by Carl Safina
It’s safe, of course. Accidents are rare, as we’ve seen. And also, of course, the stakes—and the risks—increase as the rigs get larger and more complicated.
“Our ability to manage risks hasn’t caught up with our ability to explore and produce in deep water,” says Edward C. Chow, a former oil executive now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Perdido, for example, lies twenty hours away from supply-boat help. It lives in a realm of hundred-mile-an-hour hurricanes and mountainous walls of angry, battering-ram waves. Its delicate underwater equipment and many pipelines feel the insistence of currents and mud slides, but lie far beyond human reach in their own underwater metropolis populated by unmanned submarines and robots. Down there, it’s Dune—but without people.
In 2005, Hurricanes Rita and Katrina damaged or destroyed hundreds of offshore platforms and pipelines. (About thirty thousand miles of pipeline crisscross the Gulf of Mexico seafloor.) The gulf’s oil and gas production shut down for weeks. I hope we don’t someday look back at that as a quaint time of heroic people. Meanwhile, new rigs have recently arrived in the Gulf that can drill in water 12,000 feet deep.
“Going to the moon is hazardous. Going to Mars is even more hazardous,” says University of California professor Robert Bea. “The industry has entered a new domain of vastly increased complexity and increased risks.”
On May 27, Obama had extended the ban on deep exploratory drilling for six months. Today, June 22, a federal judge strikes down the moratorium, saying, “Are all airplanes a danger because one was? All oil tankers like Exxon Valdez? All trains? All mines? That sort of thinking seems heavy-handed, and rather overbearing.”
Of course, that’s not the point. When a plane crashes, hundreds of thousands of people don’t get put out of work, nor do they perceive their communities, livelihoods, and self-identities threatened; an entire region doesn’t lose tens of billions of dollars. That’s a difference. The judge says the six-month moratorium would have an “immeasurable effect” on the industry, the local economy, and the U.S. energy supply. Maybe he can’t measure it, but economists should be able to tell us how many jobs, what overall effects, things like that. All those big robes and that big bench don’t guarantee much. Beware the man behind the curtain.
And yet, I have to admit that even I’m not sure that the Obama moratorium is necessary. It seems that regulators could greatly improve rules and tighten oversight without a moratorium. But I just don’t like the judge’s juvenile logic. His silly comparisons are off base. Rather than blind justice at work, I see a certain blindness. Like most everyone in this mess, he doesn’t grasp the big picture: this isn’t like a plane crash; it’s like aviation safety procedures. There are systemic problems to fix.
In response, the Interior secretary says he will order a new moratorium, one designed to eliminate doubt that it is appropriate. Salazar says he expects oil companies to complain that the coming regulations are too onerous. “There is the pre–April 20th framework of regulation and the post–April 20th framework,” he’ll say, “and the oil and gas industry better get used to it.”
Despite the judge’s ruling, BP stock drops 2.7 percent. The better bet: shrimp. Imported shrimp prices are up 13 percent, and Thai shrimp import poundage is up 37 percent. And Gulf shrimp prices have gone jumbo, up a whopping 43 percent. About 60 to 70 percent of oysters eaten in the United States come from the Gulf, and oysters now cost about 40 percent more, too.
On June 23 the feds reopen fishing over more than 8,000 square miles. Their reason: “because no oil has been observed there.” So why’d they close it? Other parts of the Gulf with no observed oil were never closed. Still closed: roughly 75,000 square miles, about 32.5 percent of the Gulf’s federal waters. Their smiley face: “That leaves more than two-thirds of the Gulf’s federal waters available for fishing.” People have now found more than 500 sea turtles dead or dying around the Gulf.
During the last days of June, Tropical Storm Alex thickens the air with sheets of rain that pound so heavily on my car that several times, unable to see, I have to pull over. Seven- to ten-foot seas lash the coast. Beach cleanup is halted, most work disrupted, most people scurrying for shore; hundreds of vessels steam for ports. Waves are pushing most booms ashore. Movement of the surface oil accelerates; winds push the crude turds northwest, toward heretofore oil-unsoiled Texas beaches.
