by Carl Safina
Allen remarks about BP, “They are necessarily the modality by which this is going to get solved.”
In my experience, people who use the word “modality” never quite get to the point.
He gets to the point: “They’re exhausting every technical means possible to deal with that leak. I am satisfied with the coordination that’s going on.”
I’m not. Nor is anyone else I know. A few days later, even the president will say he regrets not realizing that oil companies did not “have their act together when it came to worst-case scenarios.” He will add a stern admonishment: “Make no mistake, BP is operating at our direction.”
It’s a mistake I will continue to make—often—in the upcoming weeks. Meanwhile, enraged over BP’s stonewalling and its refusal to entertain new ideas and alternate solutions—or to make any seemingly sincere attempt to collect oil at the surface—Plaquemines Parish president Billy Nungesser rails, “BP has taken over the Gulf of Mexico, and we’re doing nothing to stop them.”
Indeed, it feels to many as if the Coast Guard has handed BP the keys to our car and climbed into the back seat.
Louisiana’s governor declares a commercial fisheries’ failure to trigger aid. Within a week, the fisheries disaster declarations spread to include Alabama and Mississippi. Aid means tax dollars. Aid means that oil is not as cheap as it seems at the pump. We pay anyway.
Here’s who doesn’t get dispersants: the head of the EPA. Lisa Jackson, Environmental Protection Agency chief, exclaims, “Oh my God, it’s so thick!” as she assesses a cupful of the oily mess dipped from the mouth of the Mississippi. “At a minimum what we can say is dispersants didn’t work here,” Jackson actually says. She adds, “When you see stuff like this, it’s clear it isn’t a panacea.”
Panacea? As if perfection would be to just send all the oil out of sight, out of mind? Isn’t that BP’s dream scenario, to make it all seem to just go away by sinking it all below the surface? I don’t agree. At a minimum, what we can say is that dispersants don’t work if your goal is to avoid polluting the water on a massive scale.
Panacea? Dr. Susan Shaw of the Maine-based Marine Environmental Research Institute says, “The worst of these dispersants—sold by the name Corexit 9527—is the one they’ve been using most. It ruptures red blood cells and causes fish to bleed. With 800,000 gallons of this, we can only imagine the death that will be caused.” But that’s the problem: we can only imagine. It causes harm in laboratory tests at certain concentrations, but the dose makes the poison, and we have no clarity on what it’s doing in the Gulf.
Panacea? The Exxon Valdez disaster is what first linked Corexit to respiratory, nerve, liver, kidney, and blood disorders. Exxon Valdez cleanup workers reported blood in their urine. EPA data shows Corexit more toxic and less effective than other approved dispersants.
A BP spokesman calls Corexit “pretty effective,” adding, “I’m not sure about the others.” BP’s main reason for continuing to use Corexit appears to be its close ties to the manufacturer.
Panacea? Dr. Shaw writes in the New York Times after actually diving in part of the dispersant-and-oil mixture, “What I witnessed was a surreal, sickening scene beyond anything I could have imagined.” She describes the murky mixture drifting a few meters down, then concludes, “The dispersants have made for cleaner beaches. But they’re not worth the destruction they cause at sea, far out of sight. It would be better to halt their use and just siphon and skim as much of the oil off the surface as we can. The Deepwater Horizon spill has done enough damage, without our adding to it.”
The pressure seems to be pushing the EPA. Its officials finally obtain and make public a list of the concoctions’ ingredients. One version of Corexit (“corrects it”; get it?) contains benzene and 2-butoxyethanol, linked to destruction of red blood cells and cancers in lab studies of monkeys, rats, mice, rabbits, and dogs, which can lead to kidney, spleen, or liver damage. Also it caused breathing difficulties, skin irritation, physical weakness and unsteadiness, sluggishness, convulsions, birth defects, and fewer offspring in mammals. This stuff, you don’t want to swallow. The head of the Louisiana Shrimp Association calls Corexit “the Gulf’s Agent Orange.”
