A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [143]
New details about the Gulf blowout of 2010 will continue to bubble up for quite some time. As the birds of autumn begin rowing through the air near my Long Island home, I begin seeing gleaming white gannets on their way south after nesting in Canada. Last spring, the first oiled bird whose image made news was a gannet that had spent its winter in the Gulf. I realized that the bird would never return to its Canadian nesting grounds, meaning the oil would create problems reaching far beyond the Gulf of Mexico. Juvenile gannets can spend several years in the Gulf, and now I get word that Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary, near Tampa, is still nursing about eighty gannets it received during the summer, debilitated by oil but alive. That means hundreds of gannets died. In Canada, seabird biologist Bill Montevecchi says that his tagging studies suggest that the oil posed a threat to as many as a third of Canada’s gannets. Even if all goes well from now on, it will take a few years for the population, nesting well over two thousand miles from the Gulf, to replace those birds lost to the Gulf oil slicks. And that’s just gannets.
The blowout is both an acute tragedy and a broad metaphor for a country operating sloppily, waving away risks and warnings, a country that does not use care in stewarding its precious gifts, a country concerned only about the next little while, not the longer time frames of our lives or our children’s futures.
In the meantime, we are left with the Gulf itself. Regardless of how fast the Gulf’s waters, wildlife, and wetlands recover from this blowout, Gulf residents will be left with scars and years-long pain. The stamp of this will be on lives, families, marriages, and children for quite a while to come.
During the last week of September, “moderate to heavy oil” washes onto almost one hundred miles of Louisiana’s shoreline. And when Louisiana State University scuba divers go for a look into the waters off of St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes, they see “oil everywhere.”
REFERENCES
BLOWOUT!
1 Deepwater Horizon size, and insured for over half a billion dollars S. Mufson, “Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Creates Environmental and Political Dilemmas,” Washington Post, April 27, 2010. See also “Deepwater Horizon,” at Wikipedia.org; accessed on November 12, 2010.
2 No serious injuries in seven years “Blowout: The Deepwater Horizon Disaster,” CBS News, May 16, 2010; http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/05/16/
60minutes/main6490197.shtml.
3 Drilling progressed to about 4,000 feet “Oil Spill Postmortem: BP Used Less-reliable, but Cheaper Drilling Method on Deepwater Horizon,” McClatchy-Tribune News Service, May 23, 2010.
4 $58 million over budget “AFE Summary for the Macondo Well,” http://www.deepwaterinvestigation.com/external/content/document/3043/
914919/1/AFE%20Summary%20for%20the%20Macondo%20Well.pdf.
5 Casing and drill pipe and “making a trip M. Raymond and William Leffler, Oil and Gas Production in Nontechnical Language (Tulsa, OK: PennWell Corp., 2006), p. 104.
6 It was a world-class rig “Deepwater Horizon’s Cementing Plan Is Under Scrutiny.” The well-drilling description is based on schematic and notes from the Times-Picayune, 2010; see schematic at http://media.nola.com/2010_gulf_oil_spill/photo/oil-halliburton-cement-052010jpg-e618a2271a66c847.jpg.