Unfortunately, that’s changed now. After the rig’s explosion and subsequent sinking, the connection between it and the oil reserve below sea level ruptured in multiple points and BP, the oil company that owns the oil field, hasn’t been able to stop the flow of oil into the water.
As a consequence, an environmental disaster far worse than the one caused by the Exxon Valdez in Alaska’s Prince William Sound in 1989 is inevitable, especially because of the fragility of the wetlands and the richness of wildlife in the area.
Excerpts from various sources. BBC News:
Rear Admiral Mary Landry said 5,000 barrels (210,000 gallons) a day were now thought to be gushing into the sea 50 miles (80km) off Louisiana's coast.NYTimes.com:
One fire-fighting expert told the BBC the disaster might become the "biggest oil spill in the world".
"Probably the only thing comparable to this is the Kuwait fires [following the Gulf War in 1991]," Mike Miller, head of Canadian oil well fire-fighting company Safety Boss, told BBC World Service.
"The Exxon Valdez [tanker disaster off Alaska in 1989] is going to pale [into insignificance] in comparison to this as it goes on."
If US Coast Guard estimates are correct, the slick could match the 11m gallons spilt from the Exxon Valdez within less than two months.
On Tuesday Adm Landry, who is in charge of the clean-up effort, warned that work on sealing the leaking well using robotic submersibles might take months, and that the coast guard would attempt to set light to much of the oil.
With the spill moving towards Louisiana's coast, which contains some 40% of the nation's wetlands and spawning grounds for countless fish and birds, she said a "controlled burn" of oil contained by special booms could limit the impact.
Environmental experts say animals nearby might be affected by toxic fumes, but perhaps not as much as if they were coated in oil.
BP says it has not been able to activate a device known as a blow-out preventer, designed to stop oil flow in an emergency.
The idea of placing a dome directly over the leaks has only been done in shallow water before and is still two to four weeks from being operational.
BP will also begin drilling a "relief well" intersecting the original well, but it is also experimental and could take two to three months to stop the flow.
About 210,000 feet of boom had been laid down to protect the shoreline in several places along the Gulf Coast, though experts said that marshlands presented a far more daunting cleaning challenge than sandy beaches.Raw Story:
Underscoring how acute the situation has become, BP is soliciting ideas and techniques from four other major oil companies — Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Shell and Anadarko. BP officials have also requested help from the Defense Department in efforts to activate the blowout preventer, a stack of hydraulically activated valves at the top of the well that is designed to seal it off in the event of a sudden pressure release.
Other efforts to contain the spill included a tactic that Admiral Landry called “absolutely novel”: crews awaited approval on Thursday night to begin deploying chemical dispersants underwater near the source of the leaks. Aircraft have dropped nearly 100,000 gallons of the dispersants on the water’s surface to break down the oil, a more conventional strategy.
BP is also designing and building large boxlike structures that could be lowered over the leaks in the riser, the 5,000-foot-long pipe that connected the well to the rig and has since become detached and is snaking along the sea floor. The structures would contain the leaking oil and route it to the surface to be collected. This temporary solution could take several weeks to execute.
“All that movement is going to continue to stress and fatigue the pipe and create more leaks,” said Jeffrey Short, Pacific science director for Oceana and former chemist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who helped clean the spill from the Exxon Valdez in 1989.
“This is not on a good trajectory,” he added.
The next solution is drilling relief wells that would allow crews to plug the gushing cavity with mud, concrete or other heavy liquid. The drilling of one such well is expected to begin in the next 48 hours, Mr. Suttles said, but it could be three months before the leak is plugged by this method.
The legal and political dimensions of the oil spill spread as well on Thursday, with lawyers filing suits on behalf of commercial fishermen, shrimpers and injured workers against BP; Transocean; Cameron, the company that manufactured the blowout preventer; and other companies involved in the drilling process, including Halliburton.
An oil spill that threatened to eclipse even the Exxon Valdez disaster spread out of control and drifted inexorably toward the Gulf Coast on Thursday as fishermen rushed to scoop up shrimp and crews spread floating barriers around marshes.CNN.com:
"It is of grave concern," David Kennedy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told The Associated Press. "I am frightened. This is a very, very big thing. And the efforts that are going to be required to do anything about it, especially if it continues on, are just mind-boggling."