Now EPA administrator Lisa Jackson orders BP to take “immediate steps to scale back the use of dispersants” by 50 to 75 percent. (Well, which one is it?) While the government had approved the use of dispersants before this blowout, no one had anticipated that they’d ever be used at this scale and in these quantities.
My question is: Why are they using dispersants at all? As the incessant video shows, the entire leak is erupting from one small pipe. It’s not like a massive tanker spill, where it’s all in the water already and there’s no ongoing “source.” This is very different. They have their hands around this whole thing at that pipe. It seems to me it could all be captured. After all—it’s an oil well.
And now: voider of her own election, former Alaska governor turned national misfortune Sarah Palin comes out of her nutshell again to say that—to make a long story short—Obama’s response has been slow. It’s another signature blast of her sound-and-fury insight. And it prompts White House spokesman Robert Gibbs to suggest that Palin needs her own personal blowout preventer.
Granted, the administration’s response does seem slow. And the Coast Guard, in my estimation, has been disappointing. Our president disagrees with the likes of Palin and me, saying, “Those who think we were either slow on the response or lacked urgency, don’t know the facts.”
In a late-May press release, a group called Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility alerts us to the details and particulars of the BP response plan. Basically, there aren’t any. Plus, it’s so full of nonsense that apparently no regulator read it seriously.
Dated June 30, 2009, the “BP Regional Oil Spill Response Plan—Gulf of Mexico” covers all of the company’s various operations in the Gulf. The plan lists “Sea Lions, Seals, Sea Otters, and Walruses” as “Sensitive Biological Resources” in the Gulf. None of those animals live there (at least not since the Caribbean monk seal went extinct in the 1950s). BP has obviously just cut-and-pasted from documents written for drilling in Alaska. The document also gives a Japanese home-shopping website as a “primary equipment providers for BP in the Gulf of Mexico Region for rapid deployment of spill response resources on a 24 hour, 7 days a week basis.” The sea turtle expert you’re supposed to call is a researcher who’s been dead for five years. And the 600-page plan never discusses how to stop a deepwater blowout.
By May’s last waning days, some fishermen hired to do cleanup by BP say they have become ill after working long hours near oil and dispersant. Headaches, dizziness, nausea. Difficulty breathing. Burning eyes. The EPA’s air monitoring has detected odors strong enough to cause sickness. The EPA’s website warns coastal residents that these chemicals “may cause short-lived headache, eye, nose and throat irritation, or nausea.”
BP says it’s unaware of any health complaints.
That’s because: “You don’t bite the hand that feeds you,” says the president of the Commercial Fishermen’s Association. Many fishermen have told him about feeling ill. “You left in the morning, you were OK. Out on the water, you’ve got a pounding headache, throwing up.” And yet, he says, “BP has the opinion that they are not getting sick.”
Maybe time for a second opinion.
On May 26 BP subjects us to two new vocabulary terms. Of all the kooky names for dopey ideas, these two take the cake: “junk shot” and “top kill.” Let’s use them in one sentence: “They don’t work either.” The rodeo names reflect the rodeo thinking that got us here. One half-baked idea after another.
The Bright Ploy this time: attempt to stop the upward flow of oil by sending heavy drilling fluid down the well. Workers have triggered the original blowout and explosion by removing the heavy drilling fluid that had, in fact, been holding down the oil. So we might call this the “oops” strategy, as in “Oops, let’s go back to what w
as working before we caused the blowout.”
It’s way too late now, though. As the University of Texas’s Petroleum Engineering Department chairman says, “You have the equivalent of six fire hoses blasting oil and gas upward and two fire hoses blasting mud down. They are at a disadvantage.”
BP pegs its chance of success at 60 to 70 percent. (New definition of “pegged”: made up, fabricated.) “We’re doing everything we can to bring it to closure, and actually we’re executing this top kill job as efficiently and effectively as we can,” says BP chief operating officer Doug Suttles.
