ahead for drilling.

  In its exploration plans for Alaska, Shell has analyzed the prospect of only a 2,000-gallon diesel fuel spill. It asserted that a larger crude oil spill would be unlikely because the water is shallow. The Minerals Management Service skimmed up this assumption without questioning it. Shell is relying on a single company based about three hundred miles from its intended Chukchi Sea drilling sites. Anything goes wrong there, Shell would have available only a tiny fraction of the resources BP called up in the Gulf.

  Big ol’ jet airliner. I doze, then rouse. That’s Sandy Hook, New Jersey. I glance at the ocean and reflexively look for streaks of oil. The stain in my brain.

  On Long Island, when an egret flies over my house, I absentmindedly check it for signs of oil, as has become my habit. At our local marina, they’re talking the Oil. At the beach, it’s sun lotion and the Oil. It sticks to everyone’s minds. Follows everywhere. You can’t wash your thoughts of it.

  At the marina’s outdoor bar, the loud ones blame environmentalists. (That’s what their favorite broadcasters have told them to say.) “There’s no reason not to get the oil that’s in Alaska.” “Because they won’t let them.” “It’s the enviros.” “The enviros pushed them to this; BP was pushed into this by the enviros.” “Big guvvamint.” “Can’t do nuthin’ anymore.”

  In his first and much-anticipated address to our nation from the Oval Office, President Obama called for a new “national mission” to wean the United States off fossil fuels. “The tragedy unfolding on our coast is the most painful and powerful reminder yet that the time to embrace a clean energy future is now. Now is the moment for this generation to embark on a national mission to unleash American innovation and seize control of our own destiny.”

  Perfect!

  But why isn’t Obama throwing all his weight behind the new energy bill unveiled by Senators John Kerry and Joe Lieberman? Because the Kerry-Lieberman bill includes fees on carbon emissions, and the White House is afraid Republicans will ride the slogan “carbon tax” to multiple victories at the midterm elections.

  It’s hard to see how America can accomplish anything as long as two parties locked in a death battle can’t see past two-year congressional cycles. But I think Obama should press it, because he will never win his opponents over, but by not acting boldly he is losing the enthusiasm of his supporters.

  Thomas Friedman had written that this is not Obama’s Hurricane Katrina; it’s his 9/11—one of those rare seismic opportunities to energize the country to do something really important that is too hard to do in normal times. But as Bush blew 9/11’s possibilities, Obama is blowing this blowout. To Americans wanting to do something for the country they love, Bush told a few to go fight and the rest of us to go shopping.

  Boosting new energy technology and building new energy infrastructure would seem to line up with the mood among those who
elected Obama to bring sweeping reforms. Yet Obama is chary, and a well-oiled moment is slipping through his fingers.

  Obama, having already asked congressional Democrats to make a hard vote on health care, seems to feel he can’t ask them for another. He isn’t publicly deploying his assembled brain trust, including Nobel Prize–winning Energy secretary Steven Chu, to rally Americans who are waiting to be enlisted, ready to be rallied.

  When people ask me, “What can I do to help the Gulf?” I don’t know what to tell them. There are no real opportunities for the public to just go down and help out, and for the Big Picture, we haven’t been given a concrete presidential vision that we can get behind.

  “Mr. President,” Friedman offers, “Americans are craving your leadership on this issue. Are you going to channel their good will into something that strengthens our country?—‘The Obama End to Oil Addiction Act’—or are you going to squander your 9/11, too?”

  In a similar but much more enjoyable vein, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow assumes the role of fake president just long enough to deliver the speech she wishes the president had given. Among other things, she wishes he’d said:

  Never again will any company be allowed to drill in a location where they are incapable of dealing with the potential consequences.… I’m announcing a new federal command specifically for containment and cleanup of oil that has already entered the Gulf of Mexico.… I no longer say that we must get off oil like every president before me has said. We will get off oil and here’s how: The United States Senate will pass an energy bill. This year.

