A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [121]
BP is now refusing to commit to pumping cement down the relief well and into the bottom of the blown-out well. But why? Maybe their reason is a good one. Or maybe they think they’ll use it to produce oil. Or they want to save a little money. Thing is, we don’t know. They’re so inept at PR, they manage to murk up the plan that for months they’ve touted as their best way to finally bring closure to the blown-out well.
But Thad Allen will have none of BP’s vacillating. He makes it clear that the gusher will have to be plugged from two directions to be sure it’s permanently dead. “I am the national incident commander and I issue the orders,” he insists. “This will not be over until we do the bottom kill.” He adds, with some urgency, “The quicker we get this done, the quicker we can reduce the risk of some type of internal failure.” He assures us that a relief well will inject cement into the well deep below the seafloor. “There should be no ambiguity about that,” Allen says. “I’m the national incident commander and this is how this will be handled.”
“I wouldn’t put it as ‘government versus BP,’ ” says one of BP’s interchangeable vice presidents. “This is just about some really smart people debating about what’s the best way to do things.”
When people refer to themselves as really smart, my confidence in them—if I have any—declines.
Perhaps sensing certain limits, BP’s CEO now (again) confirms that BP plans to use the 18,000-foot relief well to seal the blown-out well with drilling fluid and cement.
But stay tuned.
Maybe BP is getting distracted by the 300 lawsuits piling against it like snowdrifts. Transocean, close behind with 250 lawsuits, claims it’s not responsible and has the gall to ask a court to limit its liabilities to a piddling $27 million.
Central to BP’s legal strategy will be the need to rebuff claims that the company acted with “gross negligence.” The difference between “gross negligence” and regular garden-variety negligence for BP, in this case, could be more than $15 billion in additional civil penalties under the Clean Water Act. Consequently, BP does what any negligent company would do: blames its partners. “Halliburton should have done more extensive testing and signaling to BP,” says BP. To which Halliburton retorts, “The well owner is responsible for designing the well program and any testing.”
While the principals engage in a foot-eating contest and continue to antagonize one another, the media, and us, we have a bit of luxury in asking the real questions: How much? How long? How bad? A big part of this—maybe all of it now—turns on the questions, How toxic? What will die?
Easy questions, hard to answer. People are still measuring, analyzing, writing up their findings. A fuller picture hasn’t yet emerged. And so there’s a tug-of-war between those who see the changing Gulf situation as a glass half empty, those who see it as half full, and those who see it as half-assed.
We can begin with brief comparisons. Oil from the Exxon Valdez remains obvious in the sands of Prince William Sound. Oil spilled four decades ago in a well-studied Cape Cod marsh lingers a few inches below the surface. But the Ixtoc blowout sent more than 3 million barrels into the Gulf of Mexico. That’s a lot; it’s more than half the total of the 2010 blowout. Ixtoc did a lot of damage, yet by most accounts, most things were pretty much back to normal a few years after Ixtoc blew.
Because an estimated couple thousand barrels of oil enter the Gulf daily from thousands of small natural seeps, the Gulf is well populated with bacteria that can eat oil. (Thank God for evolution.) Like a living inoculation, their existence gives the Gulf some powers of natural recuperation, even from such an enormous shock as this blowout. They’re part of the Gulf’s resilience, its flex. Microbiologist Ronald M. Atlas, formerly a president of the American Society for Microbiology, says, “I believe that most of the oil will not have a significant impact. That’s been the story with spills