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By Root 1214 0

the Gulf, and provide hope for recovery, actions should be taken ASAP to identify and protect areas that are still in good shape. Obama has the power to do as Presidents T. Roosevelt and G. W. Bush have done in the past—under the Antiquities Act—to declare National Monuments. What better way to “give back to the Gulf,” and to the people whose livelihoods depend on a healthy Gulf, than to protect the deep reefs and string of “topographic highs” in the Northern Gulf, the spawning areas for tuna, the critical places for menhaden, grouper, snapper, shrimp and others, as well as the vital—but neglected—seagrass meadows of Florida’s Big Bend area. Respect for the importance of the floating forests of sargassum and their role in providing nursery areas, food and shelter—as well as taking up carbon and generating oxygen—might be considered in an overall recovery plan. This could be the moment to act to secure protection for Pulley Ridge, the extraordinary system of deep reefs 150 miles offshore from Sarasota. And time is of the essence. Maybe now is the time, when the need is so obvious, to act.

When BP announces it has spent $9.5 billion cleaning up its mess (a helium-filled figure that will keep floating upward over the next weeks and months), I’m not sure how I feel about it. It’s nice of BP, but they could have saved themselves and all of us the trouble by saying, “Wait a minute” when they saw pressure on the gauge during the afternoon of April 20. Maybe next time they won’t keep driving when the oil light comes on.

But what will the next time be? Just as the federal response plan failed this blowout because it was designed to fight the next Exxon Valdez, we’re gonna need something that doesn’t just plan to fight the last war. Some added thought is called for. Some vision. What might be the next big problem in the tapping and transport of oil, the one nobody is anticipating?

More than 27,000 abandoned wells lurk beneath the Gulf of Mexico. With some abandoned as long ago as the 1940s, deteriorating sealing jobs may already be failing. About 13 percent of them are categorized in government records as “temporarily abandoned.” Temporarily abandoned wells are supposed to be plugged within a year. That’s routinely ignored. Many “temporarily abandoned” wells have been sitting since the 1950s and ’60s. No one—not the oil companies, not the government—is checking whether they are leaking. Meanwhile, cement and pipes never intended to last so many years are aging in the seafloor. All this raises the possibility that old wells may spontaneously blow out.

If that happens, it seems unlikely that companies will rush forward to accept responsibility. BP alone has abandoned about 600 wells in the Gulf. “It’s in everybody’s interest to do it right,” says a spokesman for Apache Corporation, which has abandoned at least 2,100 wells in the Gulf. But early on, the rules were less strict than they are today, and many—tens of thousands—of wells are poorly sealed.

Texas alone has plugged more than 21,000 abandoned wells to control pollution in state waters. Other places have similar problems. California has resealed scores of abandoned wells. But in deeper federal waters, the U.S. Minerals Management Service has typically inspected only the paperwork, not the real job. Over five years, from 2003 through 2007, the MMS fined seven companies a total of only $440,000 for improper plug-and-abandonment work.

The Government Accountability Office, which does congressional investigations, warned as early as 1994 that leaks from offshore abandoned wells could cause an “environmental disaster.” The GAO pressed for inspections of abandonment jobs, but nothing was done. A 2001 Minerals Management Service study noted concern that “some abandoned oil wells in the Gulf may be leaking crude oil.”

Nothing came of that, either. In 2006 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said, “Well abandonment and plugging have generally not been properly planned, designed and executed.” The EPA was talking about wells on land, where wells abandoned in recent decades have