by Carl Safina
A few days ago, Dr. Lubchenco was the surprise guest speaker at a National Geographic event honoring the famed ocean explorer Dr. Sylvia Earle. Someone tapped my shoulder and said to meet him at a nearby restaurant, and when I did, I was surprised to find myself sitting next to both Jane Lubchenco and Sylvia Earle. I knew that Lubchenco had worked a lot with Thad Allen recently, and after dinner, as we were saying our good-byes, my twinge prompted me to tell her that I’d been writing critically of him, and I was getting the feeling that this might be unfair. “Oh,” she said, “that would be terribly unfair. He’s a good guy. You should meet him.”
And so as we sit down, Lubchenco, a coastal ecologist by profession, explains by way of introduction that Allen’s understanding goes beyond the law he must enforce and includes the ecology, the science, the regional culture, and oil drilling technology.
“I stay up late at night studying,” says Allen quite matter-of-factly. “I had to do the same during Katrina. You have to convert it to something the public can understand. If you don’t put a public face on these disasters, you’ll fail immediately. That’s what happened during Katrina. Mike Brown went and hid, y’know—”
Katrina was then, this is now. Because we’re pressed for time, I want to get down to it. So, I say, if the problem during Katrina was that the federal face was hiding, the problem this time was that the Coast Guard seemed to be guarding against public understanding and access. “How in the world,” I demand, “was declaring a felony for getting near booms—”
“I can explain.” Allen takes a sip of his coffee, a bite of his croissant, and says, “My policy was open access, except where safety and security were issues. Early on, right over the site, we had eight midair near collisions. People thought our flight restrictions were to stop the press; but it was simply to prevent collisions. Regarding boom, there were people vandalizing it to get boats in and out. That wasn’t illegal. So, like you can’t give a parking ticket unless you make parking illegal, we did it to have something to enforce. It was to keep people from damaging the boom. Things happen in the fog of war. But would we go and arrest someone just sitting near a boom? No. That was misunderstood.”
I say, “It had a bad effect on people’s perceptions—including mine—about whose side you were on.”
“Yeah, I understand that,” he says. “But I can tell you there was no untoward intent.”
And why such heavy reliance on booms anyway? I ask. They obviously weren’t up to the job.
“Oil was getting under and through the boom,” Allen acknowledges. “Boom is easily defeated.”
“So why—?”
Lubchenco begins, “The Oil Pollution Act directs NOAA to do research on cleanup, response, these kinds of things, and—”
“Budget casualties,” says Allen, beating her to the punch line. “We stopped doing research and development, so we never advanced beyond skimming and burning and dispersants.”
Lubchenco offers, “Every time they tried to put it in the budget; I wasn’t there then but I’m told—”
“I was budget director for the Coast Guard,” Allen asserts. “This stuff was defunded in the nineties and never got back into the budget. You can quote me on that.”
I know we’re pressed for time and I don’t want to keep you, I say, but that gets to the other peeve: such heavy reliance on dispersant chemicals.
“This is really important,” Allen explains. “Because the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 was Congress’s response to Exxon Valdez, legislators were producing regulations aimed at tanker spills. But drilling technology was going to deep water. We lost it on the technology.”
I comment that what people saw was the Coast Guard building a fire truck while the house was in flames.
“If you’re faced with building the fire truck,” Allen says, accepting the premise, “you can’t deploy a response system that doesn’t exist. You can’t spend time investigating what happened. You can’t get bogged down measuring what’s happening if your urgent goal is to stop it. You optimize what you’ve got. After you’re done, you analyze. We did get better over the weeks—. I don’t think the response was ever optimized. The availability of tools, the weather, how fast we could get ramped up—”
Allen explains that the Coast Guard’s role is to enforce and implement laws and regulations. The Oil Pollution Act of 1990 laid out a spill response called the National Oil Spill Contingency Plan. That creates limitations, but he says it’s worked well—until now.
“This thing went off the scale,” he adds. Allen explains that the oil spill contingency plan had protocols allowing dispersants and surface burning, and when this blowout happened, events triggered the protocols. “But,” he says, “two things went off the scale: one was the total amount of oil; the other was that when the protocols were written, no one envisioned injecting dispersants at depths of five thousand feet.
“And we had what I call ‘the social and political nullification’ of the National Contingency Plan,” he says. In other words, the public and politicians weren’t buying the constraints of the law. Main case in point: “The National Contingency Plan says the spiller is the ‘responsible party.’ That means they have to be there with you. But having BP with us created cognitive dissonance with the public. People didn’t understand; how could BP be part of the command structure? But that was what the law required.”
He thinks it would be best to have a third party—not the oil company, not government—in charge of spill response. “Too much perception of conflicts of interest otherwise,” he says.
