A Sea in Flames

by Carl Safina

  But let’s ask it another way. Let’s look at trends. Is stuff dying? What isn’t dying? What about recovery—are any components of the Gulf or its coastal marshes showing signs of bouncing back? Or not?

  Now, here’s the thing: though there’s still a lot of disagreement, suggestions that the oil is rapidly disappearing are beginning to come from various independent sources. Even before July rolls over to August, the floating oil mats that covered thousands of square miles of the Gulf are largely gone. Remaining oil patches are quickly breaking down in the warm surface waters.

  “Less oil on the surface does not mean that there isn’t oil beneath the surface, or that our beaches and marshes are not still at risk,” says NOAA chief Dr. Jane Lubchenco. “The sheer volume of oil that’s out there has to mean there will be some very significant impacts. Dilute does not mean benign.”

  That’s true. But it might also be fair to bear in mind that dilution is what pollution passes on the way to benign. In other words, the trend seems good.

  My friend the tugboat captain is heading back to shore from another trip into the Gulf. This time he’s off Florida, approaching Pensacola. And this time he’s got good news: he’s seeing numerous schools of the tuna cousins called little tunny. Because he’s driving a boat in open water, he’s got plenty of time to talk.

  What are his impressions?

  Despite the fish, “a lot of the water just looks off,” he says. “What it usually looks like and what it looks like now are two different things. I know that’s very subjective. I haven’t seen any obvious slicks recently; it just looks off. It’s like an old piece of Plexiglas; it just doesn’t have that clarity like when it was new. Ever so slightly opaque.

  “And I’ve pulled up a bucket of water that seemed perfectly clean, but it feels slimy. Like I say, the closer to the well, the worse that was. I’m accustomed to seeing large areas of sargassum. I’ve seen none of that. What you see is little bits, like it was run through a food processor, nowhere near the amount I would normally see, and no big patches. And I’m looking for it on purpose. The coloring is usually bright yellow, but it was gray; that’s something that really jumped out at me. Sea turtles, a few, but nowhere near what I’d expect.

  “And once or twice a day, twenty to sixty miles out, I saw isolated large shrimp swimming on the surface. Not near a weed line or near any protection. And also blue crabs, way offshore on the surface. I’ve never seen shrimp on the surface, and I’ve never seen blue crabs so far offshore. These were not small shrimp; I could see them from the wheelhouse, clearly alive, snapping their tails for locomotion. No other shrimp with them and no shelter, so what they were doing there, I’ve got no idea. I’ve seen this about a dozen times in the last ten days. I saw no sign of obvious distress. They were just very much out of place. What to attribute it to, I don’t know. Except we’ve had this enormous event, and then you see behavior you’ve never seen before.

  “And I could count on one hand how many flyingfish I’ve seen. That’s extraordinary; I’m used to seeing them everywhere. They’ve got to be one of the more vulnerable animals to the oil.

  “The dolphins, they’re there, but I have seen, I’d guess, less than a third of what I’d expect, and other than that one enormous herd I saw the day before they dropped dispersants near us, they’re pretty scarce and the groups are smaller. They seem more common to the east, away from the leak site. I haven’t seen a lot of seabird activity except farther east near Pensacola, where the little tunny are. And I only saw this once, but the action was fast and furious: two or three spinner sharks leaping out after prey—spectacular—with multiple twists before they splashed down.”

  When I ask if he’s going back out, he tells me he’s not sure. “I don’t know if they’re going to keep us on the job much longer,” he says. “We’re not doing anything. It’s just wasteful to keep us on the payroll. They should just give the fishermen the money instead of paying us to run in circles.”

  There’s a pause on the line—it’s not like him to stay quiet long—and then he adds this coda: “I can honestly say I have spent the whole summer doing absolutely nothing productive at all, and burning an enormous amount of fuel in the process. We just put a lot of miles and a lot of hours on the boat, for absolutely nothing. We accomplished no work, helped no one, produced no seafood, saved no lives, nothing. The only thing I have from all this is, at least I got to see it.”

  On August 10, NOAA reopens federal waters off a portion of the Florida Panhandle. The modification applies to fish only. No crabs. No shrimp.

  Fraud alert: BP discovers that the numbers of commercial fishing licenses sold since April is up by 60 percent compared with last year. Fishing was closed. “There was an approach by two individuals asking me to sign that they had worked for me, that they had been deckhands for me,” says one boat captain. “I had never seen these two individuals before in my life.” One guy charged with filing false public records and theft by fraud faces possible prison time, large fines, and even hard labor if convicted. But like dead birds, for every one you find, there could be ten out there.

  Legal alert: BP is prepping for its rootin’ tootin’ rodeo of legal wrangling. University of South Alabama’s Bob Shipp says BP’s lawyers tried to hire his whole Department of Marine Sciences to do research for them. “They wanted the oversight authority to keep us from publishing things if, for whatever reason, they didn’t want them to be published,” Shipp says. “People were to be muzzled as part of the contract. It’s not something we could live with.”