  When the benefits of drilling accrue to a private company, but the risks of that drilling accrue to we the American people, whose waters and shoreline are savaged when things go wrong, I as Fake President stand on the side of the American people, and say to the industry: From this day forward, if you cannot handle the risk, you no longer will take chances with our fate to reap your rewards.

  Maybe Maddow will someday throw her sombrero into the presidential ring. And if she wins, she will join every president since the 1970s in saying that America must get off oil. Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama. And Rachel Maddow.

  But until the country realizes that our Congress and our courts must serve people with belly buttons, not multinational corporations …

  More congressional hearings and briefings. The Interior Department’s acting inspector general, Mary L. Kendall, tells a congressional panel that in the Gulf region the Minerals Management Service has only sixty inspectors to oversee about four thousand drilling facilities. Inspectors in the Gulf operate “with little direction as to what must be inspected, or how.” Yet on the Pacific Coast, ten inspectors cover only twenty-three facilities. She says the minerals service has a difficult time recruiting inspectors because the oil industry tends to pay a lot more.

  The sargassum weed, whose yellow floating mats provide cover and nursery habitat for many kinds of sea life in the open Gulf, is dying. Most people have never seen or even heard of sargassum, but it shelters and feeds uncountable numbers of fish and young sea turtles. Tunas, mahimahi, billfish, mackerels, and others often haunt its edges. Blair Witherington, a research scientist and sea turtle expert with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, says, “Ordinarily, the sargassum is a nice, golden color. You shake it, and all kinds of life comes out: shrimp, crabs, worms, sea slugs. It is really just bursting with life. It’s the base of the food chain. And these areas we’re seeing here by comparison are quite dead.” He speaks of seeing flyingfish land on rafts of oil and get stuck right there. He says the jellies are dying. “These animals drift into the oil lines and it’s like flies on fly paper,” Witherington relates. “As far as I can tell, that whole fauna is just completely wiped out.” Of dispersants, he says the thinking is “just keep the oil out at sea; the harm will be minimal. And I disagree with that completely.” Of his beloved turtles, he says, “We’ve seen the oil covering the turtles so thick they could barely move, could hardly lift their heads.”

  It’s hard to imagine a turtle in the ocean catching fire, but after all, it’s hard to imagine any of this. And so today’s vocabulary word from the theater of the absurd is “burn box.” Noun: an area of corralled oil set on fire. Contractors are staging mass burns of some of the floating oil mats, setting the sea aflame. Some people allege they’re burning up sea turtles along with the oil. I’m dubious. But then again, a lot of little turtles could be clinging to weed mats. The turtle rescuers want to pick up as many turtles as they can find, for fear they’ll be incinerated. They find eleven, all of them heavily speckled with oil.

  I read that only 3 percent of the slick is thick enough to catch and hold a flame on the surface of the sea. But there is so much oil that the fires and their towering billows of thick smoke are horrendous.

  Workers will light more than three hundred fires at sea, sending thick plumes of smoke, carbon dioxide, and hydrocarbons toward heaven. They’ll burn more oil than the Exxon Valdez spilled. A man employed to ignite floating oil will brag, “No one can deny this is a success.”

  John Wathen, who spoke of seeing dolphins dying in thick oil, says he witnessed other dolphins, lined up with their heads out of the water, watching the astonishing sight of their ocean in flames.

  Various people report seeing sharks, mullet, crabs, rays, and small fish in unusual numbers close to shore. Are they fleeing the oil? Could be. But the Gulf has long had its dead zone of low oxygen, which worsens in summer. Large numbers of fish moving into shallows where there’s more oxygen isn’t unheard of. The latest figures of dead wildlife total about 800 birds, 350 turtles, and 40 mammals. It’s not clear whether the oil killed them all. Even people cruising Louisiana’s heavily besmirched Barataria Bay see dozens of dolphins frolicking in oil-sheened water, and oil-smudged pelicans feeding their young.