I don’t know what to make of the word “actually” there. Is he surprised? Or does he know that we know that he’s just BS-ing us?
The University of Texas’s Petroleum Engineering Department chairman watches a live video and says, “It’s not going well.”
“I wouldn’t say it’s failed yet,” says BP’s chief operating officer. With dramatic flair that seems oblivious to the sheer irresponsibility it implies, BP reminds us that the method has never been tried before at such depth. “This is the first time the industry has had to confront this issue in this water depth,” gushes BP’s CEO, the ever-perspicacious Tony Hayward, “and there is a lot of real-time learning going on.”
“We’ve never tried this before in water this deep” is a bad answer when you’ve been drilling in water this deep.
“It’s a wait-and-see game here right now; so far nothing unfavorable.… The absence of any news is good news,” says the chipper Thadmiral.
Thad Allen was a hero in the Hurricane Katrina disaster, yet I find myself unable to believe what he’s telling us. Not entirely fair, but my anger is stoking my cynicism. The impression given—at least the impression I form—is that Admiral Allen is up to his neck in oil and over his head in this debacle. In my mind he becomes government chief of useless statements.
Next, Thad Allen begins talking enthusiastically about BP’s planned “junk shot.” “They’re actually going to take a bunch of debris, shredded-up tires, golf balls, and things like that and under very high pressure shoot it into the preventer itself and see if they can clog it up and stop the leak.”
There’s that word “actually” again.
It all fails.
Obviously, Admiral Allen has been bugging me. But to be honest, I’m not sure how much of that is him—and how much is me. It’s difficult to maintain one’s objectivity amid so much subjective confusion. The drilling rig wasn’t his responsibility, and he certainly didn’t cause the blowout.
BP announces that it has spent $930 million responding to the spill. The company is acting like an emotionally distant husband seeking appreciation from his wife and children by telling them how much his bills cost.
And rather belatedly, Tony Hayward calls the blowout “a very significant environmental crisis” and a “catastrophe.” After he’d earlier said the oil leaked has been “tiny” compared with the “very big ocean,” his media coaches are earning their fees. But he should try telling us something we don’t already know.
So far, about 26,000 people have filed damage claims.
Researchers on the University of South Florida College of Marine Science vessel Weatherbird II report discovering a massive amount of oil-polluted water beneath the Gulf of Mexico, in a layer hundreds of feet thick, down to a depth of well over 3,000 feet, drifting in a several-miles-wide plume stretching twenty-two miles from the leaking wellhead northeast toward Alabama. Chemical oceanographer David Hollander makes this announcement, saying with all due scientific caution that it’s likely oil from the blown-out well.
But really, what else could it be? Let’s review: Oil is gushing from a well. One end of the plume is in the vicinity of that well. And the company running the drilling operation has been spraying dispersants on the seafloor and at the surface to keep as much of the oil underwater as is humanly possible. Scientists have detected oil underwater, ergo—what else could it be from?
“This is when all the animals are reproducing and hatching, so the damage at this depth will be much worse,” says Dr. Larry McKinney of the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies. “We’re not talking about adults on the surface; it will impact on the young—and potentially a generational life cycle. At the depth that these plumes are at, the sea will be toxic for God knows how long.”
The federal government closes more fishing areas, to the west and south, on May 25. The closed area now: 54,096 square miles, over 22 percent of the Gulf of Mexico’s federal waters. “This leaves approximately more than 77 percent still open for fishing,” our National Marine Fisheries Service adds with silver-lining turn-a-frown-upside-down think-positiveness.
Meanwhile, U.S. Geological Survey director Marcia McNutt says the oil leaked in the last five weeks totals somewhere between 18 million and 39 million gallons. That’s way past Exxon Valdez’s 11 million gallons. (So it’s said; others insist the total was much more than Exxon ever admitted.)