Thad Allen says the weather could suspend operations for two weeks. It “would be the first time and there is no playbook,” he says with dramatic flourish. No playbook because the BP Gulf plan mentions walruses, but doesn’t mention tropical storms or hurricanes.
One of the bigger worries: if they have to make the capture vessels disconnect from their supply lines, all that oil just resumes leaking full-on into the sea. Upgraded to a hurricane, Alex is the strongest June storm since 1966, with sustained winds of more than one hundred miles an hour. But its main winds pass wide of ground zero, and the rigs stay connected. The winds, though, splatter oil onto the beaches of South Padre Island, Texas, and Galveston.
On June 30, 2010, every Republican in the House of Representatives votes no on a bill that would require corporations to disclose the money they give to American elections.
Also on June 30, Coast Guard admiral Thad Allen becomes retired Coast Guard admiral Thad Allen. He joins the Department of Homeland Security and will continue managing the federal oil spill response.
Meanwhile, the widows of workers killed in the Deepwater Horizon explosions are being told that Transocean plans to argue that its liability for damages owed is limited by the Death on the High Seas Act and the Jones Act. Shelley Anderson, whose husband, Jason, was a tool pusher on the rig, says, “Why would the damages to a family be different if a death occurs on the ocean as opposed to on land?” Well, Ms. Anderson, it’s not that the damage to your family is different. It’s just that, having caused your husband’s death, the corporation doesn’t want to pay you. That’s just the kind of people their executives are. Remember, no belly button; they’ve got their wallets in their chest pockets, where their hearts should be, and are bereft of pulse.
In the true heart of the delta, what land there is lies like giant snakes resting in shallow water, each snake just wide enough for a road, a few docks, some homes. That’s all. The people and communities seem as aquatic as muskrats.
Things have changed in the last two months. When I first came, people were in shock. Now most people have worn a slight groove in their situation.
The first place I’d visited was Shell Beach, Louisiana. So now I’m going back. This time I have a little company for a change. Mandy Moore works for the National Wildlife Federation. Blond, twenty-nine, slight of build, she’s from around here, knows the place. So she’s driving. I’m in the passenger seat eating peanuts and some cherries.
“We won’t go to the staging area,” she says. “They won’t let us down that road at all. That part’s gotten a lot worse.”
Other road. Another sheriff booth. We’ll park before it, plan to walk through. Our calculus on their psychology is that walking is less confrontational, somehow, than driving on a public road. That’s how distorted things are. Mandy tells the guard we’ve gotta talk to Frank Campo. Dropping a name earns us permission to walk on a public road.
Just a little bit down the road is an open-air fishing station with a corrugated aluminum roof, a dock, tanks for live bait, fuel pumps. Fishing’s been closed for a couple of months.
Campo’s ancestral ethnicity is Spanish via the Canary Islands to Louisiana. His fishing station normally sells bait, fuel, and ice to commercial and recreational fishermen. He’s spent a lot of time in the sun.
Hurricane Katrina sent twenty feet of water through here. “There’s only two things here that’s old, besides me,” Campo says, pointing, “That post, and a piece of pipe in the front. The rest, Katrina destroyed. The whole parish was destroyed. You couldn’t buy anything. You couldn’t get here to work because the road was destroyed. All t
hem power poles, they were all gone. They never rebuilt the gas lines, not for the few people here. We knew we were gonna rebuild, but the question was ‘Where the hell do you start.’ My dad was dead. But I asked him, ‘Dad, where the hell do we start?’ And we talked about it and he said, ‘We have to rebuild; this is what we do.’ ” It took about a year to get back in business. Campo’s son Michael, late thirties, is fourth-generation in this family business. Michael says he’s “tryin’ t’ stay positive.” So much of this is psychological warfare.
Campo the elder says, “When I first heard about the oil, to be quite honest, I didn’t think much of it. Rigs blow up all the time, y’know. Then I saw that eleven people lost their lives. That really bothers me. That’s not good. You got kids? I sure wouldn’t want to be rubbed out because somebody did something stupid. I mean, I got grandkids and I know I’m not gonna be here forever; but I wanna be here, y’know, as long as I can. So I feel really bad for the people who lost their husbands and their fathers.
