by Carl Safina
Oil is just starting to smudge some of the birds. Even among those that do not get heavily oiled, some will not make it. The birds’ energy budgets will not bear the cost of feathers sticking and functioning inefficiently, and many such birds will likely drop out on their way north. Migrating peregrine falcons traveling north from South American wintering areas, destined for nesting sites as far as Greenland, are also crossing the Gulf’s marshes. Preferentially picking off birds whose flight seems compromised, falcons could end up getting disproportional doses of oil.
Certain animals that normally inhabit the open Atlantic travel to the Gulf to breed. The world’s most endangered sea turtle, the Kemp’s ridley, ranges throughout the western Atlantic as far north as New England. But it breeds only in the Gulf. Adults are now heading there to lay their eggs on remote beaches. So are other sea turtles. Adults are vulnerable, but hatchlings will likely have an even harder time. And whether from oil or fishing nets, disproportionate numbers of turtles continue turning up dead.
A magnificent frigatebird—that’s not my description; it’s the species’ name: magnificent frigatebird—patrols overhead. It shares the airspace with a couple of helicopters and a C-130 military cargo plane, newcomers in its eons-old realm. And it feels the place more deeply than anyone aboard those aircraft.
Booms designed to keep away oil have been placed along one side of Freemason Island. But they don’t run the whole length of even one side of the island. And on the side where they were placed, the wind and chop have already washed them ashore in places and partly buried them in sand and shell. In other words, segments of the boom barrier have already been rendered useless by a couple of days’ wave action.
We’d had some news that part of the oil slick was eight miles southeast of the islands in the open Gulf. But the water is too rough for us to continue on to the main Chandeleur Islands or beyond. Indeed, some of the fishing boats carrying booms are headed back in. Over the radio they tell us they were sent toward port due to the rough water.
So far, I see oil only on the heads and bellies of a few Sandwich terns. Just a few little brown smudges; but it’s unmistakably oil. I fear much worse is coming. Diving into water—that’s how they eat. Oil is famously hazardous to waterbirds. It’s a chronic thing: a few oiled birds are always showing up around harbors and ports, and I once saw a tropicbird in the middle of the ocean whose immaculate pearl plumage was stained with considerable oil from somewhere—probably a ship that had discharged dirty bilgewater.
People have been counting dead birds from major spills for years. In 1936, 1,400 oiled birds washed ashore near Kent, England. In 1937, a ship collision sent 6,600 oiled birds onto the coastline of California. Five thousand ducks on the East Coast in a 1942 mishap; 10,000 ducks killed by oil in the Detroit River in 1948; an estimated 150,000 eiders off Chatham, Massachusetts, after two ships collided in a 1952 winter gale; 30,000 ducks off Gotland, in the Baltic, in 1952, and 60,000 more in the same place in three successive spills over the next four years. In 1955 the wreck of the Gerd Maersk killed an estimated 275,000 scoters and other ducks and waterbirds near the mouth of Germany’s Elbe River. Kills of several thousand birds remained quite common throughout the 1960s. As Japan industrialized, its first large oil spill, in 1965, killed large numbers of kittiwakes, shearwaters, and other birds. Between 1964 and 1967, worldwide there were 19 tanker groundings, with 17 large spills, and 238 supertanker collisions, resulting in 22 more large spills. Though thousands of birds continued to be killed in various oil-related mishaps, improved safety and environmental regulations resulted in fewer accidents and reduced wildlife deaths, until the Exxon Valdez set new records.
Birds that are lightly oiled, like the ones here today, often raise fewer, slower-growing chicks than normal.
Some oiled animals may eventually be rescued and cleaned. Less possible to cleanse is the anguish on the faces and in the hearts of fishing families.
Casey wants to say hey to a relative, James Kieff, who’s been an oysterman for thirty-five years. “We outta work,” James says disbelievingly from the deck of his forty-eight-foot boat, Lady Jennifer, as he motors along carrying 3,000 feet of boom to the outer edge of one of the marsh islands. “Now we workin’ for BP. They don’t know these waters. We do.” A moment later he adds, “The stress is in the not knowing. Katrina came and went. We knew what to do. If the oil stays offshore, we could be okay. But that’s a big if.”
