Gloom Lifts a Tad in Deepwater Horizon Oil Slick Zone
May 3rd, 2010
by Glynn Wilson
THE BP DEEPWATER HORIZON OIL SLICK ZONE – It has been a gloomy few days since we started hearing last Thursday and Friday about the worst environmental disaster in American history, descending upon us like a giant cloud of doom, different from any hurricane.
The sun came out down here on Monday, however, and attitudes are starting to modify.
The sun is supposed to shine all day Tuesday, and for the rest of the week. But it’s going to be hot, in the mid to upper 80s.
It would be a good time to go to the beach before the sheen gets here, if you don’t have anything better to do, like train to help rescue wildlife, or simply work for a living.
With the winds slowing and shifting from out of the southwest to more out of the west and the northeast, this thing is slowly going to head for Florida’s beaches, according to the best projections to date.
We will be doing overflights this week and working on several investigative angles and news features, as well as more photo essays and videos as we wait to see just how big and bad this disaster grows.
It ain’t good on any level, but I’m just sayin’, there appears to be a glimmer of hope growing in the voices of some experts.
Dr. Bob Thomas of the Loyola University Center for Environmental Communication flew over the spill on Sunday, but had a hard time finding it in the vast Gulf of Mexico, the eleventh largest body of water in the world.
The Gulf’s basin is approximately 810 nautical miles or 1,500 kilometers wide and covers 615,000 miles, or 1.6 million kilometers. Half of the basin is shallow intertidal waters, but at its deepest, it is 14,383 feet at the Sigsbee Deep. It was probably formed approximately 300 million years ago as a result of the seafloor sinking.
On April 20, one week ago Tuesday, the Deepwater Horizon oil platform, located in the Mississippi Canyon about 40 miles off the Louisiana coast, suffered a catastrophic explosion. It sank a day-and-a-half later, although initial reports indicated that relatively little oil had leaked. By April 24, however, it was reported that approximately 1,000 barrels (42,000 gallons) of oil per day were issuing from the wellhead, a mile below the surface on the ocean floor. Then on Tuesday, April 29, the U.S. Government revealed the approximately 5,000 barrels of oil per day (210,000 gallons), five times the original estimate, were leaking into the Gulf.
The resulting oil slick quickly expanded to cover hundreds of square miles of ocean surface, posing a threat to marine life and adjacent coastal wetlands.
People along the coast worried about the catastrophic effects the spill could and will have as they waited to hear when and where the black and orange mixture of oil and chemicals would reach the shore.
But given about a week to contemplate this disaster, Thomas said there may be just be a glimmer of a chance that “we just might dodge the bullet on this one,” just as the historic city of New Orleans dodged so many hurricanes over the years, some say due to the voodoo.
Will BP’s Deepwater Horizon Oil Slick eclipse the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill?
That has been the thinking, until today.
The people of Florida do not want to hear it, but since the oil has not yet washed up en masse in the wetlands of Louisiana, and did not blow up on the Mississippi and Alabama Gulf Coasts over the weekend — as projected — due to weaker storm systems than forecast, Thomas said, “It may not hit us as hard as we thought.”
“The slick could end up on Florida’s beaches,” he said. “From an economic and environmental point of view, washing up on a sandy beach is better than ending up all in Louisiana’s wetlands, such a vast spawning ground and home to so much of America’s seafood.”
Gulf fisheries are some of the most productive in the world, with the commercial fish and shellfish harvest from the five U.S. Gulf states estimated at 1.7 billion pounds in 2000, one fifth the total domestic landings in the U.S. Commercial catches in the Gulf were about 25 percent of the total U.S. domestic commercial fishing revenue valued at more than $900 million. The Gulf also supports a productive recreational fishery, accounting for about 40 percent of the U.S. recreational finfish harvest.
Plus, it is easier to clean oil off a beach than to try to get it out of a swamp.
No one would ever want to wish a disaster onto someone else in another state, of course, but the point here is that the coast from Texas to Alabama and the Florida Panhandle might not see as much of a black picture as was broadcast during the Exxon Valdez disaster in Prince William Sound, Alaska, in March and April, 1989.
Black, oil stained ducks is the image those of us who were around still carry in our heads about that major screw up, when a drunk Captain Joseph Jeffrey Hazelwood’s ship the Exxon Valdez aground in Prince Williams Sound. Hazelwood was accused of being drunk at the time of the accident, though at trial he was cleared of this charge. He was simply convicted of a misdemeanor charge of negligent discharge of oil, fined $50,000, and sentenced to 1,000 hours of community service. In 1999, the Exxon Valdez oil spill was listed as the 53rd largest spill in history.
But as I told the broadcast reporters Saturday hanging out by the Pink Pony Pub in Gulf Shores, there with their live trucks waiting for that first drop of oil to hit the beach, “You may not get the black pictures of oil-stained birds like they got in Alaska.”
This disaster is huge, no doubt about it. It is bad, and growing bigger every day. How big will depend on when they can get the leaks stopped, and the direction of the wind and tides. It is Hurricane Season, so the sooner this thing is plugged the better.
But if all the human resources we can muster are brought to bear on this thing fast enough, we might just be able to get out of it without killing everything in sight around here.
The company, formerly known as one of the more environmentally friendly oil companies (if there is such a thing), has pledged to spend what it takes to clean it up, in spite of federal limits on corporate liability.
From everything I can glean from all the news reports and from listening in on the live media teleconference out of Louisiana today, BP is deploying resources to get the job done of stopping the spill and cleaning up the mess. There is a question about why they are not using the best rovers in the world, perhaps due to the cost, but they do have nine submersibles doing everything from monitoring the well underwater to dispersing chemicals and trying to deploy the blowout valve that failed.
The Obama administration is on the job and none too late, perhaps, although we shall see.
“Money should not be a factor. All resources should be thrown at this,” Dr. Thomas said. “The losses are already too great.”
About all we can do from here is to wait, and watch — and maybe hope, just a little. Every bird and fish — and dollar — we can save will be worth it, in the long run.
Check out the U.S. Coast Guard’s photos and oil spill track on Flickr.
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May 4th, 2010 at 4:27 pm
It is great to know that you are on the scene.
We look forward to your reports.
We need to know the FACTS about this
tragic and catastrophic event.