A10 Gulf Coast Oil Spill impact from A1
rect, 23 million to 47 million bar- rels of oil have spewed so far. Ecosystems can survive and
eventually recover from very large oil spills, even ones that are Ixtoc-sized. In most spills, the volatile compounds evaporate. The sun breaks down others. Some compounds are dissolved in water. Microbes consume the simpler, “straight chain” hydro- carbons — and the warmer it is, the more they eat. The gulf spill has climate in its favor. Scientists agree: Horrible as the spill may be, it’s not going to turn the Gulf of Mexico into another Dead Sea. But neither is this ecological
crisis going to be over anytime soon. The spill will have ripple ef- fects far into the future, scientists warn. “This spill will be lasting for years if not decades,” said Doug Inkley, senior scientist at the Na- tional Wildlife Federation. Some of the immediate effects of a spill are obvious — witness the gut-wrenching images of soaked and suffocating seabirds in the gulf. But some types of eco- logical damage are hard to meas- ure and can take years to docu- ment. Many of the creatures that die will sink to the bottom, mak- ing mortality estimates difficult. Damage to the reproduction rate of sea turtles may take years to play out. The Exxon Valdez spill of 11 million gallons killed as many as 700,000 sea birds and 5,000 sea otters initially, but even 21 years later, populations of sea otters in areas of Prince William Sound haven’t recovered. The Pacific herring population collapsed af- ter the spill for reasons that re- main in dispute among scientists. Two intensely studied pods of killer whales in the sound suf- fered heavy losses in the spill and have struggled since. One of the two pods has no more reproduc- tive females. It is doomed to ex- tinction.
And the oil? “It’s still sitting there,” said Stan Rice, program manager for habitat studies at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s Auke Bay Fish- eries Lab. “It’s still liquid, you can still smell it and touch it.” The degradation of oil slows over the years. The microbes move on, as the large and com- plex compounds that remain, known as the asphaltenes, are too hard to digest. What’s left tends to be dense, tar-like, largely inert and attractive only to people who like to pave roads.
By 2003, there were still 21,000 gallons of oil in Prince William Sound, Rice reports in a recently published study on the lingering effects of the Exxon Valdez spill. The oil can be found by someone scraping three to six inches below the surface of the beach. Rice writes that an oil spill will be “over” when the oil itself is gone, the litigation has been settled and there are no continued nega- tive effects in the environment. “The Exxon Valdez spill does not meet any of these three cri- teria,” he wrote.
Limited research funding
The oil drifting north from the Ixtoc spill not only wiped out hundreds of million of crabs on Mexican beaches but, also far to the north, managed to killed 80 percent of the segmented worms
S
KLMNO
SUNDAY, JUNE 6, 2010 Slow to break down, oil clings to habitat for ages
DAVE MARTIN/ASSOCIATED PRESS Workers build a sand berm around the homes on the beach on Dauphin Island, Ala. Oil from the Deepwater Horizon disaster has washed up on beaches along the Gulf Coast.
and shrimp-like crustaceans that live in the sand of Texas beaches, according to Tunnell, a biologist at Texas A&M University at Cor- pus Christi. But the tiny animals have rapid reproductive cycles, and in about two and a half years they had recovered, he said. Poor government funding limited re- search on the broader ecological impact of the spill, however: “We don’t have any comprehensive, good scientific studies of what happened.” There are on record since 1970 about 1,700 spills from tankers in which at least 2,100 gallons of oil were discharged into water. Sci- entists have been monitoring the effects of some of them for dec- ades, including a 189,000-gallon spill that occurred off Cape Cod in September 1969. Five years after that spill, fid-
dler crabs in the oiled marsh were sluggish and reproduced poorly. In many cases they dug burrows too shallow to protect themselves over the winter. Astonishingly, many of those problems remained 35 years lat- er, when a graduate student, Jen- nifer Culbertson, surveyed the marsh. She found that the fiddler crabs reacted slowly to startling motions, apparently the result of a narcotic effect of oil that still formed a visible layer four inches below the marsh surface. (A simi- lar clumsiness has been seen in juvenile spot fish when they chew on sediments contaminated with compounds from oil.) When the crabs burrowed down and hit the layer of 40-year-old oil, they veered horizontally. “The marsh is still waging chemical warfare several inches
That’s not just a biological
change but a geological one, points out LSU professor Edward Overton. “Biological stocks can be replenished a lot easier than land loss,” he said. Every oil spill has unique fea- tures, from the geography to the chemical makeup of the oil, which can vary dramatically in toxicity. The Deepwater Horizon spill has the distinction of being the deepest blowout in history. Also unique has been the huge quantity of chemical dispersants sprayed on the surface and at the leak on the seafloor. There’s little scientific understanding of how the dispersants might affect the deep-water ecosystem. Coral reefs, only recently stud- ied, can take centuries to develop in the cold, oxygen-poor depths; there are several such reefs di- rectly beneath the oil slick. Deep plumes of oil have been reported in preliminary research by scien- tists on research vessels. As bac- teria feast on the oil they could deplete the oxygen levels further, creating unusually deep “dead zones.”
JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES Workers shovel small oil globs as they remove what has washed up on Pensacola Beach, Fla.
below the surface,” said Christo- pher M. Reddy, a chemist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic In- stitute in Massachusetts who helped supervise Culbertson’s re- search.
Making it worse
Beaches get scrubbed by waves and storms, but marshes can de- velop tar mats lasting decades, Tunnell said. He said the beaches are a 3 on a scale of 1 to 10 in
terms of sensitivity to oil spills, but the marshes are a 10. At- tempts to clean a marsh will backfire. After the huge Amoco Cadiz spill of 68 million gallons off Brittany in 1978, French au- thorities scraped the top off the oiled marshes. It was a mistake: Most never came back. Although many scientists and
officials have warned that the marshes are in danger, one scien- tist who has studied oil spills in
Louisiana marshes said that these wetlands are generally able to recover if human intervention doesn’t make the situation worse. “The vegetation itself generally recovers in a year, although sometimes it may take three or four,” said Irving A. Mendelssohn, a biologist at Louisiana State Uni- versity. Only if oil sinks in deep, or if repeated oilings kill off new shoots, does the marsh die, he added.
“If you’re a creature that can’t move, it’s not good,” Overton said. In the years to come, scientists will study this spill in the same way they have studied the Exxon Valdez disaster. The gulf ecosys- tems may survive, but they’ll like- ly have changed in certain de- tails, according to LSU biologist Kevin R. Carman. “Undoubtedly, life will get a foothold,” he said. “The question is how different it will be.”
achenbachj@washpost.com browndm@washpost.com
For White House, struggling to assert control of the unknown politics from A1
Drug Administration and the military — that is unlike anything attempted before. The pro- cedures “on the books aren’t ready for this,” said one official, speaking on the condition of ano- nymity. “Nobody has ever done what we are trying to do.” The new normal at the Obama White House has required that a whole new schedule be laid on top of the old one. There is a daily oil-spill conference call for Cabi- net officers, one for their depu- ties, yet another with the gover- nors of affected states, and some- times as many as three briefings a day that include the president himself. “It’s not as herky-jerky as it
may come across,” said Carol Browner, Obama’s energy and cli- mate adviser. “It’s much more sys- tematic.”
But bureaucracies being what
they are, it is also far from seam- less. Though every day is jammed with interagency conference calls and a river of e-mails in between, some officials complain that at times they still feel like they are talking past each other. Occasionally, signals get crossed. On Wednesday, the Min- erals Management Service ap- proved two shallow-water dril-
ling permits, only to reverse both the next day, along with those for three other shallow-water opera- tions. Some officials in the Gulf Coast region have complained that they can’t figure out what the administration’s drilling policy really is these days. “Until they give us the new rule book, there is effectively a mora- torium,” said Sen. David Vitter (R- La.), who has criticized the gov- ernment’s response. In his radio address Saturday, Obama enumerated the scope of his endeavor to contain the dam- age, including 17,500 National Guard troops; 20,000 personnel protecting the waters and coasts; 1,900 vessels; 4.3 million feet of boom.
