A Sea in Flames

by Carl Safina

  So, rightly or wrongly, people remain concerned that the dispersants will kill plankton, fish, and other marine life. People are concerned they’ll taint seafood. People are concerned that they’ll break up millions upon millions of gallons of oil so that it pollutes vast swaths of the Gulf, making the oil unrecoverable, rendering millions of feet of boom useless on principle, bathing fish eggs and larvae, making things die, getting long-term into commercial fish, shrimp, and oysters, and taking bolt cutters to the food chain.

  Certainly all that is “true” in a strict sense, but the important questions are: How much, for how long? Will it kill a lot of plankton? Will it seriously taint seafood? Or, in the vastness and chemical complexity of the Gulf, will the effects be trivial and temporary? It’s so hard to know.

  An EPA spokesperson: “Before making any alterations to the current policy of allowing heavy dispersant use, we will need to have additional testing of the dispersants plus the oil.”

  Allow it, then do tests. Isn’t that completely backward? They’re allowing the whole region to become a laboratory of lives.

  St. Tammany Parish president Kevin Davis isn’t having any of this. He simply calls on the Coast Guard commander to immediately end use of dispersants. “Breaking the oil down so that it travels underwater and resurfaces is creating a situation where we can neither see it nor fight it,” Davis says. “This is not a prudent course of action.”

  Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart tells us that BP has had 760 “willful, egregious safety violations” over the last three years. ExxonMobil, by contrast, has had one. “Exxon,” explains Stewart, “could get seventy times the willful, egregious safety violations and still be ninety percent safer than BP.”

  A few days after the Coast Guard declares “willfulness” a felony, BP generously decriminalizes free speech in America, encouraging workers to talk to the press if they wish to. About that, a shrimp boat captain says, “Yeah, I saw that notice. But our contract still says our people on our boat can’t talk to anyone.”

  With a perceived crisis in oil supply not just from the blowout but also from Obama’s drilling bans and moratoriums, I expect a surge in gasoline prices. But the price of gasoline is going down. Is this because calls to get beyond oil might galvanize political pressure to move away from fossil fuels and do more for clean energy—so gasoline prices are getting fixed? It’s as if, just when we’re waking up to fight the bad guys, they give us another shot of muscle relaxant.

  Do you remember the “ultimate solution,” relief wells? By the first week of July the first relief well is about 1,000 feet vertically from its targeted point of interception with the blowing well—a target, remember, seven inches wide, 18,000 feet below the Gulf’s surface. In scale, the drill pipe is like a wet hair extending thousands of feet from the drilling rig, through the ocean, and deep into the seafloor. How can they know where it is, where it’s headed, and where it needs to go?

  It’s very high-tech. To determine the inclination (angle) and azimuth (compass direction), accelerometers and magnetometers send binary pulses through the drill pipe to the drill rig. If the drill bit has strayed, it can be steered back on course by pressure pads that change the bit’s direction. Magnetometers sense the seven-inch target of the original well by detecting an electromagnetic field created by an electric current that engineers send through the blown-out well’s casing. In addition, devices resembling torpedoes up to 30 feet long bear sensors and processors that measure gamma radiation emitted by rock, the electrical resistance of any fluids within, and even the magnetic resonance of hydrocarbon atoms. Thus drillers know whether they are drilling through sand or rock, or oil and gas.

  But no one makes booms capable of effectively corralling oil in open water. Incredible sophistication—and abject stupidity.

  And a whiff of an end: the Coast Guard is talking of a new cap in the works. We also hear that the relief well is ahead of its early-August schedule. Don’t hold your breath. The Thadmiral says, “I am reluctant to tell you it will be done before the middle of August because I think everything associated with this spill and response recovery suggests that we should underpromise and overdeliver.”

  Overdeliver? The only thing they’ve overdelivered is oil and polluted water. That’s the part that has vastly exceeded all expectations. (There will not be a relief well in early August. Or mid-August. Or late August. Or early September. Nor by the ides of September.)

