by Carl Safina
I’m going to keep breathing.
The same CNN article informs us that Christian, Jewish, and Muslim clergy joined “in prayer and commitment to the communities most affected by the BP oil disaster,” while “wives of current and former major league baseball players also fanned out across southern Louisiana to draw attention to the people and creatures affected by the disaster.” Whatever it takes.
Louisiana’s Governor Bobby Jindal, appearing to both lubricate his cake and eat it, complains that the oil has already ruined the seafood industry and depressed tourism, and now Obama’s ban on deep exploratory drilling is costing thousands of Louisianans their jobs. When such wanting-it-both-ways rhetoric actually makes some sense—as this does—you know we’re really in trouble. Stuck because we’ve built no options.
Bobby must therefore be pleased when, on July 8, a federal appeals court in the heart of New Orleans affirms a lower court’s June 22 decision that there should be no drilling ban. Two of the judges on the appeals panel—both appointed by Ronald Reagan—had represented the oil and gas industries as private lawyers. Judge Jerry E. Smith’s clients included ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, and Sunoco. Judge W. Eugene Davis represented various companies involved in offshore drilling. Blind justice.
Plaquemines Parish president Billy Nungesser, who’s been outspoken throughout this ordeal, is apoplectic about the rule criminalizing getting within seventy feet of booms. Nungesser says the only way to maintain public confidence in the cleanup is to make it as transparent as possible.
I appreciate that sentiment, but I don’t fully agree. In my opinion, if everyone really saw what a rope-a-dope circus this “cleanup” really is, they’d acquire scant reason for confidence.
But, actually helping address the confidence chasm, out of the ashes of the former Minerals Management Service, some fresh resolve. The former federal prosecutor who now heads the Obama administration’s newly created Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement outlines for us his planned approach: “I’m not going to say you can’t drill, but if people don’t get the message that we are really stressing regulation and enforcement to an unprecedented degree they will have problems with me,” he says. “There’s a reason why we renamed the agency by putting regulation and enforcement in the name.”
Just a few days after the appeals court affirmed the overturn of the administration’s ban on exploratory drilling, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar issues a new moratorium. Rather than basing the ban on depth, which the courts called arbitrary, he bases it on what he should have based it on in the first place: “evidence that grows every day of the industry’s inability, in the deep water, to contain a catastrophic blowout, respond to an oil spill and to operate safely.” Salazar adds, “The industry must raise the bar on its deepwater safety.” It sounds like what I want to hear: our government working to protect us.
Of course, the head of the American Petroleum Institute says the only thing he can say within the narrow confines of his job script: that the ban is “unnecessary and shortsighted,” that it will “shut down a major part of the nation’s energy lifeline,” that it “threatens enormous harm to the nation.” In other words, all the usual hype.
And, speaking of hype, a White House senior adviser this week calls the blowout the “greatest environmental catastrophe of all time.” He adds that he’s “reasonably confident” that all of the oil can be contained by the end of July.
If only all great catastrophes will be over in a week. Sad fact: this is far from the “greatest environmental catastrophe of all time.” Actually using oil is the far greater environmental disaster; oil and coal are changing the world’s climate, swelling the rising seas, and turning the oceans acidic. And in the Gulf itself, getting the oil has destroyed far more of the Mississippi River Delta’s world-class wetlands than the blowout ever will.
Congressional briefing, Capitol Hill. Testimony. National Wildlife Federation president Larry Schweiger likens the response to inventing fire trucks and building a fire department for a house that’s already in flames. He relates his recent experience aboard a boat in the Gulf amid “oil an inch-and-a-half thick in places” and “fumes overwhelming.”
Another witness at the briefing says that a sixty-nine-year-old man with sixty-nine cents in the bank called into Larry King’s Gulf telethon and pledged $10 on his credit card. Why doesn’t such decency come in corporate proportions?