  In some areas still open to fishing, fishers report large catches of red snapper, grouper, king mackerel, and amberjack. Are the fish congregating after fleeing the oil or are they unaffected by it? Are the large schools of fish locals see hanging around piers there because the fishing ban has given the fish a huge break? No one knows. But it’s seeming that much life in the Gulf has resilience enough to resist the oil.

  After many days of very public pressure from President Obama and many hours of private negotiations, BP finally agrees to divert $20 billion into an independent fund to pay claims arising from the blowout. The company will also suspend paying shareholder dividends for the rest of the year and will set aside an additional $100 million as compensation for lost wages for oil rig workers affected by the Obama moratorium on deep exploratory drilling. The president stresses that the amount is not a ceiling on BP’s obligations. Suspending dividends delivers another blow to BP’s reputation and its shareholders, but for the company’s accountants it’s a godsend that saves BP something like $10 billion. The president had earlier alluded to his determination to step in and do “what individuals couldn’t do and corporations wouldn’t do.” For the president and the Gulf, it’s a stunning coup.

  To Obama, this is a rebalancing after two decades in which multinationals sometimes acted like mini-states beyond government reach, while influencing the government to, as he says, “gut regulations and put industry insiders in charge of industry oversight.” The president had no legal basis for the demand. (Remember, BP is legally on the hook for just $75 million.) The deal follows an extraordinary four-hour White House meeting that was punctuated by breaks as each side huddled privately. BP will pay into the fund over four years, at $5 billion a year. Last year, BP generated profits of $17 billion. After the announcement, BP shares close up 1.4 percent, at $31.85.

  While the president may have been walking a fine line, at least one member of Congress was blocking the intersection. Republican congressman Joe Barton of the great oiligarchy of Texas rails that Obama acted illegally, and—during a congressional hearing—Barton apol
ogizes to BP executives for our president’s “shakedown” of their company. That rumbling is the sound of jaws dropping across America. Even though Barton had reportedly gotten $1.5 million in campaign donations from oil companies, his outburst is bizarre enough to quote at length: “I am ashamed of what happened in the White House yesterday, that a private corporation would be subject to what I would characterize as a shakedown,” said Barton. The fund, he said, “amounts to a $20 billion slush fund that is unprecedented in our nation’s history” and “sets a terrible precedent for the future.” He continued, “I apologize … I do not want to live in a country where any time a citizen or a corporation does something that is legitimately wrong it is subject to political pressure that amounts to a shakedown.” Keep in mind, this guy was in charge of the Energy and Commerce Committee before the Democrats won the House majority in 2006. And as the political pendulum swings, he’ll likely be the chairman again. One thing we agree on: I don’t want him to live in this country, either.

  On June 17, a New York Times editorial opines that BP’s CEO, Tony Hayward, has just given Congress “a mind-bogglingly vapid performance.” Congressmen Waxman, Stupak, and others spent hours trying to pry answers out of Hayward about what went wrong. Mostly, he deflected and sidestepped the grilling and frustrated the congressmen and the American public. “I was not part of that decision-making process” was his frequent answer to questions. But fair enough; that’s true. To Texas Republican congressman Michael Burgess, who was taken aback by the idea that Hayward had no prior knowledge of this well, Hayward answered, “With respect, sir, we drill hundreds of wells a year around the world.” To which Burgess shot back: “That’s what’s scaring me now.” During the seven-hour hearing, something like 735,000 gallons of oil leaked into the Gulf.

  Rather to its credit, I grudgingly admit, BP releases $25 million of a pledged half billion dollars over ten years to support several universities’ research into the effects of the blowout. To make recommendations on which institutions will receive funds, BP appoints an expert panel chaired by environmental microbiologist Rita Colwell, who formerly headed the National Science Foundation and is now a distinguished professor at Johns Hopkins University. Sounding so refreshingly out of character that the cynic in me has trouble figuring out BP’s motivation, BP CEO Tony Hayward says in a press release, “It is vitally important that research start immediately into the oil and dispersant’s impact, and that the findings are shared fully and openly. We support the independence of these institutions and projects, and hope that the funding will have a significant positive effect on scientists’ understanding of the impact of the spill.”