  In July’s first week, BP reports that nearly 95,000 claims have been submitted and the company has made more than 47,000 payments, totaling almost $147 million. So far, total, it has paid out about $3.12 billion.

  Meanwhile, the federal government extends fishing closures to cover more than 80,000 square miles, a third of the Gulf’s federal waters.

  Says a fisherman, “Everything we’ve ever known is different now. Anything I ever built, it’s gone: the business, my client base, my website—.” Another says, “In bed, I feel safe. It feels like everything is okay and I’m away from all this. When I get up in the morning, it is just very depressing.”

  July 2. Headed to Alabama. Downpours overcome by blue sky. Big lofting clouds.

  Lots of churches. And their creepy billboards: “Oil Now, Blood Later.—Revelation 8:8.” “The second angel sounded and the third part of the sea became blood.” What were they smoking? I like my Bible’s translation better: “The second angel blew his trumpet, and something like a great mountain, burning with fire, was thrown into the sea.” That does sound a bit like the Deepwater Horizon, doesn’t it?

  Car radio: “… If it were up to me, I’d let them try it, because, let’s face it, nothing BP and the Coast Guard are doing is doing much good out there.”

  “BP has received so many suggestions, it’s created a hotline.”

  A hotline. Imagine.

  A BP hotline operator in Houston asserts that the spill hotline is just “a diversion to stop callers from getting through.” She adds, “Other operators do nothing with the calls. They just type, ‘blah blah blah,’ no information, just ‘blah blah blah.’ ”

  BP denies this, saying, in effect, blah blah blah.

  Hand-painted signs on utility poles advertise “Snapper,” “Grouper,” “Flounder,” “Shrimp.” Bait and tackle every little while. That’s all archival now.

  Local news: “Mississippi officials have closed the last portion of the state’s marine waters. Any fish caught must now be returned to the waters immediately. Officials say tar balls, patties, mousse, and oil residue [such ugly terms] will continue to wash ashore for two months after the oil stops gushing.” As Eskimos are said to have many words for differing kinds of snow and ice, the Gulf now has a vocabulary of oil.

  The local news also says, “Oil is now building on Mississippi’s shoreline, but officials say the major batch of oil is still twenty miles south.”

  Officials say. Officials say do this; officials say do this; officials say do this; officials say do this; do this. Out. Out. “Officials say … Unified Command says …”

  I say, Unified Command my ass.

  “… all commercial and recreational fishing has been shut down in Mississippi Sound.”

  Officials say.

  National news: “I’m Michele Norris.” “And I’m Melissa Block. Computer modeling suggests that Miami and the Florida Keys are actually more at risk from oil than much of the state’s Gulf coast. But all that depends on a fickle phenomenon known as the Loop Current—”

  Click.

  Really, I just need a few minutes of quiet. Let my head settle.

  Pelicans remain much in evidence wherever the view embraces water. Terns. Laughing gulls. Salt marsh, rather pretty, at least for now. Occasionally a mullet jumps. I wonder whether they’ll be here in these numbers next year.

  I should hear what they’re saying, so I turn on the radio again. “… They collected wind and current data from the last fifteen years, added an oil gusher, and ran it again and again to see where the oil would likely go
. Oil ended up on the Atlantic coast of Florida more often than not. But the model could be wrong. The Loop Current usually pushes oil out of the Gulf and along the east coast of Florida, but it’s not doing that right now. On the other hand, it looks like this could be a record-breaking year for tropical storms in the Gulf. This week’s storm has delayed oil cleanup activities. What actually happens to the oil will depend on the weather. So keep watching those weather forecasts.…”

  That’s news you can’t use. All that matters: Is the oil still gushing or stopped? Still gushing. That’s all that matters.

  A sign says, “Taking Oysters Beyond This Point Prohibited.” The syntax raises the image of escorting oysters out into the bay. They need the word “from” between “oysters” and “beyond.” At any rate, a few weeks ago, oyster rakers freckled the wide water. Now there are none.

