NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana — With BP's leaking well in the Gulf of Mexico finally capped, the focus shifts to the surface clean-up and the question on everyone's lips is: where is all the oil?
For three long months a massive slick threatened the shorelines of Louisiana and other southern US Gulf Coast states as BP tried everything from top hats to junk shots and giant domes to stanch the toxic sludge.
A cap stopped the flow on July 15 and now, thanks to frantic efforts to skim and burn the crude on the surface, the real difficulty is finding the oil rather than cleaning it up.
Some 150 reconnaissance planes fly constant sorties from Florida to Texas noting any oil sitings, while flat-bottomed boats trawl the marshes for lumps of tar too large to biodegrade.
"What we have is an aggregation of hundreds of thousands of patches of oil and the challenge is to find out where they are at right now because they are widely dispersed," said US spill chief Thad Allen.
Pressed further on the patches, Allen relented: "Maybe patches is a misnomer on my part. What we're seeing are mats, patties, small concentrations, very hard to detect, but they're out there.
"What we're trying to figure out is where is all the oil at and what can we do about it."
Mac McClelland, Mother Jones, July 28, 2010:
I sent one text message to Bloomberg's Lizzie O'Leary, who's standing on Grand Isle, Louisiana, right now, asking how the beach looks. "Lower part past the barrier untouched with globs of oil that washed up last night," she said. By "untouched," she means by cleanup crews, and that "barrier" she's talking about is the one the press isn't allowed past. I sent another text to Drew Wheelan, who's also in Southwestern Louisiana, doing bird surveys for the American Birding Association, asking him how big the biggest tar mat on Grand Terre—the scene of those now famous horrifying oiled-bird photos—is. "20 feet by 15," he said. "But bigger ones submerged slightly."
If I managed to find that much oil with my BlackBerry without getting dressed or leaving the house, let's hope Thad Allen, who is quoted in the article as saying, "What we're trying to figure out is where is all the oil at and what can we do about it," can locate some more with the staff and craft of the United States Coast Guard at his disposal. As for the reporter's alarmingly unsubstantiated claim that "The beaches should be relatively painless to mop up," I can't even count the number of correspondents down here who've pointed out that digging a finger under the surface of supposedly clean sand turns up crude, or the number of cleanup workers who've said cleanup efforts are strictly cosmetic, or that no matter what they do the contamination just keeps bubbling up.
It's BP's job to whitewash this story and make it easier to indulge the desire to forget about the scope of the devastation, guys. Not the media's.
Rocky Kistner, National Resources Defense Council, July 26, 2010:
The well is plugged for now, but Louisiana coastal residents and their beloved wetlands are still hurting. Hardly anyone I’ve met here thinks the crisis is over. The good people of Sportsman’s Paradise are still wary of eating fish they pull out of these fertile waters, no matter what kind of spicy Cajun sauce they mask it with. It didn't help today that National Incident Commander Thad Allen said there were “hundreds of thousands of patches of oil” still in the Gulf and that tar balls and other impacts will be present for “a long, long time.”
Recreational fishing here in Louisiana has been open for a week and a half, which surprised many people after BP's blown out undersea well spewed out a solid plume of oil for 87 days. You’d think that anglers would be back out in force when Louisiana's most important recreational activity was suddenly available again. But Ryan Lambert, a director of the Louisiana Charter Boat Association, says business is still lousy. No one is calling and no one is booking trips except the oldest of customers. Why?
“Everyone’s still afraid of the oil,” Lambert says. “We all know it’s still out there.”
Lambert says BP approached him recently to organize three big fishing tournaments to boost people’s confidence that fishing is finally back. He declined. “I don’t want to be part of a PR effort so BP can reduce its liability.” There are too many unanswered questions, he says. Like many other fishermen, he fears the impact of tens of millions of gallons of crude spewed into the ocean will have devastating consequences. No one knows what the new normal will be—or when it will come.
For now, lots of locals in the area are wondering just what’s in the water. Local fishing guide Sal Gagliano is especially worried about the million plus gallons of chemical dispersants that BP used to break up the oil on the surface. Gagliano says state fishing authorities told him to avoid fishing in areas where he sees oil. But he knows there’s a lot of oil under the surface. He thinks dispersants have been used excessively to knock the oil down into the water column and to the ocean floor, where food for the Gulf’s fisheries could be dramatically impacted. “Where did all the oil go?” he asks. “Everyone knows it had to go somewhere. So my phone’s not exactly ringing off the hook.”
St. Petersburg Times, June 9, 2010:
A day after a University of South Florida scientist announced that BP refused to provide researchers a sample of its oil, two elected officials criticized the company and called on it to cooperate.
U.S. Rep Kathy Castor, D-Tampa, met with two BP executives Wednesday afternoon and urged them to give USF the necessary samples, a spokeswoman said.
David Hollander, a chemical oceanographer leading USF's study, said a sample of the BP oil is vital in scientists' attempts to link clouds of subsurface oil in the gulf to the oil spewing from the destroyed Deep Horizon rig.
Castor confronted BP vice president David Nagel and BP spokesman Ray Dempsey with Hollander's statement, and the executives said it must have been miscommunication, Castor said.
They said they'd make sure a sample got to USF, Castor said.
ProPublica, June 30, 2010:
BP had previously refused to provide oil samples to scientists who needed them to perform chemical "fingerprinting" tests that would more clearly establish origin--and as of last week, we weren't sure if those scientists had received the samples yet.
Apparently, they hadn't until last Friday.
In all, it took three weeks and criticism from several Florida lawmakers before the company finally handed over oil samples to scientists from the University of South Florida, reported the St. Petersburg Times.
University of South Florida News, "Subsurface Oil Clouds From BP Well", July 23, 2010:
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (July 23, 2010) – University of South Florida researchers have definitively connected clouds of degraded underwater oil found in the northern Gulf of Mexico to the Deepwater Horizon well through a chemical fingerprinting process.
The confirmation by USF chemical oceanographer David Hollander is the first direct scientific link established between the subsurface oil clouds – commonly known as “plumes” – and the massive BP spill. Scientists had gathered ample circumstantial evidence to link the subsurface oil to the Deepwater Horizon well, but had lacked a definitive scientific link until now.
Hollander’s findings came after extensive rounds of testing involving water samples gathered during a May 22-28 cruise of the R/V Weatherbird II to the northern gulf, against samples of oil provided by BP in June.
“What we have learned completely changes the idea of what an oil spill is,” Hollander said. “It has gone from a two-dimensional disaster to a three-dimensional catastrophe.”
[...]
The BP oil samples were obtained after a meeting between company officials and U.S. Rep. Kathy Castor.
[...]
Researchers from across USF’s College of Marine Science are now conducting exhaustive work on determining what impact the spill, the subsurface degraded oil and the heavy use of chemical dispersants may have for marine life and the Gulf’s ecology.
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