The Gulf of Mexico oil spill is now turning into a catastrophe
The failure of BP’s ‘top kill’ means there is no end in sight to the misery of Louisiana’s people and wildlife, writes Geoffrey Lean.
By Geoffrey Lean
Published: 8:47AM BST 01 Jun 2010
BP
Oysters were broiling, softshell crabs frying, seafood gumbo simmering and spirits being obstinately kept up at the Plaquemines Parish annual seafood festival at the weekend. But then the devastating news came through. Billy Nungesser, the rotund president of the Louisiana parish at the centre of the US fishing industry in the Gulf of Mexico, was just getting up to speak when a BlackBerry message told him of the failure of the “top kill”. It was BP’s best chance of choking off the volcano of oil a mile beneath the surface of the sea, which opened up after the accident on the Deepwater Horizon rig that killed 11 people.
“I saw the message and my knees got weak and I forgot everything I was going to say,” he recalls. “I looked at those men and women in the crowd. And I couldn’t, didn’t have the heart to tell them it didn’t work.”
The news, many local people feared (when they finally heard it) could mean that the annual celebration of the rich harvest from the Gulf, held in a bend of the Mississippi near where it pours into the sea – was the last held. For it marked the moment that what has become the worst US environmental disaster threatened to tip into a full-blown catastrophe.
When Nungesser finally found his voice, he told his audience: “Stay encouraged, keep the faith. We’re going to beat this thing and we’re not going to back down.” But afterwards, he predicted that the spill would “destroy south Louisiana”, adding: “We are dying a slow death here, and we don’t have time to wait while they try solutions.”
Sunday’s abandonment of BP’s three-day attempt to plug the well, 48 miles offshore, through “top kill” – injecting vast amounts of heavy mud and junk, including golf balls and shredded tyres, into the belching hole in the ocean floor – appears to have put an end to hopes of shutting off the flow of oil any time soon.
Senior White House figures accept that there is little chance of choking it off until two relief wells, bypassing the volcano, are completed, which is expected to be in August. And by then the spill is set to have got much, much worse.
BP will continue to grapple with what it has come to call “the beast”, but it has used up all its relatively easy options. Attempts to close off valves with remote-controlled submarines, and to lower a steel and concrete container over the leak, have both failed over the past weeks. And administration officials – led by Steven Chu, the Nobel Prize-winning Energy Secretary – stopped the “top kill” attempt because of “very, very grave concerns” that it was putting too much pressure on the well, and so risking greater disaster.
Now the company is having to move on to even more difficult operations, where the likelihood of making things worse increases even as the chances of success fall. Its next ploy is to try to cut the broken pipe through which the oil is being emitted, and to lower a dome to capture most of the black sticky liquid and siphon it off. But this is likely to increase the flow by a fifth, at least in the short term, and even if it works, will not shut it off completely.
So the focus is increasingly shifting to containing the spill. Attempts to do this have, of course, been going on from the start. BP has been trying to burn and skim off the oil, and to keep it from reaching land by laying hundreds of miles of booms, but with limited success. After being kept at bay by favourable winds, the oil has begun to come ashore; about a quarter of Louisiana’s 400-mile coast is polluted.
The oil is making landfall in the fragile but ecologically vital wetlands, which are used by three quarters of US waterfowl, and are critically important nurseries for fish. Ninety per cent of the Gulf’s marine species depend on the wetlands at some stage of their lives, and most are located in Louisiana. Largely because of that, the state produces more fish and seafood than anywhere else in the country, outside Alaska.
Worse, this is the breeding season. The waters of the wetlands should be a factory of life, churning with fish and alive with birds feeding on them. But they are unnaturally quiet. Some scientists fear that the marshes could die altogether if they become seriously polluted. They are already under severe pressure; about 24 square miles disappear every year.
The oil could smother and kill the grasses that hold the whole system together, leaving just mud to be rapidly washed away. And the hurricane season, predicted to be one of the worst for years, officially opens today, leading to concern that the storms could turn the spill into crashing black surf and drive it far into the wetlands.
But it may well be that the worst effects are occurring far out to sea. As Dr Reese Halter, of California Lutheran University, puts it, this one is “behaving unlike any other oil spill ever observed before”. Scientists say that, instead of rising to the surface as normal, much of the oil is spreading in giant underwater plumes; one is thought to be 22 miles long.
This may be because dispersants were sprayed on to the oil near where it was emitted, reducing its buoyancy. The chemicals are highly toxic and break the oil up into small droplets, which can be eaten by sea life.
“Every fish and invertebrate contacting the oil is probably dying,” says Prof Prosanta Chakrabarty of Louisiana State University. He recently discovered two new species of fish off the coast, but fears that they will become extinct before his findings are published in a scientific journal in August.
President Obama this weekend announced that the onshore clean-up effort would be tripled, but as well as doing nothing to combat the peril of the plumes, his initiative has come too late to prevent perceptions of his handling of the crisis plummeting. In a sense, that is unfair. It is BP, not the administration, that is supposed to have the expertise and equipment to tackle the leak. And by US law, the government is not supposed to take charge of clean-up operations when a private company has promised to meet the bill, as BP has done.
Politically, however, the President has been inept, projecting his cool, “no drama Obama” style, when a “bullhorn moment” – like George Bush’s at Ground Zero just after September 11 – might have served him better. He relied too much on BP’s early assurances that it had the situation under control, and on its gross understatement of the scale of the spill; some 19,000 barrels of oil a day are thought to be gushing out, compared to the 1,000 originally announced.
It is also embarrassing that Obama opened up vast areas of US waters to oil drilling just weeks before this accident. But though it may give him an opportunity to push more strongly for a promised expansion of renewable energy, there is little sign of the spill doing much to wean the US off its addiction to the black stuff. Thirty per cent of the fuel used to transport Americans comes from the Gulf and, even now, about half of them approve of offshore drilling.
There will undoubtably be tougher controls on the oil industry: one revelation of the crisis has been how poorly it was regulated.
Indeed, Obama announced last week that 33 deepwater drilling operations in the Gulf – 22 of them off Louisiana – would be suspended immediately, and that no new ones considered for at least six months.
That, however, will do even more damage to the battered state, by shutting down the oil industry as well as its fisheries. For the people of the Gulf coast, that will be no better than plunging from the Plaquemines festival’s frying pans into its fires.
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