Courts have ruled that a corporation’s first and foremost “responsibility” is maximizing profits for shareholders. But what if the courts had said instead—in consideration of the fact that a corporation’s profitability benefits from military, copyright, and patent protections of the United States government—and by being ensconced in a great and technologically sophisticated country made stable by its laws and the peace its taxes buy—that corporations must budget 10 percent of profits (in the age-old tradition of tithing) to doing social good? What would the world look like then?
But that would be big government, interfering with business. Burdensome regulation! Meddling with the market. Happy to enjoy the meal and loath to wash the dishes, oil companies and other multinationals slurp their market-distorting taxpayer-funded subsidies like spaghetti. But this prevents new energy technologies and new companies from getting a toehold in a real market.
Sorry; the mind drifts.
Next witness. Brittin Eustice. Charter boat captain, about thirty. He takes people fishing for fun. Rather, took. Like the guy I talked to on Dauphin Island, Eustice says he recently fished an area about eighty miles south of Port Fourchon, Louisiana. Lookin’ for the big boys: marlin, huge yellowfins. It was “very dead.” They got one small blackfin and one dolphinfish in three days of fishing. “Usually that’s what you catch in the first ten minutes,” he says; usually you see lines of live floating weed and a lot of flyingfish. It was, he testifies, “extremely unusual.” About the Oil and his life, he tells the assembled congressional folks, “No one knows what’s the plan, what the effects will be. How can I plan anything?”
National Wildlife’s Schweiger has the closing comment: “America needs clean energy …” He elaborates while my mind drifts again, because, of course, this is the most obvious message of the blowout. But before that locomotive can start moving, more fundamental things need to happen, things about money in politics.
On July 10, a Saturday, crews use undersea robots to yank six 52-pound bolts and remove the existing flange. They remove the ill-sealed cap installed five weeks ago. Oil resumes gushing. Next task: installing a 12-foot high, 15,000-pound piece of equipment that will eventually attach to the remaining hardware on the ocean floor and, on its other end, allow attachment of an 18-foot-high, 150,000-pound series of hydraulic seals that—engineers hope—will allow them to fully direct all the oil up to collection ships.
In a procedure taking several days, they install this new tighter-fitting cap, which features valves like a blowout preventer’s. On a positive note: it is possible that the cap can also close the well like the blowout preventer was supposed to do, stopping the flow of oil altogether.
It appears that BP is actually getting serious about stopping the flow of oil. Not just collecting some of it. Not just marking time while waiting for relief wells that require more weeks of drilling.
Cleverly—how refreshing to be able to say that—this new cap has a perforated temporary pipe above the valves. Rather than trying to simply cap the enormous pressure, the perforations allow the pressurized oil to continue escaping through the open valves while workers fully tighten the cap into place.
By July 14, on the eighty-fourth day of the blowout, nearly 5 million barrels—something like 200 million gallons of oil—have spewed into the Gulf. And the well is still flowing unchecked. This blowout now clearly outranks Ixtoc I’s 3.3-million-barrel blowout.
Engineers have been trying to determine if it’s safe to close the cap’s vents and let the pressure build. The worry is that pressurized oil could rupture ano
ther channel for itself right through the seafloor. If that happens, there’d be no way of controlling it. They’re also afraid that the blowout might find its way into the relief wells, blowing them out, too. These fears cause BP to suspend digging the relief wells that we’ve been told for months are the “ultimate solution.” Meanwhile, oil keeps gushing into the Gulf.
Finally they’re ready to see if this cap is going to work. They begin closing a trio of ram valves. They monitor the pressure gauges. If the pressure holds, it means the cap is holding. If the pressure falls, it means the oil has found another route out.
New vocabulary term: “static kill.” Definition: using a device that should already have been invented, built, tested, and warehoused for this purpose before the blowout ever happened.
The Thadmiral tells us that BP tells him that the test of the pressure will last six to forty-eight hours “or more, depending.”
And as if our expectations could be lower, BP tells us to hold our applause, that such a cap has “never before been deployed at such depths” and that its ability to contain the oil and gas cannot be assured.
The pressure builds.
