A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [90]
Oil floats. Shares sink. BP’s stock price drops 6 percent, to $27.02, on June 25. Lowest value in fourteen years.
Oil floats. Turtles fly. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is coordinating collection of about 70,000 sea turtle eggs from around 800 beach-buried nests from the Florida Panhandle to Alabama. The fear: hatchlings will head into a toxic sea and be fatally mired as they seek food and shelter in oil-matted seaweed. The dilemma: nobody’s ever done this before at such a scale. There’s a lot of guessing. And any hatchlings that survive will almost certainly not return to the Gulf as adults, because they’ll imprint on the east coast of Florida beaches where they’ll be released. The turtles could squeeze out a win. But for the Gulf, it’s a loss either way. It’s not that anyone thinks this is a great idea. It’s that the people involved don’t want to just sit back; they want to help.
Halfway around the world is a man who wants so very much to help, he has sent us a giant, unsolicited gift. And so now, in the center ring, we have for you: the World’s Largest Skimming Vessel. That’s right, ladies and gentlemen. This massive beast, the awkwardly named A Whale, has crossed the Pacific flying a Taiwanese flag to go head-to-head, mano a mano, with the slick. How many football fields is it? you might ask. Three and a half! Ten stories high! It’s a tanker newly converted at its owner’s expense for just this purpose. And what a guy he must truly be. It has never been tested, but it’s the thought that counts. And this whole season is about testing technology and people as never before.
The radio theater of the absurd tells us that “officials” hope the vessel will be able to suck up as much as 21 million gallons of oil-fouled water per day! But that’s not quite true. That’s what the owner hopes. Remember, it hasn’t been tested. And the key phrase there is “oil-fouled water.” Nobody thinks it could collect that much sheer oil.
Officials are doing their usual bit: being skeptical and mulling whether to grant access. And so the ship’s mysterious and “reclusive” owner has sent a representative from a PR firm to “unleash a torrent of publicity and cut through red tape.”
Turns out, “officials” are inclined to deny the ship permission to work, citing the fact that after it skims water and separates out the oil, the water it returns will still have some oil in it—and it’s illegal for a ship to discharge oil. Never mind that there are skimmers all over the Gulf right now doing just that. “BP and the Coast Guard still have concerns about the ship,” one official says.
I continue to have a concern: Why does it keep sounding like “BP and the Coast Guard” are one team? How is it that BP gets to say anything about what and who goes into the federal waters of the United States? Especially when we the people of the United States sit helplessly watching BP fill the Gulf to the brim with oil and dispersants?
Finally, finally, finally, after about a week, the giant skimmer ship is allowed to do its thing.
It doesn’t work.
On the final day of June, oil is scoring a touchdown on the Mississippi coast. On the radio, Governor Barbour says they had a great plan six weeks ago that isn’t working very well now. Not enough skimmers, not enough equipment.
He is asked by the radio host whether this tests the philosophy that he and many Republicans champion: smaller government, less regulation, more freedom for industry. “The idea that more regulation is good is, I believe, a very suspect idea,” Barbour answers. “In the case of this well, I think that if existing regulations were followed, it wouldn’t have blown out. I think if there was somebody from Minerals Management Service on the rig that day making sure the regulations were properly followed, that would’ve made a difference. Now I think every oil company in the world is looking and thinking they