A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [80]
It’s hard to imagine a turtle in the ocean catching fire, but after all, it’s hard to imagine any of this. And so today’s vocabulary word from the theater of the absurd is “burn box.” Noun: an area of corralled oil set on fire. Contractors are staging mass burns of some of the floating oil mats, setting the sea aflame. Some people allege they’re burning up sea turtles along with the oil. I’m dubious. But then again, a lot of little turtles could be clinging to weed mats. The turtle rescuers want to pick up as many turtles as they can find, for fear they’ll be incinerated. They find eleven, all of them heavily speckled with oil.
I read that only 3 percent of the slick is thick enough to catch and hold a flame on the surface of the sea. But there is so much oil that the fires and their towering billows of thick smoke are horrendous.
Workers will light more than three hundred fires at sea, sending thick plumes of smoke, carbon dioxide, and hydrocarbons toward heaven. They’ll burn more oil than the Exxon Valdez spilled. A man employed to ignite floating oil will brag, “No one can deny this is a success.”
John Wathen, who spoke of seeing dolphins dying in thick oil, says he witnessed other dolphins, lined up with their heads out of the water, watching the astonishing sight of their ocean in flames.
Various people report seeing sharks, mullet, crabs, rays, and small fish in unusual numbers close to shore. Are they fleeing the oil? Could be. But the Gulf has long had its dead zone of low oxygen, which worsens in summer. Large numbers of fish moving into shallows where there’s more oxygen isn’t unheard of. The latest figures of dead wildlife total about 800 birds, 350 turtles, and 40 mammals. It’s not clear whether the oil killed them all. Even people cruising Louisiana’s heavily besmirched Barataria Bay see dozens of dolphins frolicking in oil-sheened water, and oil-smudged pelicans feeding their young.
In some areas still open to fishing, fishers report large catches of red snapper, grouper, king mackerel, and amberjack. Are the fish congregating after fleeing the oil or are they unaffected by it? Are the large schools of fish locals see hanging around piers there because the fishing ban has given the fish a huge break? No one knows. But it’s seeming that much life in the Gulf has resilience enough to resist the oil.
After many days of very public pressure from President Obama and many hours of private negotiations, BP finally agrees to divert $20 billion into an independent fund to pay claims arising from the blowout. The company will also suspend paying shareholder dividends for the rest of the year and will set aside an additional $100 million as compensation for lost wages for oil rig workers affected by the Obama moratorium on deep exploratory drilling. The president stresses that the amount is not a ceiling on BP’s obligations. Suspending dividends delivers another blow to BP’s reputation and its shareholders, but for the company’s accountants it’s a godsend that saves BP something like $10 billion. The president had earlier alluded to his determination to step in and do “what individuals couldn’t do and corporations wouldn’t do.” For the president and the Gulf, it’s a stunning coup.
To Obama, this is a rebalancing after two decades in which multinationals sometimes acted like mini-states beyond government reach, while influencing the government to, as he says, “gut regulations and put industry insiders in charge of industry oversight.” The president had no legal basis for the demand. (Remember, BP is legally on the hook for just $75 million.) The deal follows