A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [27]
A week in, as the sheer unstoppable quantity of oil breeches the confines of our ability to imagine what to do, the idea of skimming up most of the oil gives way to a desire to get rid of the oil, no matter how. Landry talks about burning it off the sea. Lighting the sea on fire. In 1969, the Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught fire. So shocked was America to see its waters on fire that the incident—along with an oil leak off Santa Barbara, California, the same year—helped precipitate the explosion of environmental laws that Republican president Richard Nixon signed in the early 1970s.
(Note to the young: If you wonder why we need a Clean Water Act—a reasonable question, since you’re lucky enough not to have seen America’s waterways as they were before—consider that the Cuyahoga River had ignited about ten prior times in the last century, and also consider this description from Time magazine, August 1, 1969:
Some river! Chocolate-brown, oily, bubbling with subsurface gases, it oozes rather than flows. “Anyone who falls into the Cuyahoga does not drown,” Cleveland’s citizens joke grimly. “He decays.” … The Federal Water Pollution Control Administration dryly notes: “The lower Cuyahoga has no visible signs of life, not even low forms such as leeches and sludge worms that usually thrive on wastes.” It is also—literally—a fire hazard.
Now Landry explains about burning this oil off the surface of the Gulf. She uses the term “controlled burns,” and says they would be done far from shore. As if nothing that breathes air lives out in the Gulf of Mexico. No turtles, say. No whales. She says that crews would make sure marine life and people were protected and that work on other oil rigs would not be interrupted. But can they protect sea turtles? Can they avoid interrupting dolphins and whales?
Two decades after the Exxon Valdez ran aground, its oil can still be found under rocks along Prince William Sound. Scratch and sniff.
There’s that terror here—that it will never be back to normal. Or that in the years it takes, communities will die and families disintegrate. But others begin saying maybe not. This isn’t Alaska crude. Gulf crude is “sweet crude”—gotta love these funky terms—while the Exxon Valdez disgorged heavy crude. This isn’t Prince William Sound. It’s hot here. What’s different is different.
“You have warm temperatures, strong sunlight, microbial action. It will degrade a lot faster,” says Ronald S. Tjeerdema, a University of California toxicologist who studies the effects of oil on aquatic systems. “Eventually, things will return to normal.”
But how long is eventually? One summer? A year? Five? Twenty? People know that before it returns to normal they are hurtling toward a time like no other, when everything they know and love is suddenly at risk.
We’re all aware that there’ll be oiled birds, dead turtles, the like. Some people ask, How bad? Most simply believe it will be real bad. Now we wait.
The Gulf of Mexico had gotten its own personal warning call in June 1979, when the Mexican drilling rig Ixtoc I blew out in about 160 feet of water. In the nine months required to stop the flow, it released 140 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf, the world’s largest accidental release up to then. It killed hundreds of millions of crabs on Mexican beaches and 80 percent of the invertebrates on Texas beaches. But other than that, its effects were poorly studied.
And since then, there’s been no new preparedness. No new techniques. No prefabricated deep-sea oil-capture technology.
What’s new is the depth of this well. A blowout this deep is new. But we shouldn’t be so surprised.
DÉJÀ VU, TO NAME BUT A FEW
March 1967. The supertanker Torrey Canyon, whose captain took a shortcut to beat the tide, strands in the Scilly Isles, spilling 35 million gallons of Kuwaiti oil. People watch in horror as oil kills about 25,000 seabirds and coats the shores of Cornwall and Brittany. There