“Katrina destroyed us—but it didn’t kill us. A hurricane takes everything, but you know you’re gonna come back. You know you’re gonna have the seafood, sport fishing—. I mean, it takes a while, but you know you’re gonna be back on top of the ball again. But the oil really bothers me. The oil could take all this away from us. What do you do then? And where we gonna go? What’s the use of coming here if you can’t fish?
“I fish, y’know what I mean? Louisiana produces most of the seafood that’s eaten in the country. They got shrimp comes outta other states but they ain’t no good; I wouldn’t eat ’em. Our shrimp are so good, it’s not even funny.
“I’ve fished out of so many places, I got friends all over the doggone country. Biloxi, Gulfport, Houma. I’ve been all over. I got friends in Texas. I didn’t have to punch a clock. And I didn’t have to drive. I went with the boat, everywhere.
“This fishin’ is a learnin’ process. You get to meet interesting people. And you learn a lot from everybody. When I started, you used a trawl. Well, all right. Then they started using what they call a tickler chain ahead of the net. It makes the shrimp jump up. Well, that improved the catch—greatly.
“As we travel through the jungle, you gotta change with the times. But now—. I don’t know what we’re gonna do. Because if the oil moves in, it could kill the marsh. I don’t feel confident we’ll survive this. This is a significant threat to our well-being. This is not something to take lightly. This is very serious. This could destroy a way of life for everybody in this part of the world. If they don’t stop it, then we’ll be dead. Eventually, this is gonna go away. Whether it’s going to take everybody with it, that I don’t know.”
Over on the Ellie Margaret we find Charlie Robin—“S’posed to say Ro-ban,” he acknowledges, “but it’s Robin.” His boat, designed for shrimping, is laden with that elongated pacifier of the Gulf summer of 2010: boom. But Robin isn’t quite pacified yet. He’s mad as a buzz-worm. Angrily, but amiably—he knows who his enemies are not—he sits astride the side of his battered boat. Not a lean man. Talkative. Worried. On top of it all, mechanical problems. Hit some leftover hurricane debris. Bent the propeller. “Destroyed it.” Broken exhaust. Clothes covered in grease. Hands full of grease. Last week, he cut his finger off in a winch. “Dat little-bitty winch right there? Cut it off.” Reattached, heavily bandaged.
Gesturing to the boom on his deck, he says, “Ninety percent of the boats here are workin’ de erl. Nevvah thought it would still be comin’ out in July.… Gettin’ my flares. Gettin’ all my safety equipment. Dat’s what I’m doin’. Dat way we’s good t’ go. We been practicin’ in a lake. We pull two twenty-four-inch booms. And we tow at, like, one knot. You got t’ go a certain speed. Don’t want the erl to go over, don’t want it under. So you go slow. Other boat’s behind you; he skims it. Pumps it on a barge. That’s the way you go. Mop it up. Exactly what we doin’. So, pretty cool. I’m excited about it. Because I know it’s gonna help our fisheries out. Anything we do to save our land, save our area, it’s good. I’m five generations. If I go shrimpin’ and de erl comes in, I’m screwed, right?
“We don’t know what’s the effect all this gonna be. Dat’s de scary part. Dat’s the part we feah de mos’. No one not knowin’. Hurricane comes in, we clean up, lick our wounds, go back workin’. We might bust a few nets on debris, but we back to livin’. But this?” His voice drops to an emphatic whisper: “We don’t know the outcome of this. We don’t know, we don’t know.
“The ground you standin’ on been in de family a hundred and fifty yeauhs. My great-grandfather lived on it. It means a lot to me. And it’s worth savin’. This place goes, what we gonna do? Is BP gonna give us back owah culture? Hell no. There’s not enough money in the world to pay for five generations of freedom. You don’t buy dat.
“And to give you fresh seafood, Mother Nature’s home brew—instead of some farmed frozen foreign chemical-raised shrimp. You follow dat? Okay.
“Well, dat’s how we feel. Dat’s how angry. Their ignorant mistake—is gonna cost all this. To try to save a million bucks. Dat’s a penny to us. Now I’m gettin’ mad. I’m sorry.”