The oil slick could become the nation's worst environmental disaster in decades, threatening hundreds of species of fish, birds and other wildlife along the Gulf Coast, one of the world's richest seafood grounds, teeming with shrimp, oysters and other marine life.
Government officials said the blown-out well 40 miles offshore is spewing five times as much oil into the water as originally estimated — about 5,000 barrels, or 200,000 gallons, a day.
At that rate, the spill could easily eclipse the worst oil spill in U.S. history — the 11 million gallons that leaked from the grounded tanker Exxon Valdez in Alaska's Prince William Sound in 1989 — in the three months it could take to drill a relief well and plug the gushing well 5,000 feet underwater on the sea floor.
Ultimately, the spill could grow much larger than the Valdez because Gulf of Mexico wells typically hold many times more oil than a single tanker.
"You're pumping out a massive amount of oil. There is no way to stop it," he said.
An emergency shrimping season was opened to allow shrimpers to scoop up their catch before it is fouled by oil. Cannons were to be used to scare off birds. And shrimpers were being lined up to use their boats as makeshift skimmers in the shallows.
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal declared a state of emergency Thursday so officials could begin preparing for the oil's impact. He said at least 10 wildlife management areas and refuges in his state and neighboring Mississippi are in the oil plume's path.
A huge oil spill oozing toward the Gulf Coast on Thursday threatens hundreds of species of wildlife, some in their prime breeding season, environmental organizations said.CNN.com:
"The terrible loss of 11 workers (unaccounted for after the rig explosion) may be just the beginning of this tragedy as the oil slick spreads toward sensitive coastal areas vital to birds and marine life and to all the communities that depend on them," said Melanie Driscoll, director of bird conservation for the Louisiana Coastal Initiative, in a statement.
Coastal areas of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida could be at risk, the organization said.
"For birds, the timing could not be worse; they are breeding, nesting and especially vulnerable in many of the places where the oil could come ashore," she said. "The efforts to stop the oil before it reaches shore are heroic, but may not be enough. We have to hope for the best, but prepare for the worst, including a true catastrophe for birds."
It's not just birds that could be affected, although they are usually the first to feel the effects, said Gregory Bossart, chief veterinary officer for the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta. The birds are right at the surface, get covered in the oil and swallow it, causing liver and kidney problems.
"They need to be rescued and cleaned," he said.
But the coastline of Louisiana, with its barrier islands and estuaries, "is a very unique ecosystem. It's very complex," Bossart said.
Plankton found in the estuaries nourish organisms all the way up the food chain. Crabs, mussels, oysters and shrimp feed on the plankton, he said. Oil smothers the plankton, meaning they cannot eat.
Also, "the estuaries here are a nursery ground, literally a nursery ground, for the entire fish population in this area," Bossart said.
River otters in the region eat mussels and other animals. And "we know, in this area right now, that there are sperm whales. There are dolphins right in the oil slick," he said.
If an oil spill is small enough, animals can leave the area.
"Some of them can get away," Bossart said. "It's totally dependent on the size of the slick, and this is huge."
Exposure to the oil for a prolonged period of time can result in a toxic effect on the skin, and mammals can suffer lung damage or death after breathing it in, Bossart said.
"When the oil starts to settle, it'll smother the oyster beds. It'll kill the oysters," he said.
The spill also threatens the Louisiana and Mississippi fishing industry, as crab, oysters and shrimp along the coast could be affected, along with numerous species of fish. Gulf shrimp are in their spawning season.
More than 400 species are threatened by the spill, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported Thursday, citing the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.
Species of beach-nesting terns and gulls, beach-nesting shorebirds, large wading birds, marsh birds and ocean-dwelling birds are also at risk, along with migratory shorebirds and songbirds, the Initiative said.
The migratory songbirds move across the Gulf during a two-week period from late April to early May, for instance.
"The journey across 500 miles of open water strains their endurance to its limits," the Initiative said. "They depend on clear skies and healthy habitats on both sides of the Gulf in order to survive the journey."
According to a 1998 study by Louisiana State University, more than 500 million birds fly over the Gulf and enter the United States along coastal areas in Louisiana and Texas each spring.