And so on July 15, a seismic shift: at about 3:00 in the afternoon, it looks like the new cap, with its valves shut, is holding the pressure. They’ve gotten control of the upward surge.
In other words, they’ve stopped the leak.
But no one celebrates. Everyone is holding their breath. No one knows whether the pressure will hold indefinitely. In the days to come, the pressure appears lower than expected, suggesting the possibility of leaks. Word of leaks near the well begins seeping out in the media. BP wants to leave the well capped and the valves shut. The Thadmiral wants BP to hook up the collection lines and let the oil go into waiting vessels at the surface. That would lessen the pressure, lowering the chances of a rupture through the nearby seafloor.
But it seems there are no leaks; they leave the cap closed.
This is how the blowout is over. It’s the end of the beginning.
Eighty-six days. Two thousand and sixty-four hours.
Kill the well, slay the dragon, conquer the demon. But it’s only liquid under miles and miles of the pressure of the Earth. Prick of a needle. That’s all it ever was. The real fire-breathing dragon, the real dangerous demon, lurking on the surface all along, can be located in the mirror.
It’s been the world’s largest accidental release of oil into ocean waters. Twenty times the volume spewed by the Exxon Valdez. They’d told us 1,000 barrels a day; then 5,000; then 12,000 to 19,000; then upward from there. Now the best estimate: 56,000 to 68,000 barrels per day. From April 22 to June 3, oil had spurted from a jagged break in the riser pipe at about 56,000 barrels, or 2.4 million gallons, per day. After June 3, when robots cut the riser, oil spewed into the ocean even more freely for a time, around 68,000 barrels—approaching 3 million gallons—per day, or 2,000 gallons per minute.
The Gulf got an estimated 4.9 million barrels, about 206 million gallons: 99,700 gallons per hour, 1,662 gallons per minute, about 30 gallons per second. Roughly 25 gallons each and every time your heart sent a pulse of blood up your aorta, for nearly three months.
But the beat goes on and the usual pumping and burning continues; we in the United States burn over 20 million barrels of oil a day, about the same as Japan, China, India, Germany, and Russia—combined. Per person, Americans burn more fossil fuels and emit more carbon dioxide than anyone else; 4 percent of the world’s population uses 30 percent of its nonrenewable energy.
Just as some of the hysteria was misplaced, now a false calm ensues. BP seems to be saying it’s all finished; the oil is gone. All gone. That is also hype, a kind of information junk shot, pumping smoke and mirrors into the media stream to jam the flow of clarity.
BP’s stock price rises.
LATE JULY
For a crisis begun so spectacularly, it’s a murky, uncertain ending. We begin the next phase with an enormous amount of floating oil, and Gulf waters polluted by deep oil and dispersant. What now?
Of course, turtles, birds, fish, shrimp, crabs, shellfish, dolphins, and all their habitats have been affected. And creatures that range widely but funnel through the Gulf to migrate or to breed are of hemispheric importance. How many of these creatures, and what proportion of their populations, were damaged or spared? That, no one can say.
So far, the dead wildlife found and collected total about 500 sea turtles, 60 dolphins, and nearly 2,000 birds. It’s not at all clear that oil killed most of them. But it’s also not at all clear how many were killed by oil and never found. One dolphin’s ribs were broken—a boat strike. But dolphins are usually nimble enough to avoid boats. A necropsy found what looked like a tar ball in its throat. Affected by oil, then hit by a boat; it’s a reasonable conclusion. But not certain.
Every oiled carcass found may suggest ten to one hundred undetected deaths. Birders are reporting the disappearance of black skimmers, pelicans, royal terns, least terns, Sandwich terns, laughing gulls, and reddish egrets from several Louisiana islands, including Raccoon Island, Cat Island, Queen Bess Island, and East Grand Terre Island.
But it’s also true that there remain along Gulf shores and marshes many clean-looking pelicans, gleaming gulls, and egrets with no regrets. A silver lining for animals with gills is that they got a season’s break from fishing, which typically kills millions of adult fish, shrimp, and crabs, probably far more than this blowout did.