Obama has also called in some of the many scientists on the fed- eral payroll, led by Energy Secre- tary Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize- winning physicist. Chu at one point pushed the unusual idea of using gamma rays to peer into the blowout preventer to determine if its valves were closed, a tech- nique he experimented with in graduate school while studying radioactive decay. The suggestion at first elicited
snickering and “Incredible Hulk” jokes. Then they tried it, and it worked. “They weren’t hot on his ideas,” a senior White House offi-
cial said of BP’s initial reaction to Chu’s suggestions. “Now they are.” The president has pressured other oil companies to step up. At a May 3 dinner at the White House with business executives, says one official who was there, Obama bluntly told Exxon Mobil Chairman Rex Tillerson that he expected the entire petroleum in- dustry to dedicate its engineering talent to fixing the spill and pre- venting others. It is a question of duty, Obama told him — and also of the industry’s own financial in- terest.
But Obama and his team are still feeling their way, and it is not at all clear what this vast mar- shaling of resources will accom- plish. Despite all its efforts, the government is still depending on BP to plug the leak. That is not likely to happen until August at the earliest. The administration is focusing
many of its resources on the cleanup operation, which will continue for years, and on miti- gating the effects on the environ- ment, which could be felt for dec- ades. The Coast Guard has taken over the enormous effort to re- store oil-blackened beaches. “There’s the acute, and there’s the chronic,” Browner said. “We have moved very much into ‘How
do you manage this, a difficult sit- uation, over an extended period of time?’ ”
Obama has at times expressed
frustration that the government continues to rely on BP for basic information about the spill. He has insisted that Washington de- velop its own, more accurate esti- mates of how much oil is flowing out of the hole. BP spokeswoman Anne Kolton said the company has tried to “give our best estimate” and to be “open and honest and transpar- ent.” Yet whatever trust there was between the administration and BP has seemingly all but dis- appeared. The White House has worked
to keep the focus of public anger on the company — and with it, give reassurance that there will be consequences and restitution. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has launched criminal and civ- il investigations, and the govern- ment has presented BP with a first bill for $69 million in clean- up costs. On his visit to the region Friday, Obama warned the firm against “nickel-and-diming” peo- ple and businesses harmed by the spill. Kolton said the company’s rela- tionship with the federal govern- ment remains one of “coordina- tion and cooperation.” Yet she ac-
knowledged: “The frustration is growing on their part. It’s grow- ing on our part. It’s growing on the part of the people in the gulf.” The White House has also pros-
pected for political opportunity in the crisis. Obama has tried to direct some of the public outrage toward reviving climate-change legislation, a key part of his agen- da that is suddenly showing glim- mers of life in the Senate. The uncertainty surrounding the future of drilling is no small concern in a region so heavily de- pendent on the oil industry. “This is our most important is- sue right now. I mean, oil on the ground is almost secondary,” said Lafourche Parish President Char- lotte Randolph. “This is the entire region’s future. It’s that signifi- cant, that we can’t spend a mo- ment on anything else.” Some area officials say the ad-
ministration is doing a better job of delivering resources to help protect and clean up the Gulf Coast shore. “I think they’ve fi- nally realized this needs to be a major federal response, so they’re ramping that up,” Vitter said. It might also help that the ad-
ministration is sending as its em- issaries officials who have ties to the region, including EPA Admin- istrator Lisa P. Jackson, a New Or- leans native, and Tom Strickland,
the Louisiana State University- educated chief of staff to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. At the re- quest of Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R), the White House has also assigned each parish presi- dent in Louisiana a personal Coast Guard liaison. White House officials com- plain, with some justification, that they are caught between con- tradictory narratives about their handling of the crisis: that the president is not engaged enough in the details of the response, or that he is getting bogged down in them; that he should spend more time in the gulf making common cause with its residents, or that his repeated trips down there are merely publicity stunts.
And there remains the ques- tion of whether, for all its efforts, the administration can really gain control, or even the illusion of it. BP did indeed shear the riser and put the cap on it as planned. But days later, everyone at the White House was still waiting to see if it had succeeded. And how would they know? When they got the word from BP.
tumultyk@washpost.com eilperinj@washpost.com
Staff writers Michael D. Shear and David A. Fahrenthold contributed to this report.
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