Louisiana is the No. 1 producer of shrimp and oysters in the United States, while fishing remains a major industry on the Mississippi coast even after casino gambling has come to dominate the local economy.Yahoo! News:
The Gulf Coast hasn't seen a major oil spill in about 40 years, Crozier said. Most of the toxic components in the crude spill are likely to evaporate in the sun, but a "physical mess" is likely to remain in the marshes.
"The occasional drum has fallen overboard, but we've never had anything of this magnitude," he said.
Wilma Subra, a chemist who advises the Louisiana Environmental Action Network, said hundreds of spotters are watching for signs of the slick along the shoreline. But until the damaged well is capped, the coast could be hit over and over again when weather patterns shift.
"This is just going to be unbelievable," Subra said. "It's not going to be just a one-time event."
Crews continued to lay boom in what increasingly feels like a futile effort to slow down the spill, with all ideas to contain the flow failing so far.
"I've been in Pensacola and I am very, very concerned about this filth in the Gulf of Mexico," Florida Gov. Charlie Crist said at a fundraiser for his U.S. Senate campaign Sunday night. "It's not a spill, it's a flow. Envision sort of an underground volcano of oil and it keeps spewing over 200,000 gallons every single day, if not more."
Fishermen from the mouth of the Mississippi River to the Florida Panhandle got the news that more than 6,800 square miles of federal fishing areas were closed, fracturing their livelihood for at least 10 days and likely more just as the prime spring season was kicking in. The slick also was precariously close to a key shipping lane that feeds goods and materials to the interior of the U.S. by the Mississippi River.
Even if the well is shut off in a week, fishermen and wildlife officials wonder how long it will take for the Gulf to recover. Some compare it to Hurricane Katrina, which Louisiana is still recovering from after nearly five years.
"It's probably easier to fly in space than do some of this," Charlie Holt, BP's drilling and completion operations manager in the Gulf of Mexico, said Sunday.
Everything engineers have tried so far has failed. After the April 20 oil rig explosion, which killed 11 people, the flow of oil should have been stopped by a blowout preventer, but the mechanism failed. Efforts to remotely activate it continue to prove fruitless. On the surface, windy weather and waves have hampered plans to burn the oil and made booms all along the coast ineffective.
The oil probably could keep gushing for months until a second well can be dug to relieve pressure from the first.
Besides the immediate impact on Gulf industries, shipping along the Mississippi River could soon be limited. Ships carrying food, oil, rubber and much more come through the Southwest Pass to enter the vital waterway.
Shipment delays — either because oil-splattered ships need to be cleaned off at sea before docking or because water lanes are shut down for a time — would raise the cost of transporting those goods.
Even if the oil stays mostly offshore, the consequences could be dire for sea turtles, dolphins and other deepwater marine life — and microscopic plankton and tiny creatures that are a staple of larger animals' diets.
Moby Solangi, director of the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Gulfport, Miss., said at least 20 dead sea turtles were found on the state's beaches. He said it's too soon to say whether oil contamination killed them but that it is unusual to have them turning up across such a wide stretch of coast, nearly 30 miles.
None of the turtles have oil on them, but Solangi said they could have ingested oily fish or breathed in oil on the surface.
The situation could become even more grave if the oil gets into the Gulf Stream and flows to the beaches of Florida — and potentially whips around the state's southern tip and up the Eastern Seaboard. Tourist-magnet beaches and countless wildlife could be ruined.
BP has not said how much oil is beneath the seabed the Deepwater Horizon rig was tapping when it exploded. A company official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the volume of reserves, confirmed reports that it was tens of millions of barrels. Fryar said any numbers being thrown out are just estimates at best.
Scary. Maddening. Sad. Heartbreaking.
When we told the kids what was happening, their eyes opened wide. They couldn’t understand how something like this could happen. I can’t either.
In our daily lives, in this modern society, we need energy to operate anything and everything. That energy comes primarily from oil, which can be collected on land or sea. Naturally, it’s much harder to control in the water, so I would think that the safeguards there should be paramount, more important than even the ability to drill for oil in the first place.
Obviously, oil barons don’t agree with that reasoning. As a result, we’re now witnessing the latest oil related environmental disaster unfolding right before our eyes.
My heart goes out to all those whose livelihood will be affected, but above all to all the poor animals who will lose their lives because of our shortcomings.
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