As we’re walking out, back up the road to Mandy’s car, we pass a handful of young people hanging out, leaning against a parked car. One, in his early twenties, is wearing the little orange life vest of the body snatchers. (He’s on land, mind you—safety!)
Just after we pass he yells, “Hey. Hey. HEY!” Apparently he’s “working,” but doesn’t know the difference between adolescence and a job.
We’re walking out, on the public road, and he’s yelling at us. Mandy has the courtesy to stop, so I turn around, too.
He suspects we’re “from the media.”
Mandy says we’re not “the media.”
“Then what’s that,” he demands. She happens to be carrying a folder bearing the business card of a Los Angeles Times reporter. Seeing that, the guy believes he’s caught her lying to him. These are the banal ways the Gulf becomes a police state.
As if he deserves any answer, as though he has any scrim of real authority, Mandy calmly tells him that, no, it’s someone else’s business card. It’s a good thing he’s talking to her (that’s an easy choice for him, of course) and that she’s doing the talking, because I can feel my next breath forming the words Go fuck yourself.
As oil speckles Mississippi beaches, Governor Haley Barbour complains of not being given adequate resources. A Democrat congressman says he’s “dumbfounded by the amount of wasted effort, wasted money and stupidity that I saw.”
Oil spreads. Pain deepens. “Seeing everything that you’ve been used to for years kind of slowly going away from you, it’s overwhelming,” says a boat captain. His family wants answers he doesn’t have. His wife says she cries. A lot. “I haven’t slept. I’ve lost weight,” says Yvonne Pfeiffer, fifty-three. “The stress has my shoulders up to my ears.”
Oil floats. Shares sink. BP’s stock price drops 6 percent, to $27.02, on June 25. Lowest value in fourteen years.
Oil floats. Turtles fly. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is coordinating collection of about 70,000 sea turtle eggs from around 800 beach-buried nests from the Florida Panhandle to Alabama. The fear: hatchlings will head into a toxic sea and be fatally mired as they seek food and shelter in oil-matted seaweed. The dilemma: nobody’s ever done this before at such a scale. There’s a lot of guessing. And any hatchlings that survive will almost certainly not return to the Gulf as adults, because they’ll imprint on the east coast of Florida beaches where they’ll be released. The turtles could squeeze out a win. But for the Gulf, it’s a loss either way. It’s not that anyone thinks this is a great idea. It’s that the people involved don’t want to just sit back; they want to help.
Halfway around the world is a man who wants so very much to help, he has sent us a giant, unsolicited gift. And so now, in the center ring, we have for you: the World’s Largest Skimming Vessel. That’s right, ladies and gentlemen. This massive bea
st, the awkwardly named A Whale, has crossed the Pacific flying a Taiwanese flag to go head-to-head, mano a mano, with the slick. How many football fields is it? you might ask. Three and a half! Ten stories high! It’s a tanker newly converted at its owner’s expense for just this purpose. And what a guy he must truly be. It has never been tested, but it’s the thought that counts. And this whole season is about testing technology and people as never before.
The radio theater of the absurd tells us that “officials” hope the vessel will be able to suck up as much as 21 million gallons of oil-fouled water per day! But that’s not quite true. That’s what the owner hopes. Remember, it hasn’t been tested. And the key phrase there is “oil-fouled water.” Nobody thinks it could collect that much sheer oil.
Officials are doing their usual bit: being skeptical and mulling whether to grant access. And so the ship’s mysterious and “reclusive” owner has sent a representative from a PR firm to “unleash a torrent of publicity and cut through red tape.”
Turns out, “officials” are inclined to deny the ship permission to work, citing the fact that after it skims water and separates out the oil, the water it returns will still have some oil in it—and it’s illegal for a ship to discharge oil. Never mind that there are skimmers all over the Gulf right now doing just that. “BP and the Coast Guard still have concerns about the ship,” one official says.
I continue to have a concern: Why does it keep sounding like “BP and the Coast Guard” are one team? How is it that BP gets to say anything about what and who goes into the federal waters of the United States? Especially when we the people of the United States sit helplessly watching BP fill the Gulf to the brim with oil and dispersants?
