A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [94]
This isn’t just a working coast. It’s an overworked coast. Watermen feel stalked by disintegrating marshes. And everywhere the towering hardware of oil and gas prickles the horizon and brings down the sky. Henry Ford first used biodiesel. Standard Oil lobbied for Prohibition so there’d be no ethanol available. Ford was forced to switch to petroleum gasoline.
Outside, the oil complex confronts the eye with pipes, stacks, tubes. “It’s so ugly,” my companion says, “but it’s jobs.” A moment later she adds, “Ports, rigs; the oil is just the face of how the whole place—nature and people—have been so disrespected.”
Wherever you turned, the Oil shadowed.
Suddenly, the Gulf seemed to betray all prior promises.
In the beautiful blue Gulf, the blowout meant a massive brownout.
For weeks, much of the Gulf resembled abstract oil paintings.
Directly over the blown-out well, crews drilled relief wells while one rig collected oil and flared gas.
Oil drifting inexorably onto undefended Louisiana shoreline.
Intimate, intertwined relationships create human reliance
on the Mississippi Delta marshes.
The marshes have for decades suffered death by a thousand cuts and, oil aside, they still do.
Booms, booms, booms.
Workers collect sand splattered with oil while a few beachgoers remain, determined to enjoy themselves.
Booms rendered useless by a little wave action.
Booms could not prevent birds from flying to oiled areas.
Booms towed by shrimp boats seemed to leave as much oil behind as there was ahead.
Oil-splattered beaches kept tourists away in droves.
On Dauphin Island, Alabama, wetlands were destroyed to mine sand to build oceanfront berms.
Were the multimillion-dollar berms really to hold back oil, or were they a desperate attempt to shield real estate from the next big hurricane?
A sea turtle nest. Protected?
Around the taped-off turtle nest, all beach-holding vegetation was destroyed for berms that would likely wash away, and any turtles that hatched had a near-zero chance of detecting the direction to the sea.
Happy Independence Day
By the dawn’s oily light, kids had slick fun on the Fourth of July.
Spontaneous art expressing roadside rage.
One Mississippi River Delta resident’s opinion.
On a private lawn in Grand Isle, Louisiana, grief.
On a southern Louisiana intersection, despair during a summer of anguish.
LIKE A THOUSAND JULYS
By the beginning of July, this blowout achieves peerdom, in sheer volume, with the Ixtoc disaster. That had been the largest accidental release of oil ever. Until now. Something like 140 million Macondo gallons have hemorrhaged into the Gulf.
Way back on May 26, the Environmental Protection Agency ordered BP to cut dispersant use roughly 75 percent from the maximum. But the maximum was 70,000 gallons in one day. The EPA now says it wants to keep dispersant use down to 18,000 gallons per day. CNN reports that BP is still averaging about 23,250 gallons. Such are the games.
EPA administrator Lisa Jackson said weeks ago that she was “dissatisfied with BP’s response.” Her agency set a deadline for BP to stop using two particular Corexit dispersant formulations (including one banned in Britain).
In mid-June BP announced that one, Corexit 9527, is “no longer in use in the Gulf.” The manufacturer will say that the alternative, Corexit 9500, does not include the 2-butoxyethanol linked to the long-term health problems of Exxon Valdez cleanup workers.
BP seems to get away with shrugging its shoulders. When it only partially complies, there are no fines and no one goes to jail. I know what would happen to, say, me if I took a boat into the Gulf and radioed the Coast Guard to announce that I was about to dump one barrel of chemical dispersant.
And at the beginning of July, more than two months into the blowout,