I watch him and other boats laying booms along the marshes. They work hard. I see men and women who know water, boats, and work, bending seriously to their task. And despite never having handled booms before, they do the job well.
The only problem: No one believes the booms can work. Any medium wave action will push oil over them. And despite miles and miles and miles of booms, miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles of marsh remain utterly naked and undefended. It’s a fool’s errand. (During the Valdez catastrophe, Exxon’s CEO was apparently audiotaped saying he didn’t care if the booms contained the oil; he just wanted pictures of them in the water.)
The only saving grace is that there is no oil in sight yet. And that hardly helps. Because the people have no jobs after this. As always, it’s a matter of who people are at the mercy of how people are.
But for this frantic moment, with oil rigs in every direction and the oil coating everyone’s mind, it’s boom boom boom.
A Louisiana State University professor says the oil could entirely wipe out many kinds of fish, and notes, “We may very well lose dozens of vulnerable fish species.” A toxicologist says, “We’ll see dead bodies soon. Sharks, dolphins, sea turtles, whales; the impact on predators will be seen in a short time because the food web will be impacted from the bottom up.” Another Louisiana State University professor says oil pushed inland by a hurricane could affect rice and sugarcane crops. A meteorologist says there’s a chance that the oil could cause explosive deepening of hurricanes in the Gulf. The Christian Science Monitor asks whether hurricane-blown oil could make coastal towns permanently uninhabitable. The Monitor then quotes a Pensacola Beach solar energy salesman (bias alert) who took a hazardous materials class as saying, “In these classes, they basically tell you that swallowing even a small amount of the oil or getting some on your hands and then having a smoke could be deadly.”
Well, holy cow; somebody needs to warn auto mechanics, boat owners, auto-lube attendants, heating-oil delivery people, gas station attendants, and anyone with a car or lawn mower not to move because they’re about to explode!
In the Florida Keys, Miami, and beyond, people begin worrying about the “Loop Current” (vocabulary term). It flows out of the Gulf of Mexico to become the Gulf Stream, and might carry oil throughout the Keys’ reefs and then up the East Coast. “Once it’s in the Loop Current, that’s the worst case,” says a Texas A&M University oceanographer. “Then that oil could wind up along the Keys and get transported out to the Atlantic.” I begin hearing worries from Long Island’s Hamptons—and, indeed, as far away as Ireland—that in a few months, oil from the blowout will ruin beaches there. Florida senator Bill Nelson warns, “If this gusher continues for several months, it’s going to get down into the Loop Current. You are talking about massive economic loss to our tourism, our beaches, to our fisheries, very possibly disruption of our military testing and training, which is in the Gulf of Mexico.”
Another scientist from Texas A&M University says, “The threat to the deep-sea habitat is already a done deal, it is happening now.” He adds, “If the oil settles on the bottom, it will kill the smaller organisms, like the copepods and small worms. When we lose the forage, then you have an impact on the larger fish.”
Yeah, maybe. But “a done deal”? Really? How much oil would have to settle? How densely?
I’m a professional environmentalist and conservationist; I’m really angry about the recklessness that caused this, and the inanity of the response; I am deeply distressed about the potential damage to wildlife and hab
itats—but I find myself becoming uncomfortable with all the catastrophizing. “A done deal”—that’s not very scientific. Especially for a scientist. Many scientists—and as a scientist it hurts to say this—are being a little shrill. Cool heads are not prevailing.
But it’s not a time of calm. With the situation out of control, everyone wants to know what’s gonna happen. Even the normally cautious are prone to overspeculating.
And then there are those never burdened by caution. Enter the crazies. Some say this was done on purpose: Obama and BP have conspired to make money from this; someday, they claim, we’ll get to the bottom of how. Some believe this will merely kill the entire ocean; others think it will kill the whole world.
