BP Oil Slick to Make Landfall Here Sunday
by Glynn Wilson
DAUPHIN ISLAND – We arrived on the scene here before sunset on Friday at the point where the massive BP oil slick is supposed to hit Alabama first, the Western tip of Dauphin Island south of Mobile.
There’s already a black streak in the sand on the primary dune line here from routine pollution on this side of Mobile Bay.
So far, the readiness to handle a disaster of this magnitude appears not just inadequate, but non-existant. There are only 60 miles of boom to cover 300 miles of coast, according to a spokesman for the town of Dauphin Island, and it is useless with waves of three feat or higher.
With storms coming in over the Gulf for the next few days out of the southwest, the waves could top six to eight feet or more. There are no plans in place to do ANYTHING to try and stop the oil from coming ashore here.
The clouds on Friday looked like the sky over Mordor in the final episode of Lord of the Rings, a harbinger of a looming disaster of epic proportions. This will no doubt dwarf the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William’s Sound Alaska in March of 1989, and without exaggeration, will be called the largest and worst environmental disaster in American history.
Did I mention no plan?
British Petroleum once downplayed the possibility of a catastrophic accident at an offshore rig that exploded, according to AP. In the company’s 2009 exploration plan and environmental impact analysis for the well, BP suggested it was unlikely, or virtually impossible, for an accident to occur that would lead to a giant crude oil spill and serious damage to beaches, fish and mammals.
The Mobile Press-Register apparently broke the story on a confidential government report which makes clear the Coast Guard now fears the well could become an unchecked gusher shooting millions of gallons of oil per day into the Gulf.
As for the cause of the blast and the leak, according to the New Orleans bureau of the Associated Press, oil services contractor Halliburton Inc. said in a statement Friday that workers had finished cementing the well’s pipes 20 hours before the rig went up in flames.
Halliburton, the company of former Vice President Dick Cheney, is named as a defendant in most of the more than two dozen lawsuits filed by Gulf Coast people and businesses claiming the oil spill could ruin them financially. One lawsuit filed by an injured technician on the rig claims that Halliburton improperly performed its job in cementing the well, “increasing the pressure at the well and contributing to the fire, explosion and resulting oil spill.”
Remote-controlled blowout preventers designed to apply brute force to seal off a well should have kicked in. But they failed to activate after the explosion.
Scott Bickford, a lawyer for several Deepwater Horizon workers who survived the blast, said he believes a “burp” of natural gas rose to the rig floor and was sucked into machinery, leading to the explosion.
If that’s not enough, BP has knowingly broken federal laws and violated its own internal procedures by failing to maintain crucial safety and engineering documents related to one of the firms other deepwater production projects in the Gulf of Mexico, a former contractor who worked for the oil behemoth claimed in internal emails last year and other documents obtained by Truthout.
Then, the American Bird Conservancy, the nation’s leading bird conservation organization, released a list of key bird sites they say are most immediately threatened by the ongoing Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf.
The pelicans, like the one above, are going to have a hard time of it, especially at the Gulf Coast Least Tern Colony; the Lower Pascagoula River – including the Pascagoula River Coastal Preserve; the Gulf Islands National Seashore; Breton National Wildlife Refuge – including the Chandeleur Islands; Dauphin Island; Fort Morgan Historical Park; Bon Secour National Wildlife Refuge; Eglin Air Force Base; Delta National Wildlife Refuge; and Baptiste Collette Bird Islands.
This is the kind of disaster that changes mens’ souls. It will turn many Republicans into environmentalists, and get the Democrats in Alabama talking about the environment finally, without a doubt, in the midterm elections just one month down the road on June 1.
We are on the scene and will document it the best we can over the next few days.
Watch the news page for more headlines, and don’t forget to hook up with us on Facebook.
The scene appeared entirely routine at the gas wells along Alabama’s Gulf Coast on Friday, two days before BP’s destructive oil slick is scheduled to virtually shut down this part of the world, killing tourism, devastating commercial and recreational sea food harvesting, and covering the coast and inland estuaries in black, gooey oil.
