A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [120]
University of Miami marine scientist Jerald Ault points out, “All those toxins that were injected into the Gulf, and remain in the Gulf, can be deadly to eggs and larvae and the young life stages of these species like giant bluefin tuna, yellowfin tuna, the billfishes and marine mammals, and many others. When you inject that volume of oil and dispersants into this life web, changes will echo through the system for a very long time. This is a long way from being over.”
That’s reasonable speculation. But it’s speculation. Really, nobody knows. The stuff can be toxic, but how toxic at what concentrations, and for how long? It’s continually being diluted and degraded. Its toxicity yesterday isn’t the same tomorrow. And yet there must have been—I speculate—tremendous damage to sheer numbers of those eggs and larvae. We should also bear in mind, however, that the numbers of eggs and larvae are always far in excess of what the system can support. The competition and struggle for existence is so intense that under normal, healthy circumstances, only one fish egg in millions wins the lottery ticket for becoming an adult. That is where a lot of the resiliency comes from. There may be enough survivors to let the Gulf recover quickly.
So yes, this is a long way from being over. But I think it’s the people and communities that will have the longest and hardest time recovering. Again, that’s my speculation. But I’d bet on it.
Patches of oil are still washing up in the marshes and coastal areas of Louisiana, tourists remain skeptical and elusive, and waters remain closed to fishing.
“For technological disasters, unlike natural disasters, we see long-term impacts to communities, families, and individuals,” says University of South Alabama sociologist Steven Picou. He has studied the impacts of both the Exxon Valdez spill and Katrina. In a natural disaster, he says, “People quit blaming God, usually after two weeks; then they come together with purpose and meaning to rebuild, so your social capital in a community grows after a natural disaster.” But, he notes, “What we found in Alaska was that communities tended to lose their social capital. Their trust in local institutions and state and federal institutions, and their social networks, tends to break down. Everyone is angry and people get tired.” The resiliency coast residents showed after Katrina may help them overcome the blowout, too, he says—but this will be a marathon, not a bounce-back.
And as for misjudging people’s emotions, few can rival BP, which is saying it might someday go back to Plan A and use the well for commercial purposes. Tony Hayward said in June that the reservoir was believed to hold about 2.1 billion gallons of oil. Roughly 200 million gallons have leaked out, leaving about 1.9 billion gallons, over 45 million barrels. At the current per-barrel value of $82, what remains is still worth $3.7 billion. Now BP’s chief operating officer, Doug Suttles, is saying—and you have to wonder why in the world he thinks it necessary to bring this up before the well is even deemed fully secured—“We’re going to have to think about what to do with that at some point.”
It happens to really bother some people that a company with revenues of $147 billion in the first half of 2010 would commercialize a grave site. A fifty-four-year-old real estate agent from Mississippi, her voice cracking, says, “People died out there on that rig. They can find another place. Leave that one alone.”
BP still has lease access to a roughly three-by-three-mile block of seafloor there. They’ll be back.
In another stroke of public relations insight, BP is now hedging about how the relief wells will be used. BP officials had insisted for months that the relief wells were the only surefire way to end the oil leak, but now they