  Boom in channels. Boom under bridges. A long crescent boom arcs out from the shoreline, then simply ends. Protects nothing. The inescapable visual dominance of oil rigs. And this fiasco. I’ve never before seen a coast I hated.

  Cedar Point Pier is on the north side of the bridge to Dauphin Island. Last time I was here the place was open. Now there’s a hand-painted sign saying, “Closed.”

  A middle-aged woman named Jo is feeding the cats. Doesn’t want “them to be victims, too.” Takes me inside the store next to the empty piers. Shelves empty. “This is what’s left.” She’s known me for two minutes, but she gives me a soft drink and a candy bar and won’t let me pay.

  On June 10 at 9:30 P.M., while several dozen people were fishing from the pier, police officers came onto the property to announce that the waters were closed to fishing and the place was “closed immediately.” Not just the fishing. The whole business, bait shop, snacks and drinks, everything.

  When the seventy-four-year-old proprietor came out to get an explanation, the six-foot-five officer knocked him to the ground to handcuff him, sending his face into a fence post on the way down and landing him in the hospital for two weeks. “Ambulance people could not believe the officer wouldn’t uncuff him,” Jo tells me. Word is that the officer had a prior problem controlling himself.

  “When it’s all over,” she says, “it’ll be bad for everyone.”

  While we wait to see when it’ll be over, we pause for this word from the United Nations: a new report says that large modern corporations are “soulless” and threaten to become “cancerous” to society. The author of those comments, Pavan Sukhdev, is on sabbatical from Deutsche Bank and is working at the United Nations on a report called “The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity.” Reading between the lines, I infer that one goal of the report is to install an artificial heart in the treasure chest of multinational corporations. “We have created a soulless corporation that does not have any innate reason to be ethical about anything,” he says. “The purpose of a corporation is to be selfish. That is law. So it’s up to society and its leaders and thinkers to design the checks and balances that are needed to ensure that the corporation does not simply become cancerous.” This doesn’t come as news. But checks and balances—isn’t that liberal code for regulations and taxes? In a famous report in 2006, British economist Nicholas Stern argued that the cost of tackling climate change would be 1 to 2 percent of the global economy, while the cost of doing nothing would be five to twenty times as great. Sukhdev says that failure to put a dollar value on nature’s services—things like flood protection and crop pollination and carbon take-up by forests—is causing widespread destruction of whole ecosystems and of life on Earth.

  “Arrogant and in denial.” That’s how a safety specialist who helped BP investigate its own refineries after the deadly 2005 explosion at its Texas City facility describes the company.

  BP had grown into the world’s second-largest oil company, behind only ExxonMobil. The company struck bold deals in shaky places like Angola and Azerbaijan, and drilled high in Alaska and deep in the Gulf of Mexico. It did “the tough stuff that others cannot or choose not to do,” as BP CEO Tony Hayward once boasted.

  When Hayward became BP’s chief executive in 2007, he did away with fancy affectations, replacing art in the company’s headquarters with photographs of BP service stations, platforms, and pipelines. A geologist by training, Hayward dispensed with the limousine used by his socially prominent predecessor. “BP makes its money by someone, somewhere, every day putting on boots, coveralls, a hard hat and glasses, and going out and turning valves,” Hayward said in 2009. “And we’d sort of lost track of that.” He vowed to make safety BP’s “No. 1 priority.”

  But Hayward’s predecessor, John Browne, had gone after the most expensive and potentially most lucrative ventures. And that record of risk translated to success. BP’s share price more than doubled; its cash dividend tripled. Browne was knighted.

  As Browne was reaching, he was also cutting. He outsourced. He fired tens of thousands of employees. Among them, many engineers. He kept rotating managers into new jobs with tough profit targets. The Texas City refinery, for example, had five managers in six years before the blast that killed fifteen people.

  Built in 1934, that plant was poorly maintained even before BP acquired it. “We have never seen a site where the notion ‘I could die today’ was so real,” a consulting firm hired to examine the plant wrote two months before the accident. The explosion was “caused by organizational and safety deficiencies at all levels of BP,” the U.S. Chemical Safety Board concluded. The government ultimately found more than 300 safety violations. BP paid $21 million in fines, a record at the time. A year later, 267,000 gallons of oil leaked from BP’s corroded pipes in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. BP eventually paid more than $20 million in fines and damages.