© 2010, Glynn Wilson. All rights reserved. The Locust Fork News-Journal, LocustFork.Net
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Glynn:
Look forward to your reporting. Do you think this will change Riley’s plans about a luxury resort at Gulf State Park?
Keep up the great, informative reporting! We need to hear it as it really is.
Good question…
Great Info, Glynn.
Dangers of unknown size and character send you ricocheting between complacency and alarmist panic. If attempts succeed to shut the leaking oil well’s valve, or if the magical dome manages to contain the spew on the seafloor, then the life of the waters and the shores will be largely spared, and the greatest tragedy of the BP blowout will be the eleven lives lost on the burned, sunken rig.
But if the crude geyser continues erupting for months—apparently a genuine possibility—then consequences could follow that are literally beyond comprehension.
We stand near the mouth of Mobile Bay. Its shores are fringed with marshes, and from its head spreads the Mobile River delta, in the USA second only to the Mississippi delta in extent and in vitality as an incubator of marine life. What happens to that life if the oil gushes for months and if winds and currents drive it into the bay and up into the delta? Perhaps a wall of multiple booms across the mouth of the bay could stop this. But wouldn’t those booms also stop the ships that are the life of the waterfront in Mobile, one of America’s top ten ports by cargo volume?
If circumstances force a choice, what is the rational and fair principle by which to decide whether to save the marine life and the livelihoods that depend on it or to save the commerce of the port and the livelihoods that depend on it? No such principle is apparent. The decision would likely come from an unruly and bitter contention among interest groups, all of which foresee ruin for themselves if they lose this showdown.
Short of such an environmental and social calamity, it’s much easier to decide who should do whatever cleanup and recovery proves possible whenever the oil arrives here in whatever amounts. All in attendance today could not have gotten here without using in some form the petroleum products whose production mishap now threatens us all. But we are not all equally complicit in this mishap. For most of us these products are an inescapable daily feature of the society we inhabit. For a few of us they are the source of a paycheck that supports a family, with little leftover at the end of the month. And for even fewer, these products are a source of great wealth, luxury, and power from owning and controlling the global petrochemical companies. These same folks, or their families and associates, also tend to own and control the companies that rush in to seize the recovery contracts when calamities occur. Disaster capitalism it has been called. Such buzzards seeking road kill to scavenge are not needed or welcome here.
Instead, some people will volunteer to help. Others should be hired. Many in this vicinity lost jobs and homes to hurricane Katrina that have still not been restored. They have skills and equipment suitable for recovery work offshore and on. On the streets of Mobile and other nearby cities are thousands of the unemployed who should be hired. And they should all be paid by the reckless operators and owners who caused this crisis but who mostly live in safely distant places.
And after the runaway well is plugged and the restorative work is underway, the lessons learned must be implemented. During the Cold War, when mutual nuclear annihilation by the United States and the Soviet Union loomed as an instant menace, movies appeared expressing this anxiety. They had titles like The Thing That Ate the Bronx and The Blob.
But humanity looked at the rubble of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and realized that just because you’re capable of doing something does not mean you should or must do it. So no nuclear weapons have been used since then, and if this lesson holds, none ever will be used.
Technology has now spread our capacity for ruin to many other realms. The maps of the spreading oil slick in our news today look remarkably like that ravenous blob from the Cold War movies. But we don’t have to succumb to it, just as we don’t have to nuke ourselves if we decide not to.
The oil pouring from the well is like ink writing a lesson on the surface of the waters that we must learn. We must not do things simply because we’re technologically capable of them—at least until they go disastrously wrong. We must find other ways of providing the order and energy necessary for our lives. That’s what Mother Earth or Father God or Nature is trying to tell us by this approaching menace.
Use whatever name you prefer for this higher, incomprehensible power. But recognize and adopt the lesson it is trying to teach—before it gets fed up and issues us a final, flunking, terminal F.
David Underhill
Mobile Bay Sierra Club