A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [129]
That’s the good news.
But while she says, “We haven’t seen any oiled sediments,” the University of Georgia’s Samantha Joye says, “I’ve never seen anything like this.” Joye describes layers of oily sediment two inches thick. Below the oily layer, she says, she finds recently dead shrimp, worms, and other invertebrates. And University of South Florida researchers see what they believe are droplets of oil on the seafloor. “It wasn’t like a drape, like a blanket of oil, don’t get me wrong,” says David Hollander. “It looked like a constellation of stars that were at the scale of microdroplets.”
What are we to make of such different findings? Different samples, different times, in different parts of the Gulf where heavy oil did or didn’t go. Pieces of a puzzle.
Greenpeace says it’s still easy to find oil just a few inches down in the sand on beaches that had been obviously oiled a few weeks back. That’s believeable, and the videos look convincing.
Less convincing is that Louisiana’s Governor Bobby Jindal is still trying to get his one hundred miles of sand berms built. BP has agreed to pay a hefty $360 million for them. But the Environmental Protection Agency is urging the Army Corps of Engineers to turn down the state’s sand berm project, saying berms don’t do anything and can harm wildlife. Ostensibly they’re to stop oil from contaminating shores and marshlands. Using a May permit, the state spent tens of millions of dollars to build four miles of berms.
Here’s a good line of BS: one of the governor’s aides says the berms they built received “some of the heaviest oiling on Louisiana’s coast.” So what are they, oil magnets? He reportedly says the Louisiana National Guard has picked up at least a thousand pounds of oily debris from the berms. You know how much oil and sand it takes to make a thousand-pound pile? Very, very little. Let’s put it this way: one cubic yard of sand weighs 2,700 pounds. He says, “Now is not the time to stop protective measures that have proven their effectiveness.” Actually, now might be a good time.
I suspect that this desire for berms stems from a fear of hurricanes, not oil. Is my suspicion misplaced? Says Grand Isle’s mayor, “What is wrong with us dredging and building these islands back up?”
On September 8, BP’s just-released internal investigation spreads the blame widely, declares the disaster—lawyers and jurors, please take note—a “shared responsibility,” blames “no single factor,” and adds, “Rather, a complex and interlinked series of mechanical failures, human judgments, engineering design, operational implementation, and team interfaces came together to allow the initiation and escalation of the accident. Multiple companies, work teams, and circumstances were involved.”
Oh, and also, even after all the stuff leading to the blowout went wrong, the blowout preventer should have activated automatically, sealing the well. BP says the device “failed to operate, probably because critical components were not working.”
Self-serving as all that is, it’s also probably all correct. But there’s “shared responsibility” and then there’s “shared responsibility.” It certainly does seem that multiple workers from multiple companies made multiple errors. But whether BP shares or owns “responsibility” will largely come down to legal definitions of said term. I once got a ticket for an undersized fish that was caught on my boat but that I did not catch and did not measure and did not put in the cooler myself (it was a quarter-inch short and the mismeasurement was a friend’s honest mistake). But as captain, I was responsible. I got the ticket. Sometimes that’s the way it is; the crew messes up, but the captain pays.
The sign at Pensacola Beach proclaims “World’s Whitest Beach.” And still, it pretty much is.
People here say they dodged a bullet. Workers are keeping the main beaches almost clean. Fort Pickens National