Something called Yowusa.com posts an article based on warnings it says are from an Italian physicist. (The site also features predictions made by Nostradamus, including his “proven” prediction that a giant tsunami will destroy New York City.) We read, “The Loop Current in the Gulf of Mexico has stalled as a consequence of the BP oil spill disaster. The effects have also begun to spread to the Gulf Stream. If natural processes cannot re-establish the stalled Loop Current, we could begin to see global crop failures as early as 2011.” Yow, indeed.
The Web begins amplifying a blogger-posted article called “How BP Gulf Disaster May Have Triggered a ‘World-Killing’ Event.” In another post the same blogger writes, “The giant oil company is now quietly preparing to test a small nuclear device in a frenzied rush against time to quell a cascading catastrophe.” On the same site (whose slogan is: “Where Knowledge Rules”) we find several entries under the heading “How the Ultimate BP Gulf Disaster Could Kill Millions.” The first click gets me “A devastating eruption of methane gas, buried deep beneath the sea floor, could absolutely decimate the region. Even worse, this eruption could inundate the low lying coast line with a tsunami.” The entry unleashes a tsunami of speculation and dire conclusion that surges across the Web.
Sparked by very legitimate fears and fanned by wild speculation, a certain simmering siege mentality, peppered with panic, begins bubbling across the region. The sky begins falling a little.
As gallop horsemen of the Apocalypse, so also ride a few doubters of disaster. “The sky is not falling. It isn’t the end of the Gulf of Mexico,” says the director of a Texas-based conservation group. While many are predicting a thousand ruined miles of irreplaceable wetlands and beaches, fisheries sidelined for seasons on end, fragile species shattered, a region economically crippled for years, and tongues of oil lashing beaches up to Cape Cod, others shrug.
It’s still the first inning in a nine-inning game. “Right now what people are fearing has not materialized,” says a retired professor and oil spill expert from Louisiana State. “People have the idea of an Exxon Valdez, with a gunky, smelly black tide.… I do not anticipate this will happen here.” Others point out that the Ixtoc leak seemed largely to vanish in about three years. (Even if it did, three years would be a very long time in a fishing community that can’t go fishing.)
Still others note that this isn’t so bad compared to all the other bad stuff that happens to the Gulf every day: scores of refineries and chemical plants from Mexico to Mississippi pouring pollutants into the water, pollution from all the ships, the degrading marshes, the dead zone caused by all the Midwest’s farm runoff flowing down the Mississippi River. It’s hardly a pristine Eden.
“The Gulf is tremendously resilient,” says the cool-headed director of the Texas-based conservation group. But he adds, “How long can we keep heaping these insults on the Gulf and having it bounce back? I have to say I just don’t know.”
No one knows. The not knowing thickens a gumbo of fear.
Meanwhile, BP executives admit to Congress behind closed doors that the leak could reach 60,000 barrels per day, sixty times what they’d been saying.
Now, about that Loop Current. There’re kernels of truth in both the fear that it could take oil across the Keys reefs and into the Gulf Stream and the observation that it’s “stopped.” Normally, the Loop Current flows a bit like a snaking conveyor belt; it does have the potential to take the oil and move it past the Florida Keys. But that conveyor has just pinched itself off. As sometimes happens, a meander has bent itself into an enormous eddy that’s just pinwheeling in the Gulf. This greatly blunts the likelihood of the oil getting into the Gulf Stream and up the East Coast. “This is the closest thing to an act of God that we’ve seen,” says Dr. Steve Murawski of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Well, maybe—whatever. But another way of looking at it is that the Gulf will be stuck with all the oil. And I’m about to get a pelican’s-eye impression of how much oil is currently in the Gulf.
“My name’s Dicky Toups,” says the pilot before he starts the engine of the seaplane I’m climbing into. “But they call me Captain Coon-ass.”
We overfly the emerald maze of the vast Mississippi Delta. Captain Coon-ass points, saying, “There’s a big ole gator.”
To the far points of view, America’s greatest marshes lie dissected, bisected, and trisected, diced by long, straight artificial channels and man-angled meanders, all aids to access and shipping. For the vast multimillion-acre emerald marshes, they are death by a thousand cuts.