Another problem: “BP’s efforts to just keep writing checks to state and local governments—you can describe it any way you want—allowed those folks to act outside of federal coordination. Perfect example: the people of Plaquemines Parish decided they wanted to put boom out in Barataria Bay. That should have been coordinated with us. But they independently went out and did it. And to keep the boom in place, they hired a contractor who drove PVC pipe into marshland—every twenty feet. They did that with BP money. Obviously not good for the marsh. The law says it has to be federally coordinated, but that was hard when the law was politically, socially, and economically nullified. There were other plans to close off estuaries with rock jetties so oil wouldn’t get in. But that would basically destroy the ecosystem.”
“We were very insistent on preventing people from trying to clean marshes,” Lubchenco adds. “That just pushes the oil into the sediment, and then later it keeps coming up.” After the spill from the Amoco Cadiz, some oiled marshes were bulldozed; those are the areas that haven’t recovered. Marsh recovery seems to depend a lot on not disturbing the plants’ roots. With the Exxon Valdez, the mistake was to pressure-wash tidal zones with hot water. Hard clams are still diminished in washed areas because the structure of sediments was disrupted.
Following up on BP’s unusual eagerness to write checks—thinking again of Exxon—I ask for their thoughts on why BP agreed to fund a $20 billion account when no law required that.
“Early on,” Allen replies, “BP was saying yes to just about anything. It’s safe to say BP thought the situation was an existential threat to their corporation and their industry.”
“But—early on, too,” Lubchenco says turning to Allen, “BP wouldn’t let us get the video. That was a case where they had to be ordered to—”
“But even there,” Allen replies, “I don’t think they were trying to hide anything. Their position on live video was that with several remotely operated vehicles being very delicately maneuvered near each other, they didn’t want the operators under the added stress of being watched real-time.”
“That’s reasonable,” I say.
“It is reasonable,” Allen affirms. “But you know what? I said no. I said, ‘At this point—you lose that.’ I told them, ‘You’ve had a market failure and you’re responsible. So you lose discretion and things get dictated. That’s the way it is.’ ”
Allen adds that in dealing extensively with BP’s seni
or management, he sensed “no indication of any ulterior motives other than to re-establish their credibility, do what they had to do, and be responsible.”
Seeing my face turn skeptical, he continues: “Put it this way: there’s a difference between what seems like foot-dragging and obfuscation—and competence. BP is an oil company; they’re very good at getting oil out of the ground, but they absolutely suck at retail. One-on-one interactions with people—they don’t have a clue. You cannot hire consultants to give you compassion and empathy. A lot of things people got upset about and viewed as bad intent on BP’s part were, in my view, a lack of competency, capability, and capacity. But it produces inaction and people get the same perception.”
Speaking of inaction and perception, I ask how Coast Guard rear admiral Mary Landry could have said—after the whole rig sank, with eleven lives—that it was too early to call this a catastrophe and that no oil was leaking. Why didn’t they act immediately as if this obvious catastrophe would produce a worst-case blowout, and hope they were wrong?
Lubchenco insists that this is what they did. That the president said in his very first briefing, “I want everybody prepared for worst-case scenarios”; that within hours, her agency began generating models of currents, predicting where oil would be going. “Our folks mobilized anticipating the worst. Right from the beginning our efforts were incredibly intense.”
But how, I persist, could the Coast Guard have said immediately that it didn’t seem oil was leaking?
Allen replies that for two days after the rig sank, there was so much silt kicked up that the remote vehicles had a hard time seeing anything. “You’ve gotta remember, this is a place where there’s no human access. Everything has to be done remotely. It took almost seventy-two hours to understand what was going on. Initially there were leaks in three places where the pipe was kinked. It took a few days before the abrasive sand and everything coming out finally ground a larger hole in it.”
“You can do Monday-morning quarterbacking,” Lubchenco says to me a bit pointedly, “but at the time there was extraordinary effort. We mobilized ships and planes and people, assuming that it would be really bad.”
“How,” I posit, “is it possible to assume it’s really bad when you kept putting out flow estimates that were one-sixtieth of the—”
Allen interrupts: “I was irritated over the early declarations about whether this was one or five thousand barrels. I listened to that and I thought, ‘This is crazy—nobody knows.’ ”
Lubchenco wants me to appreciate that “for weeks and weeks, the primary focus was stopping the flow.” She adds, “We all thought the early estimates were very low, but we didn’t have a way of getting better estimates initially. In every other spill, the amount of oil was estimated from the surface. But this time a lot of oil was staying deep. We were really frustrated early on because BP said, ‘No, we don’t want anybody else down there.’ ”
“They were just focused on stopping the oil,” says Allen. “That’s when it’s our job to say, ‘Here’s our national priorities; here’s how we’re gonna do it.’ With the amount of remotely operated vehicles moving around down there, it is stunning we didn’t have a major accident. We had ROVs bump into one other and knock things off; that happened twice, almost with major consequences. It’s like the eight near midair plane collisions. There was an unbelievable amount of stuff going on within one square mile; that never happened before. The area where oil was coming to the surface sometimes had thirty-five vessels all in one square mile. But at one point,” he adds, “I said, ‘We’re gonna establish an independent estimate of flow rate.’ ”
Lubchenco continues: “Thad ordered them to let the group go down and make those measurements.”