  Tulane law professor Mark Davis reminds us that BP is doing what other oil, tobacco, and pharmaceutical companies have done in the past: hiring scientists to do research they want kept secret. “When the best scientists have evidence that would work against you, but they’re not able to present it to the public, well then, you’ve essentially bought some silence.”

  LATE AUGUST

  Relief well? Cement? No cement? Just a week ago BP stopped hedging on whether it would send cement into the bottom of the blown well. Its people have reconfirmed that yes, they will cement the thing using the relief well they’ve been digging for three and a half months. Our adamant commandant the Thadmiral has resolutely insisted that he gives the orders and that the endgame equation is: relief well = bottom kill = pumped cement = final victory.

  Now, what’s this? BP and the feds are back to wondering whether the bottom kill is even necessary.

  The Thadmiral can’t really be telling us that the blown-out well may not need to have heavy fluid and cement pumped into it through the relief well after all, can he? I guess he is. He’s saying, “A bottom kill finishes this well.” Then he adds, “The question is whether it’s already been done with the static kill.”

  I don’t get it.

  This statement seems—what’s a good word?—it seems evasive. How could no one have even hinted at this possibility all along? What’s up? The relief well is late, they’ve been hemming and hawing, and now this.

  It appears that after the relief well intersects its target—assuming it does, eventually—BP wants to check to see whether the cement pumped in through the top of the blown-out well went all the way down the casing, went out through the bottom of the well, and came up far enough between the casing and the rock to have plugged the whole shebang to secure satisfaction.

  If so—spokesmen now say—sending cement in near the bottom might not be necessary. But as the Associated Press puts it, this new idea “would be a hard sell to a public that’s heard for weeks that the bottom kill is the only way to ensure the well is no longer a danger to the region.”

  Exactly.

  What is Allen thinking? The Thadmiral has zero to gain by even introducing this as a question now. It once again undermines the perceived credibility of everything he and other federal officials have been saying for months—even if what he’s saying is perfectly reasonable. Sometimes you just gotta do what you’ve been promising.

  I admire Thad Allen’s
willingness to reassess and to change course accordingly. It’s a sign of intelligence. A foolish consistency indicates a small mind. He may be right, and he’s certainly being reasonable.

  But people don’t want to feel reasoned with. They want to feel safe. This whole disaster is psychological almost as much as it is physical—and America hates flip-floppers. To suddenly open this as a question scratches the scab just forming over this gaping wound. For all of us who’ve been assured for months that a relief well that pumps cement is the only assurance, it feels excruciating.

  Emotions. The public mood is at least as big an issue as the oil. I don’t think the officials have realized this. If they have, they haven’t dealt with it skillfully.

  Emotions dominated the region while the oil flowed. Yes, there is real blame for what caused the blowout and for the utter unpreparedness to anticipate and deal with a blowout one mile deep. Some places, like Grand Isle, received awful coatings of oil. Wildlife suffered, and there is damage to natural habitats (though, luckily, less than feared).

  But the two most devastating social and economical consequences of the blowout—the region-wide tourism meltdown, the vast fisheries closures—have been, in much of the wider region, emotional responses to aesthetics and perceptions, rather than necessary responses to real dangers. That’s been true even where little oil reached. Panic, blind anger, and the months-long inability to know how long the oil would continue flowing have dominated people’s responses to the event—including my own—especially in the months from late April until early August, when the leak was finally stopped.

  Now that the oil has stopped flowing, we can begin to assess the extent of the event, the damage done, the prospects for recovery—and we can begin to calm down.

  We’ve seen what caused this well to blow out, and the varied responses during the chaotic months while the oil was flowing. Now we can afford ourselves a little more calmness, clarity, rationality, and insight.

  So what is the main observable effect to date, and what has taken the biggest hit—marshes, fishes, birds, water quality? It doesn’t seem that way. Many Gulf Coast beaches are now free of both oil and tourists. The tourism industry projects losses in the $20 billion range. Both the tourism and the seafood industries see themselves as battling negative perceptions more than actual oil at this point, and perception may turn out to be the most costly of consequences.

  There’s still a lot of oil out in the Gulf. The twin fears for deep-sea oil plumes have been that billows of toxic hydrocarbons would roll through plankton communities, causing massive damage, and that the dissolved oil and gas would trigger a population explosion of oil- and gas-eating microbes that would burn up most of the surrounding oxygen, strangling nearby life.

  NOAA and the EPA now report on dissolved oxygen at some 350 sampling stations. Bottom line: no oil-caused dead zones developed; none are expected. The average normal oxygen level in the Gulf at plume depths is 4.8 milliliters per liter. The average in-plume level was 3.8. The depressed oxygen level indicated bacteria eating oil.

  But for the water to be a dead zone, the level would have to be below 1.4. Modeling indicates that dead zones have not developed because of oil mixing with nearby water. In other words, it’s a relatively small amount of oil in a big ocean.