The sign had said, “Welcome to Louisiana—America’s Wetland.” Pride and prejudice. People here depend on nature or the control of nature—or both. Keep an eye on nature; it can kill you here. But people can kill the place itself.
Since the 1930s, oil and gas companies have dug about 10,000 miles of canals through the oak and cypress forests, black mangrove swamps, and green marshes. Lined up, they could go straight through Earth with a couple thousand miles to spare. The salt water they brought killed coastal forests and subjected our greatest wetlands to steady erosion. Upstream, dams and levees hold back the sediment that could have helped heal some of that erosion. Starved on one end, eaten at the other. How to kill America’s wetlands. Long after this oil crisis is over, this chronic disease will continue doing far more damage than the oil.
All these Delta-slicing channels cause banks to dissolve, swapping wetlands for open water. Those channels also roll out red carpets for hurricanes. Incredibly, this has all cost Louisiana’s coast about 2,300 square miles of wetlands. Marshland continues to disintegrate at a rate of about 25 square miles a year. The rise in sea level due to global warming is also helping drown watery borderlands. Oil leak or no leak, these things, all ongoing, constitute the most devastating human-made disaster that’s ever hit the Gulf. Bar none.
Only slowly does the muddy Mississippi lose itself to the oceanic blue of the open Gulf, a melding of identities, a meeting of watery minds. And also the drain for sediments, agricultural fertilizers, and dead-zone-generating pollutants from the entire Midwest and most of the plains. Even before the oil blowout, this was a troubled place—a troubled place whose troubles have now escalated to a whole new level.
Two boats are tending booms around an island densely dotted with nesting pelicans. As I’ve noticed from the ground—but it’s even more striking from up here, at 3,500 feet—most of the coast is bare of booms and undefended. Where booms have been placed along the outer beach, many have already washed up onshore, already useless.
The sea-surface breeze pattern is interrupted by a marbling of slicks. Often such a pattern is perfectly natural, so I look carefully. It’s brown.
“Oil,” says Captain Coon-ass.
One of those slicks has nuzzled against the shore. There’s a boat there and some people are walking along the beach, inspecting a long boom that the wind has washed ashore.
The nearshore waters and beyond are dotted with drilling rigs for oil and gas, some abandoned. Like bringing coals to Newcastle, many of the rigs stand surrounded by floating oil.
Offshore, longer slicks ribbon their way out across the blue Gulf. As we follow them, the light slicks thicken with dark streaks that look from the air like wind-driven orange fingers, then like chocolate
pudding. An ocean streaked with chocolate pudding.
A few miles out, the streaks grow darker still. Yet there remains far more open water than oil slick.
That changes. Blue water turned shiny purple. A bruise from a battering. The sea swollen with oil.
As the water darkens and the slicks widen, Captain Coon-ass points to a small plane below us, saying it’s on a scouting run for the C-130s that will follow to spray dispersants. More chemicals on a sea of chemicals.
Yet plenty of the oil—and I mean plenty—is not dissolved. Blue water turned brown.
“This is some pretty thick stuff right here,” Captain Coon-ass says. The crude is now drifting in broad bands that stretch to the horizon. “We’re lookin’ at twenty miles of oil right here.”
We’re directly over the source of the blowout. Below, two ships are drilling the relief wells that we’ve been told will take months. A dozen ships drift nearby, most with helicopter landing pads on them. What they’re all doing, heaven knows.
A fresh breeze puts whitecaps on the nonoiled patches of the black-and-blue sea. As the C-130 comes out, we turn northeast.
We’re headed toward the Chandeleurs, the line of sandy islands that have been much in the news for their at-risk bird rookeries. Soon we’re over Breton Sound, where a couple of days ago, from a boat, I saw no oil.
But now there is plenty of oil, moving in between the main coast and the islands.
Out to intercept the oil is a fleet of shrimp boats towing booms from the outriggers that would normally tow their nets. The idea appears to be that they will catch the oil at the surface, the way they catch shrimp at the seafloor.
Dozens of boats tow booms through the oil, but as they do, water and oil simply flow over them. Far from corralling it, they’re barely stirring it. As they pass, the oil—seemingly all of it—remains.