Allen takes another sip of his coffee and glances at his watch. I know we don’t have a ton of time left. He poses the next question himself: “Could we have stopped it sooner? In hindsight, we might have saved two to three weeks. But we were operating with an abundance of caution.”
“We had very good reason to believe,” Lubchenco informs me, “that the well had been damaged. The concern was, if we built too much pressure in it, the oil would start breaking out through the seafloor. And then—it would be completely uncontrollable.”
“That’s the Armageddon we all feared,” Allen adds. “So we had eighty-five days of a different spill coming to the surface in a different way in a different place every day, depending on winds and current conditions. We had a hundred thousand different patches of oil from Louisiana to Florida. Because the oil spill contingency plan didn’t call for enough equipment, we were behind the power curve for six or seven weeks. We had three kinds of responses to the oil: skim it, burn it, or disperse it.”
I point out that all of the oil was coming out of one pipe: “You had your hands around it right there at the source, and you let it get away.”
“We just did not have the ability to capture it at the source,” Lubchenco replies. “And we didn’t have the boats, skimming equipment, right weather—or the kind of oil—to let us just put a ring around it and capture it at the surface. It sounds like that should have been easy,” she says. “But it was not.”
“When the Deepwater Horizon’s pipe broke,” Allen affirms, “there was nothing capable of capturing that oil. A system should have been in place, but it wasn’t, because we were focused on tanker spills. Oil spill response in this country is based on Exxon Valdez.”
“That’s painfully obvious,” Lubchenco concurs.
“The assumption was, ‘We’ll never have a failed blowout preventer.’ ”
But we know blowouts happen, I insist. What they finally installed on July 15 to stop the leak, they should have already had in a warehouse before April 20.
“I couldn’t agree more,” Lubchenco affirms.
“We’re not gonna sit here and defend the fact that it wasn’t there,” Allen says.
Of the kinds of things that were there, Lubchenco says that she hadn’t anticipated how much their response options depended on weather. “I mean, skimming just doesn’t work in rough water.”
“But in rough water you can disperse,” Allen points out, “and the motion helps mix the dispersant and oil so it’s not just laying on top of it.”
“Oil is toxic and nasty,” Lubchenco says. “There are no choices that are risk-free.”
“No right choices,” Allen agrees. “Nothing good happens when oil gets into water.”
“Skimming and burning were just very ineffective. That wasn’t getting us very far,” Lubchenco says.
“The Hobson’s choice was,” Allen says, “accept the fate of the oil in the ocean, or accept the fate of the oil along the shore. There was no easy answer.”
“So,” Lubchenco says, “the decision was made—not by me; on the advice of our scientific support people—that, on balance, using dispersants was the right thing to do.”
But the thing that sticks in people’s ribs, I say, is this: dispersed oil is still oil. And it’s still in the waters of the Gulf.
“Agreed,” says Lubchenco.
“The dispersants don’t make the oil go away,” Allen acknowledges.
“And that’s problematic,” Lubchenco points out. “So let me continue. Now, the thing is, dispersed oil is available to be biodegraded much, much faster.” That’s because the crude’s surface area gets vastly increased, facilitating microbial attachment, basically cutting it into little pieces that bacteria can more easily eat. “And that’s the whole rationale for using chemical dispersants,” she says.
“But,” she adds, “twice as much was dispersed physically as chemically. When such hot oil, being shot out under pressure, suddenly hits such cold water, it fractionates into microscopic droplets. ‘Dispersed’ doesn’t mean it hasn’t had impact. I think it has likely had. Early on we got ships out there to get baseline data of things like plankton and bluefin tuna larvae—as much as possible. When this disaster happened, just-spawned shrimp and crabs and fish were in the
drifting plankton. The plankton, I think, could have been very seriously affected. Something like eighty to ninety percent of the economically important fish populations in the Gulf depend on the marshes and estuaries for part of their lives; they move back and forth. For them, this could not have come at a worse time. But it’s next to impossible to document—so far—what’s happened to them.”
“So,” she sums up, “1.25 million barrels of neutrally buoyant chemically and physically dispersed oil ended up drifting in the water at depths between thirteen hundred to forty-three hundred feet. And that—that’s not good. I mean, oil is inherently really toxic. We won’t know for a while—we really won’t know for decades—but it’s likely it’s had very serious impacts.”
I’m surprised that Lubchenco seems to think things will likely turn out worse than I’m betting they will. And that she’s saying so. I might have expected her to downplay the long-term effects while I insisted that things were likely worse. How odd that we’re not following that script. It’s in her best professional interest for the long-term effects of this to be minimal. Because the results won’t be in for a long time and some damage may never be known, Jane’s got the option of hiding behind uncertainty to make herself look better. She could easily put on a game face and say she thinks the Gulf will bounce right back. That she’s not doing this suggests both admirable integrity and a cool hand on the tiller.
“Even if the oil degrades pretty rapidly,” Lubchenco says, “and is gone in, like, a year, its impact on populations may already be very, very substantial. I have very grave concerns about impacts this has had for populations that were already depressed and longer-lived species.”