  Revisiting Texas City in 2009, inspectors from the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration found more than 700 safety violations and proposed a record fine of $87.4 million. Most of the penalties, the agency said, resulted from BP’s failure to live up to the previous settlement.

  In March 2010, OSHA found 62 violations at BP’s Ohio refinery. An OSHA administrator said, “BP told us they are very serious about safety, but they haven’t translated their words into safe working procedures, and they have difficulty applying the lessons learned.” On May 25, 2010, in Alaska—during the Gulf blowout—BP spilled about 200,000 gallons of oil. It was the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System’s third-largest spill.

  “In effect, it appears that BP repeatedly chose risky procedures in order to reduce costs and save time and made minimal efforts to contain the added risk,” wrote Representatives Bart Stupak, Democrat of Michigan, and Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California. “BP cut corner after corner to save a million dollars here and a few hours there,” Waxman said. “And now the whole Gulf Coast is paying the price.”

  BP’s executive overseeing the Gulf response, Bob Dudley, says it’s unfair to blame cultural failings at BP for the string of accidents. “Everyone realized we had to operate safely and reliably, particularly in the U.S., to restore a reputation that was damaged by the accident at Texas City,” he notes. “So I don’t accept, and have not witnessed, this cutting of corners and the sacrifice of safety to drive results.” He’s about to become Tony Hayward’s successor.

  Dauphin Island, Alabama. Salt marshes on the north side. Egrets here look fine, miraculously immaculate. As do gulls. Adult pelicans—unlike those dingy birds near Grand Isle, Louisiana—retain the whiteness of their heads. Wherever they’ve been foraging, it’s the safe place to be now.

  On the main island, palmettos and cicadas. Full-on summer. In the entrance to a bed-and-breakfast hangs a big, framed prayer:

  We pray for your protection, Lord

  From the oil that is on the sea.

  We ask that you keep it far away

  And our island safe and free …

  Standard selfishness directed skyward. How about asking the Lord to stop the blowout. And why would any God of mercy whose eye misses not the falling sparrow actually need to be aske
d?

  Marion Laney, a part-time real estate agent here, says, “Every day something happens that makes you say—y’know—‘What the fuck?’ Stuff that doesn’t make sense, at any level.”

  How’s business? “I’m on the verge of bankruptcy in so many ways it’s almost funny.” Fourth of July weekend coming up. Last year one local company rented one hundred and eleven units for the holiday weekend. This year: ten. House values have fallen by half.

  We park in the driveway of someone he knows. They’re away. He wants photos of the four bucket loaders currently digging enormous amounts of sand from the north side of the island. The sand’s being trucked to the ocean side, where other machinery patty-cakes it into ten-foot berms. Sand castles of woe. Also, unbelievably expensive.

  They’re digging a series of pits about one hundred yards long, fifty yards wide, twelve feet deep. Destroying whatever habitat was there. Scale of digging, scale of sand removal, scale of vegetation ruination: astonishing. Likelihood that this will deter oil in a hurricane: zero.

  I’m guessing the idea is: attempt to replace sand dunes washed away by the last decade’s major hurricanes. In other words, a subterfuge; the town is gouging BP while trying to fix an issue not related to oil.

  Terns carrying fish circle the site; they seem to be looking for lost nestlings. Word is the permit was expedited. Loss of wetlands? What wetlands?

  My other guess: BP doesn’t care what excuse municipalities use to tangle themselves in BP’s money. Money’s how they gain control. Money’s what they have. And all they have. Reasonable people might disagree with me. Unreasonable people surely would.

  Also on the bay side, National Guard workers are replacing the natural shoreline with hard walls, armoring the shore against—what are they thinking? It all seems part of a “can-do” attitude that can’t do the job of distinguishing whether the cure aids the ailment or kills the patient.