And speaking of Alaska, Shell Oil has been poised to start exploratory drilling this summer as far as 140 miles off Alaska’s coast. But now the Obama administration suspends proposed exploratory drilling in the Arctic Ocean until 2011. Alaska politicians are pissed! They have to be—about 90 percent of Alaska’s general revenue comes from the petroleum industry. It’s what helps get them elected. They’re like sled dogs who start the day with a big bowl of oil and then get harnessed up to pull Petroleum’s sled.
“I was certain I was going to die,” Deepwater Horizon survivor Stephen Stone tells a congressional hearing panel. He says the April 20 blast was “hardly the first thing to go wrong.” He testifies, “This event was set in motion years ago by these companies needlessly rushing to make money faster, while cutting corners to save money.” More than a day after the explosion, Stone was finally back on land. “Before we were allowed to leave, we were lined up and made to take a drug test. It was only then, 28 hours after the explosion, that I was given access to a phone, and was allowed to call my wife and tell her I was OK.”
Then, a few days later, a representative of rig owner Transocean asked him to sign a document “stating I was not injured, in order to get $5,000 for the loss of my personal possessions.” He declined to sign.
These are the kinds of people we’re dealing with.
Eight workers airlifted to a Louisiana hospital this week were released. That’s the good news. One fisherman hospitalized after becoming ill while cleaning up oil—severe headaches, nosebleeds, and so on—files a temporary restraining order in federal court against BP. He wants BP to give workers masks and not harass workers for publicly voicing their health concerns. He also says, “There were tents set up outside the hospital, where I was stripped of my clothing, washed with water and [had] several showers, before I was allowed into the hospital. When I asked for my clothing, I was told that BP had confiscated all of my clothing and it would not be returned.”
A lot of fishermen are reluctant to complain. Making as much as $3,000 a day cleaning up the oil, they fear losing their jobs with BP. If it’s partly hush money, BP’s plan for them is working.
Of course, a BP spokesman says there have been no threats against workers for speaking out. He adds, “If they have any concerns, they should raise them with their supervisors.”
In the space after that statement, I hear “and not with anyone else.” When I ask one worker a question, he says to me, “No comment.” When I ask him if his supervisors have told him to say that, he says, “Yeah.”
“The only work fishermen can get right now is with BP,” affirms the fisherman seeking the restraining order.
A fisherman’s wife says her husband called her from a boat, saying, “This one’s hanging over the boat throwing up. This one says he’s dizzy, and he’s feeling faint.” She says they were downwind of it and the smell was “so strong they could almost taste it.”
In addition to concern over oil, many fear the million gallons of dispersant served so far. The dispersant’s o
wn manufacturer states that people should “avoid breathing vapor” and that when this product is present in certain concentrations in the air, workers should wear masks.
The fisherman’s wife says her husband came home so sick he collapsed into a recliner without eating dinner or saying hello to her or their children. After three weeks of coughing and feeling weak, he agreed to go for medical help. His wife’s been trying to get BP to give the workers masks.
BP says workers who want to wear masks are “free to do so”—as long as they receive instructions from their supervisors on “how to use them.”
A spokesman for the shrimpers’ association insists that BP has told workers they are not allowed to wear masks: “Some of our men asked, and they were told they’d be fired if they wore masks.” Environmental groups offering free masks to workers have been told by BP that they can’t do that. If you wear a respirator you have bought with your own money, if you wear a respirator someone has given you—you’re fired.
And here’s why: oil is not their problem. Their problem is that they are eating. At least, that’s what BP says. BP’s CEO and chief harlequin Tony Hayward actually says, “Food poisoning is clearly a big issue.” He adds, “It’s something we’ve got to be very mindful of. It’s one of the big issues.” He himself seems to be suffering from foot-in-mouth disease.
“Headaches, shortness of breath, nosebleeds—there’s nothing there that suggests foodborne illness,” said Dr. Michael Osterholm of the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. “I don’t know what these people have, but it sounds more like a respiratory illness.”
The fisherman’s wife has better data. She says there’s no way her husband and the other men had fallen victim to food poisoning—they were on eight different boats and didn’t eat the same food.