Crying over spilt oil:
Did BP sacrifice the future
on the grave of the present?
By Chip Drago
Mobile Bay Times
In responding to the April 20 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, officials may have sacrificed a piece of the future in a futile bid to salvage the present summer season’s economy, fears marine scientist Dr. George Crozier of the Dauphin Island Sea Lab.
A native of Louisiana and the face of the Sea Lab for its 30-year existence, Crozier suggested a tactical retreat may have been the best initial course – surrender the summer to save the future, fold on a losing hand to stay in the game for a bigger
pot later on.
News coverage of the
oil spill and the
clean-up campaign,
along with the actual
and inevitable effects
of the spill on area
coastal waters, were
going to seriously
damage if not destroy
the 2010 summer
tourist season here
anyway, Crozier
pointed out.
Reports of 2 million gallons of oil spewing daily with photographs of crabs looking like they've been dipped in chocolate, oily pelicans and gooey blackened beaches, even if they grossly exaggerate the reality of any given day on any given Gulf beach, will have vacationers thinking about a camping trip in the Smokies this year or maybe giving Myrtle Beach a try as a change of pace and place.
The unprecedented use of chemical dispersants on the spilled oil deep below the surface of the Gulf disguises the severity of the spill with an out-of-sight, out-of-mind upside for tourism, but at unknown long-term risk to the ecological system, according to a number of marine scientists who cautioned BP against haste in untried approaches. Events may prove the scientists needlessly fretful, but there is a fair chance of decades long environmental issues stemming from the application of those chemicals to disperse the oil at depths of 5,000 feet of water, they note.
Crozier acknowledges that the Gulf of Mexico is resilient and, over time, will heal itself. The task, he says, is to manage the response so the happy day comes sooner rather than later. A number of marine scientists remain concerned that the use of chemical dispersants at such a depth was reactionary, possibly even recklessly motivated by short-term economic priorities over environmental regard and, ironically, as time may tell, over economic concerns across-the-board.
Crozier is neither a doomsayer nor a sunny-faced optimist, but a realist about the spill, he says. While some “run around with their hair on fire” about the death of the Gulf of Mexico, it is only a part of the Gulf that is in jeopardy, he says.
“Where you stand (things will work out okay or it’s the end of the world as we know it) will depend a lot on your point of view,” he said. “The poor guy (charter boat captain Allen Kruse, 55) who killed himself might have benefited from hearing it (a balanced assessment that didn’t ignore legitimate reasons to hope for a return to “normal” before too long).”
As long as oil continues to gush from the well, talk of normal is hypothetical; talk of normal will only begin to have a point once the well is capped, said Crozier.
According to Crozier, at least two things in the discussion of the spill have “gotten out of hand.”
“The first one is making it all the same – the Gulf, the Gulf, the Gulf; Well, it’s not the Gulf, not the Gulf as a whole,” he said. “It’s the northeast corner or the north central Gulf depending on your geography.”
The area in harm’s way stretches from the Atchafalaya to Apalachicola, approximately.
"As long as it is in the summer season, it (the oil) is going to keep going north and south with the net result moving north. That’s inevitable. We are going to be exposed to it. Nothing will change it till Mother Nature changes. Nothing will clean it but Mother Nature."
The captains and crews aboard an armada of ships, skiffs, ski-boats, barges, trawlers and rust buckets plying the coastal waters at $1,200-$3,000 a day plus expenses to do battle with oil would do as well to kick back and read Don Quixote, except for the income part. The thousands of moonscape-clad troopers patrolling the beaches like an invading alien force are of small consequence in combating the spill, said Crozier, remarking that, in watching them emerge from their tent to march in formation along the beach, it was difficult not to think of the Seven Dwarfs’ and the “Heigh Ho, Heigh Ho, It’s Off To Work We Go” tune.
“It’s really a waste of time and money,” he said. “If it makes people feel better, that’s cool. I’m glad.”
Another thing to feel good about, said Crozier, is the "weathering" of the oil which dissipates its toxicity and the farther away from the spill you are, the better, not to burden the obvious. The site of the Deepwater Horizon rig is 80-90 miles away from the Alabama coast but just 40 or so miles from Louisiana. The longer the oil is exposed to water and air the less toxic material is in the oil itself, said Crozier, better for Mobile Bay, not so good for Louisiana's local waters.
"That's why the dispersants at depth is such a concern to us," he said. "If the stuff surfaces, the toxins can be evaporated off; you can burn it if the conditions are okay. But if you disperse it and keep it at depth, you eliminate those methods for getting rid of it. That occurred to me immediately and then I hear other scientists saying the same, so it wasn't just a crazy Crozier thing. Others were worried as well."
Crozier said he did not know whether the BP decision-makers were having second thoughts, and he conceded that there was "logic" behind the use of dispersants. The greater the surface area the faster the bacteria can work on breaking down the oil, he said.
"There is a lot of uncertainty," he said. "If we're feeling good about the distance and getting the toxicity down, that's one thing. But in order to get toxicity down, oxygen consumption goes up. Then the worry becomes dissolved oxygen levels. It is fraught with uncertainty. There's really nothing to be optimistic about, but there is going to be an end to it."
"It bothers me to say it, but if they hadn't used dispersants and let the oil come to the surface, a big skimmer may have gotten a lot of it and our situation might be a lot less fearsome than it is now."
Of the political leaders, only Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal expressed serious reservations about underwater dispersants, said Crozier -- one, perhaps likely, explanation being that Louisiana -- unlike Mississippi, Alabama and Florida -- has no white sand, beach-based economy. So even the conservative, safe call could reflect self-interest.
"They (BP) took a chance on dispersants to keep it off the beaches and save the summer of 2010, but it died the first of May when it became known that it would be August before they were sure of capping it," said Crozier. "It was a gamble no question. Hindsight is so cheap. I realize that. But they probably screwed up. Now we have decades of uncertainty about toxins in the food chain. How long before the Gulf snapper market is credible? This will be long-term rebuilding. It maybe will not be done for 20 years."
There is another facet that is worrisome, said Crozier. While he has great faith in the resilience of the Gulf's ecological system, Crozier said the durability of the human system may pale by comparison. How long on either side of the transaction will humans' demand for fresh Gulf seafood, seafood restaurants, charter boat fishing and beach vacations persist? Do the suppliers and consumers move on to other pursuits?
"It's going to take no less than three, and maybe five, years, considering the size of this sucker, before anything approaches normal in this part of the Gulf," said Crozier.
As an example, Crozier pointed to the seafood restaurant owned and operated in Orange Beach by Matt Shipp, the son of Crozier's longtime colleague Dr. Bob Shipp.
"How does that human system weather three years?" he asked. "The Pillars (Shipp's previous restaurant in Mobile) was not doing too great so he moved to Orange Beach and with the snowbirds there was doing wonderfully. Now they are teetering on the brink of collapse and I feel for them. Our kids grew up together. And there are probably 10,000 stories just like that along the central and eastern Gulf Coast into the panhandle in Florida."
