A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [43]
To the ambiguity and imprecision, add unnecessary intonations of worrisome complexity: “The high winds may distribute oil over a wide area,” says a National Hurricane Center meteorologist, adding, “It’s a complex problem that really needs to be looked at in great detail to try to understand what the oceanic response is when you have an oil layer at the sea surface.”
To most normal people faced with the real event of an out-of-control mess, especially people who’ve survived hurricanes, that kind of noninformation stokes anxiety, provokes fear—and gives no one a clear clue about what to do. Does one make decisions based on the difference between 30 and 44 percent? News you can use, it isn’t. It’s news that can help ruin your health.
Insult to injury: “Safety first,” says a BP spokesman. “We build in hurricane preparedness, and that requires us to take the necessary precautions.”
By mid-May, something like 10,000 people are Being Paid for cleanup efforts around the Gulf. BP has little choice. Anything less, there’d be riots. Most are fishermen riding around looking for oil, dragging booms that don’t collect much oil, or putting out booms that can work only on oil that hasn’t been dissolved by dispersants. About a million and a half feet—roughly 300 miles—of boom is already out along the coast. Other people are out picking oil off beaches with shovels.
How much oil are we dealing with? This gets good: Purdue professor Steve Wereley performs computer analyses on the video of the leaking oil to see how far and how fast particles are moving (a technique called particle image velocimetry). His conclusion: the well is leaking between 56,000 and 84,000 barrels daily. His other conclusion: “It’s definitely not 5,000 barrels a day.”
Just a few days ago, during congressional testimony, officials from BP, Transocean, and Halliburton estimated a “worst-case” scenario maximum flow of 60,000 barrels a day. Yet a BP spokesman says the company stands by its estimate of 5,000 barrels per day. There’s “no way to calculate a definite amount,” he says, adding coyly, “We are focused on stopping the leak and not measuring it.”
That’s Bull Poop. As the director of the Texas A&M University’s geochemical and environmental research group points out: “If you don’t know the flow, it is awfully hard to design the thing that is going to work.”
Killing the well is proving difficult. Killing public confidence is easier. The fact that the real flow will turn out to be sixty times what BP was first saying, and twelve times the Coast Guard’s most oft-repeated estimate, does the trick handily.
LATE MAY
Another discovery, another debate, more resistance from BP about disclosing how much oil is leaking. Scientists from the University of Georgia, Louisiana University, and elsewhere, aboard the research vessel Pelican, report finding—well, let them tell you: “There’s a shocking amount of oil in the deep water, relative to what you see in the surface water,” says Samantha Joye, a researcher at the University of Georgia. “There’s a tremendous amount of oil in multiple layers, three or four or five layers deep in the water column.” “Tremendous” meaning plumes as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide, and up to 300 feet thick. She reports methane concentrations up to 10,000 times higher than normal.
Dr. Joye says oxygen near some of the plumes has already dropped 30 percent because of oxygen-using microbes feeding on the hydrocarbons. In an e-mail, Joye calls her findings “the most bizarre-looking oxygen profiles I have ever seen anywhere.” She notes, “If you keep those kinds of rates up, you could draw the oxygen down to very low levels that are dangerous to animals.” Some parts of the plume had oxygen concentrations just above levels that make areas uninhabitable to fish, crabs, shrimp, and other marine creatures. “That is alarming,