  “We’re seeing very few, if any, moderately or heavily oiled turtles,” says sea turtle biologist Blair Witherington. Until the blowout was capped, the floating mats of sargassum weed that young turtles must spend years in had collected their own mats—of oil. Many young turtles must have perished unaccounted for. But the sargassum habitat is revitalizing, the oil dissipating from it. The blackened sargassum of early summer is being replaced by clean new growth teeming with crabs and other recovering creatures, and accompanied by turtles either clean or so lightly oiled that they can be cleaned on the spot and released. Says veterinarian Dr. Brian Stacy, “I personally didn’t anticipate such a dramatic change so quickly.”

  Louisiana State University professor emeritus Edward Overton observes, “The Gulf is incredible in its resiliency and ability to clean itself up. I think we are going to be flabbergasted by the little amount of damage that has been caused by this spill.”

  But remember the oil and dispersant droplets in the larval crabs, showing that the spill was already climbing up the food chain? A pretty explosive find. Yet we haven’t heard more about it. So a reporter from the Orlando Sentinel followed up, asking one of the scientists about it.

  “That was a mistake,” she said.

  But what about the droplets seen in the crab larvae?

  “We don’t know what it is,” she said. “It could be natural.”

  The owner of a bait-and-fuel dock peers into the marina’s clean-looking water and says, “The spill isn’t as bad as the media has suggested.”

  A charter boat captain who’s been fishing several times a week since his area reopened says, “The perception is, everything down here is absolutely slap covered in oil. But that’s not true. You could drive around all day and not find it.” He’s back to catching redfish and speckled sea trout.

  Even in Louisiana’s Barataria Bay, where two months ago gruesome scenes of oil-clotted pelicans horrified America, by mid-August green shoots began appearing in oil-blackened grass and mangroves and cane started to regrow. The Gulf region does indeed appear to have escaped the most dire predictions of spring. It could have been a lot worse.

  Of the oil that reached the coast, most was stopped by the marsh itself. Marshland closest to the Gulf took the worst of the spill, absorbing oil more thoroughly than all the boom in BP’s checkbook, and preventing it from moving farther into thousands of square miles of marshes. Estimates of how much of Louisiana’s vast marshes have been affected are remarkably small. The Associated Press calculates that, over hundreds of miles of Louisiana coastline, at most 3.4 square miles of marshland got oiled. There are roughly 7,000 square miles of marsh.

  It’s tempting to shout, “The marsh is coming back!” But it’s just that the vegetation is regrowing. The marsh is disappearing.

  In Shell Beach, Louisiana, a man saw me staring at all the dead trees standing in the marsh. “When I was a kid,” he said, “this channel wasn’t here. And all of this was woods, all cypress and oak and other hardwoods. Everything behind us was cattle pasture. Now it’s water. The channel let salt water pour in. Now you see all these dead trees. Those all died in the last ten years. The road leading up to the bridge you came over? That road was canopied with trees. It was real nice. So it gives me bad memories. Everything tries to live. Two feet above the water, a tree will grow. Everything wants a chance to survive. The land is subsiding. Anyway, yeah, it was a paradise. Everyone got told they were all gonna be rich when the channel came. Look at any other state. Their coasts continue to thrive. This one died.”

  “We were anchored,” writes Louisiana outdoor columnist Bob Marshall three weeks after the leak has been stanched, “watching redfish push wakes in clear water as they raced along a bank lined with very green and very healthy Spartina marsh. Shrimp were leaping from the water in attempts not to become redfish dinners. Blue claw crabs were riding the outgoing tide toward the Gulf of Mexico. Pelicans were diving on mullet schools. Mottled ducks were puddle jumping, and sand flies were taking their pint of blood from my ankles.

  “One of the planet’s most vibrant and dynamic ecosystems seemed the picture of health. Of course, like most wetlands sportsmen, I knew better. That’s because I know these marshes are turning into open water at the rate of 25 square miles per year.”

  The delta originally covered something like 8,500 to 10,000 square miles, and has lost about 20 percent of that area, or very roughly 1,800 square miles of marsh, with recent loss rates around 20 to 40 square miles a year. All these estimates vary, as do the actual loss rates. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita alone dissolved over 200 square miles of marsh to open water, but much of that had been already degraded marsh. The Mississippi River is the main source of the
delta’s nourishment, but engineering projects have almost completely isolated the river from its own delta. The projects include levees built for ships and against floods, thousands of miles of channels sliced through the mazes of marshes, and the dredging and deepening done for shipping, and oil drilling, and the ships and traffic buzzing to and fro to service the rigs. The delta is disintegrating because the sediment that washes from the heartland now gets shot straight out into the open Gulf. It never gets a chance to build the marshes. Oil and gas pumping have also helped the marshes subside. The rise in sea level isn’t helping.

  A lot of marsh remains, but the amount lost—and with it the lost wildlife, recreation, and fisheries productivity—is staggering. The marshes are one big reason the Gulf produces more seafood than any other region in the lower forty-eight states. But some estimates say they’ll largely vanish by 2050.

  A certain irony is not lost on Dr. Felicia Coleman, who runs Florida State University’s Coastal and Marine Laboratory. “There’s a tremendous amount of outrage with the oil spill, and rightfully so,” she notes pointedly. “But where’s the outrage at the thousands and millions of little cuts we’ve made on a daily basis?”