A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [117]
“We were towing four 50,000-barrel-capacity double-hulled barges. Our job was to be a receptacle for skimmed oil. The need for us was wildly optimistic. With 200,000-barrel capacity, we came back with about 1,000 barrels of oil-water mix.
“The oil we traveled fifteen hundred miles to help recover was mostly not recoverable. We saw little patches here, little blobs there, pancakes, palm-sized pieces, pennies, dimes, nickels everywhere. Most of the stuff is just broken up into tiny droplets. And it’s in suspension, so there’s no way you can skim it.
“So we’re constantly driving around looking for something we may be able to do something with, and almost never finding it, not really accomplishing anything. I’m sure we used more oil as fuel than the amount of oil we recovered.
“On the radio you’d hear frustration from other boats. Southerners attracted to working on boats and oil rigs have a very powerful work ethic; nobody wants to feel like they’re wasting their time.
“To compound it, every time we find a large enough mass to actually be able to do some productive skimming, they just hit it with dispersants. One day we were in water with a heavy sheen on top. The air stank of the crude, and there were millions of little blobs of what has become known as ‘peanut butter,’ or weathered crude. It was also scattered throughout the water vertically. I couldn’t tell how far down it went. It lasted mile after mile, as far as the eye could see.
“This is my second major spill response—I was one of the volunteer idiots power-washing rocks after Exxon Valdez back in ’89—and as bad as Valdez was, the scale of this one simply takes my breath away.
“In this horrible mess was the biggest herd of dolphin I’ve ever seen, about sixty to ninety, I estimated. They stayed with us for about two hours, until I changed course. As the day progressed the oil got heavier and heavier, and by sunset I thought that the next day we’d get to do some real skimming and recovery.
“About four in the morning they called and told us all to get out of there and go north of twenty-nine degrees, ten minutes latitude. They kicked all the boats out of the area by dawn, then they bombed the whole area with dispersants from planes. I said, ‘What the hell do they want to do that for? We finally found it in a concentration we might have picked up, and these assholes go and spray it.’
“I don’t know if those dolphins were around for that or not. I don’t know if the pilots would have aborted the mission if they had spotted them in the target area. Probably not, I imagine. I only hope the dolphins somehow knew what was going to happen and got the hell out of there. I don’t even want to think about what would have happened to them if they didn’t.”
Splotches of crude are still washing up here and there along Louisiana’s coast, but in early August NOAA releases a five-page report called “Deepwater Horizon/BP Oil Budget: What Happened to the Oil?”
It’s got a nifty pie chart that describes the fate of the estimated 4.9 million gallons of oil, broken into seven categories. Designed to be simple and communicate clearly, it becomes a major public relations mess because: (1) some high-ranking government officials apparently can’t read; (2) that’s partly because there is one major thing in the report that really is pretty confusing; and (3) some reporters also apparently can’t read. And what the confused officials say confuses the media totally.
Here’s what the report says; you can read it for yourself:
In summary, it is estimated that burning, skimming and direct recovery from the wellhead removed one quarter (25%) of the oil released from the wellhead. One quarter (25%) of the total oil naturally evaporated or dissolved, and just less than one quarter (24%) was dispersed