BP Revisited

Now that it has been two years since the incident occurred, I’d like to revisit the story of the PB oil spill.  Some of you will undoubtedly disagree with my assessment, but then, we never agree on everything.

The explosion and fire aboard the Deep Water Horizon oilrig happened on April 20, 2010.  Subsequently, the 89-day oil leakage began, and we were treated to continuous live television coverage of the oil gushing from the bottom of the gulf until the leak was finally sealed off.  It was horrendous, catastrophic and criminal, and it was said to be an accident of monumental proportions that might kill all life and industry in the Gulf of Mexico and possibly in the whole Caribbean Sea.

I recall watching CNBC and seeing that oil billowing out into the sea and thinking, can’t they hurry up and cap that thing before the whole gulf turns black?  I’m sure we all had that image seared into our brains.  But, like all bad things, once the images are gone, we tend to forget about them

For some strange reason the BP oil spill has come to the forefront again, so I wanted to see just how true the predictions of catastrophe were.

Well, it turns out that the well wasn’t as poisoned as we thought.  Nearly two years after the spill, the recovery is well under way.  Oh yes, many people who fish for a living were harmed economically, and those who work the big rigs were put out of their jobs by the moratorium on deep water drilling.  But overall, life goes on, and the fishing industry is coming back a lot faster than was hoped.

Carl Safina a veteran of the Exxon Valdez spill and head of the Blue Ocean Institute, an environmental group, went to the Gulf Coast last spring to see how the recovery was going.  He was also doing research for his recently released book A Sea in Flames so I don’t think he would have put a positive spin on it if there were no good news.

What Safina found was heartening, and his accepted verdict was that “it could have been a lot worse.”  That isn’t to say that it wasn’t bad, but the long-term damage was way overplayed.  I’ll let you buy and read the book if you care to examine that aspect more closely.

I’m more interested in the hype that grew around the BP Spill and that still abounds today.  For one thing, the graphic footage (an antiquated term in the digital age) we saw was rather skewed toward the sensational.  It looked like thousands of gallons were spewing forth every minute. 

However, I’d like you to imagine any of the Great Lakes—say Erie—and a person standing on the shore with a garden hose.  (I wanted to say a squirt gun, but I thought that would be harder to portray even though it is closer to the true magnitude of the spill) The hose is turned on full blast and there is a camera about 5 feet away taking a movie of it.  We never see the full expanse of Lake Erie in the background, but only that water blasting out of the hose into the nearby lake. Put it underwater if you want to create the same effects as the BP Spill. Of course, you wouldn’t actually see the water flowing into the lake then, would you?

Now substitute oil in the hose and watch it discolor and pollute the lake.  Wow, it sure looks terrible, doesn’t it?  I’ll bet that if the oil continued to flow from that nozzle for three months that whole lake would be just covered in oil. 

Fortunately, that’s not how oil disperses in water.  It has a specific gravity much higher than the water, so it tends to stay below the surface.  And it doesn’t spread nearly as fast as a liquid with a lesser SG. I’m no scientist nor can I qualify as an “expert” on oil spills, but I do know that oil doesn’t play well with water.  The two don’t mix together well and that is observable.

I’d be surprised if that oil spread any more than about a twenty-mile radius from the spot where is entered the water. Bad yes, but catastrophic?  I think not, especially when there are natural enzymes and catalysts in seawater to cleanse it, and there are those in the seas of our world. Even where the oil did wash up on beaches, it was mostly in the form of tar balls, separate from the water around it.

My wife and I visited some of the beaches along the gulf coast back in February, and I have to tell you that they were just as beautiful and pristine as I expected them to be.  I didn’t see any evidence of the vast oil spill and pollution that those graphic live feeds of two years ago predicted.

I believe we have been had by the environmentalists, and look what it has cost us in lost energy sources, jobs, prices and deficit spending.  And the BP oil spill has been used as a tool to further delay or prohibit our energy independence.  I’m not writing this in ignorance. Go read that book written by an environmentalist and learn for yourself how bad the spill was.