Some say the floating oil is blocking light needed by the plankton that are the base of the whole food web. Some say oil will settle on the bottom and continue washing up for years. Some say microbes will eat it. Some say those microbes will also rob regional waters of oxygen, killing nearly everything for miles. Some say no one knows what its effects will be, or how long they’ll last.
As a naturalist, I find that the effects on wildlife remain hard to grasp.
People, though, have taken deep and immediate hits. Closures have meant an end to fishing, the cessation of a way of life and of the way thousands of people understand who they are. No one knows whether the seafood and tourism and fisheries will be clean and healthy again next year or in a decade.
So even with the leak stopped, there’s hardly a sigh of relief.
“Just because they kill the well doesn’t mean our troubles go away,” says the crab dealer in Yscloskey, Louisiana. Another fisherman says, “As soon as BP gets this oil out of sight, they’ll get it out of mind, and we’ll be left to deal with it alone.”
“We’re not going anywhere” is the reassurance offered by NOAA chief Dr. Lubchenco. But official reassurances do little to dispel such deep anxiety. Many residents don’t know who to believe, or what to believe. Many simply believe that the oil isn’t going away anytime soon, whatever anyone says.
But they do believe that help is going away. During a public forum, Louisiana fishermen hear an Alaskan seafood spokesman describe how after the 1989 Exxon Valdez accident, the perception was that oil affected all seafood from the state. “It took ten-plus years to get out of that hole,” he says. “We put in a request directly to the oil companies to fund a marketing effort. They gave us zero, absolutely nothing.”
An estimated 45,000 people and 6,000 vessels and aircraft have by now been involved in the response. Now even the retreat of oil manages to become bad news for fishermen. For many fishermen idled by the oil, responding to the oil has become their livelihood. As the crude ebbs, many face being left with nothing to do but wait for the government to reopen fishing areas, and for consumers to show confidence in their seafood. And there are no guarantees that they will be able to resume fishing soon.
“This whole area is gonna die,” bemoans a fifth-generation fisher-woman in Buras, Louisiana. “Down here, we have oil and we have fishing,” she says. “We are water people. Everything we do involves the sea, and the spill has taken it all away from us. I’ve been contemplating suicide to the point of making myself a hangman’s noose, honest to God.
Then I decided that’s not going to do anything, apart from shut me up.”
The manager of a BP decontamination site for cleanup workers says he gets calls “every day” about people who want to commit suicide.
I can’t help noticing it’s only the victims who want to kill themselves.
On July 19, while a tanker is offloading oil near a Chinese port, two oil pipelines explode, sending flames 60 feet into the air and an estimated 11,000 barrels of oil into the Yellow Sea. Local media reports a 70-square-mile slick, which workers try to break up with chemical dispersants and with oil-eating bacteria.
On July 21, a federal judge stops companies from developing oil and gas wells on billions of dollars’ of leases off Alaska’s northwest coast. He says the federal government sold drilling rights without following environmental law. Alaska Native groups and environmentalists insist that no one could ever clean up an oil spill in Arctic waters, especially if there’s sea ice. The Arctic is much more remote than the Gulf of Mexico. It’s far from harbors and airports. The nearest Coast Guard base lies many horizons away.
“That spill in the Gulf, it could have been our ocean,” says Daisy Sharp, mayor of Point Hope, an Inupiat Eskimo community of seven hundred people on the Chukchi Sea. “It’s sad to say, but in a way I’m glad it happened. Maybe now people will take a closer look at offshore oil drilling.”
Caroline Cannon, Native president of the village, says the decision brought tears of joy: “The world has heard us, in a sense. We’re not on the corner of the back page. We exist and we count.”
Well, Ms. Cannon, you guys exist as far as I’m concerned, but oil greases Alaska. Alaska’s governor and other politicians love oil, because the petroleum industry pumps more than 90 percent of the state’s revenue into Alaska’s budget. And that judge didn’t void the leases, but merely ruled that the federal government must analyze the environmental impact of development. For the oil companies, it’s not over.
