Cleanup Theater

BILOXI, MS – I’m back in the Gulf of Mexico, nearly six months after BP’s Macondo well blew out and spewed 4 million barrels of oil into one of the northern hemisphere’s most fragile and fecund ecosystems.

The government and BP will both tell you things are going great. They want this to be over. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says most of the oil is gone. They know this because they’re towing sorbent booms across the surface of the gulf, taking samples from the water column, testing for oil’s signature flourescence.

Problem with all that is that it seeks oil where oil is not. Much of it is off the surface and out of the water column. It’s degraded enough that it no longer flouresces (if one can use such a word). I think NOAA, certainly the scientists there, knows this. But the federal government would like this to be over.

(As the media reported Wednesday, in the early days of this disaster the White House deliberately ordered NOAA to withhold worst case estimates – which proved to be accurate – of the flow of oil into the gulf and for weeks kept promoting more optimistic – and incorrect – estimates. Change you can believe in.)

The tourism industry, the fishing industry, what will they tell you? That’s tougher. They’d like to tell you, “Things are great! Come visit! Have some shrimp! It’s all OK now!”

Attorneys for BP perch like vultures in the trees, waiting to hear these things. If they do, they’ll swoop down and say, “No more damage settlement for you! You’ve been made whole, you said so yourself!” If the tourism and fishing industries say, “Things are not good, we still have oil on the beaches and we’re not sure about the seafood,” well, who knows how long those same BP vulture-lawyers will keep things tied up in court? Who knows when full settlements will be awarded? Maybe it’s better to play along with the bully’s game.

The night I arrived in Biloxi, I went for a walk on its beautiful beach. No visible signs of oil. I encountered a pack of eight BP cleanup workers in white suits with kitchen strainers clamped onto long poles. Cleanup workers moving in a pack didn’t seem like the most efficient formation, but we stopped and chatted and they showed me what they had in their buckets. Almost nothing. Guess everything must be getting back to normal.

They next day I visited the barrier islands a few miles out. On Horn Island, popular for recreation, a real cleanup operation was underway. Big orange tractors dragged sorbent booms wrapped in lengths of chain link fence back and forth through the sand, but still, there were tar balls (tar cakes, really – they’re not round) everywhere. I dug down into the sand (I’m not supposed to be allowed to do that) and found layers of oil, separated by layers of white sand, a mini-geology and likely a record of this year’s tropical storms pushing oil onshore.

Then we went to East Ship Island, which people rarely visit and which has apparently not been touched by a cleanup crew. Tar cakes everywhere, huge ones, so big that when you break them open, the center is pure crude oil. On a dune I found the “high tar line” where one of the summer storms had dropped quantities of tar cake.

On the landward side of the island, temporary ponds, filled with seawater by those storms were slowly evaporating, leaving “bathtub rings” of tar or tar flats where they’d completely dried up. I waded into the eelgrass bed just off shore. A little shark was in there, chasing fish. I reached down and pulled up a handful of grass. Every blade was covered in oil.

To recap: on the beach by the hotels, where most of the tourists walk, there’s very little oil, but many cleanup workers. On the barrier island used for recreation, there’s industrial cleaning operations in progress. On the islands few people visit – nothing. Why not leave one cleanup worker on the nearly-pristine tourist beach and send the rest out to East Ship Island to get some real work done? Is this about tourism or about the ecosystem? Is this a cleanup or merely “cleanup theater”?

Autumn is here and the gulf waters are beginning to cool. When the temperature changes, the water density changes and plumes suspended in mid-water may rise to the surface. The turbulence of winter storms will push oil out of the sediment and into the water column to be washed toward land. We won’t be able to get a true grasp of the extent of BP’s damage to the gulf until the first anniversary of the blowout next spring.

If we’re going to keep trying to clean the gulf with the methods we’ve been applying, then all the cleanup workers I’ve seen here have job security for the rest of their careers and the money BP has already dedicated can be doubled or tripled.

Surely that can’t be right? All this oil will quickly degrade, right? The government has kind of hinted that will happen, right? Oil spill expert Rick Steiner is here, too. He just got back for working on an oil spill in Nigeria’s Niger delta. While he was there, he found deposits of oil spilled over 40 years ago, during the Biafran war. He said it’s dry on the surface, but beneath, it’s still viscous. (How long before Shell Oil starts mining that stuff for gas?)

Forget what you’re hearing from the feds and BP. Oil doesn’t go away. It needs to be cleaned up and to do it properly will take a long, long time.

© Mark Floegel, 2010

One Comment

  1. Taj
    Posted 10/7/2010 at 11:01 pm | Permalink

    Thank you for sharing this experience, Mark. What the HELL are we going to do??? So frustrating.

Post a Comment

Your email is never published nor shared. Required fields are marked *

*
*