DISCLAIMER: The views, opinions, or positions expressed in the following are mine and mine alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or positions of any entity, organization, or agency.
This summer, I went to Oil Spill Response Camp. My job required and continues to require me to advocate for the needs of threatened and endangered species at the Deepwater Horizon Houma Incident Command Post (ICP) in Louisiana. What I learned during my rotations at the ICP changed my entire perception of this unprecedented oil spill, and the subsequent emergency response. What I learned also eased my fears; however, in the face of my first-hand knowledge of the data and information coming into the Environmental Unit at the Houma ICP, the media coverage of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and its effects on human health and the environment have me feeling incredibly frustrated and angry.
1. Dedicated, Smart Professionals Are On The Job
The first thing I learned when I rotated through the Houma ICP was the incredible dedication of the people working at the ICP. Many, if not most of the people working in my unit had been there since the start of the spill. They continuously work 12+ hours a day, 7 days a week – and they will continue to do so until all the environmental data needs of the response are satisfied. These people are BP managers, U.S. government agency personnel, and contractors – all of whom have come from near and far, away from their families, friends, and routine lives – to solve this problem in the Gulf. They are samplers, water quality analysts, waste managers, endangered species biologists, meteorologists, hydrologists, restoration scientists, crisis managers, scientific support staff, lab staff, off-duty tree-huggers, and experienced retirees called back into duty for their expertise. The ICP is host to the foremost experts in oil science, including many that cut their teeth on the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska. They are smart, educated, and experienced. Individually, these experts have decades of experience, collectively they have centuries, and they all are my generation’s mentors.
All of us in the Environmental Unit of the Houma ICP have the same goal: find out where the oil is going or has gone, find out what is being impacted, and find out how to remedy those impacts appropriately. This means taking samples wherever and whenever oil is spotted. Find out if the oil sampled is from Deepwater Horizon. If it is washing up on beaches or into marshes, how do we clean it up? What tools, machines, or methods do we use? What wildlife is in the area? How will these methods affect water quality? How will the waste be disposed? How can we clean up the oil without doing further harm? All of these questions, and many more must be answered in the screaming face of local municipalities and a nation that wants the oil cleaned up NOW.
This brings me to my big beef: the media and its portrayal of the science driving the decisions of this emergency clean-up response. The poor reporting and sensationalism that continues does an extreme disservice the knowledge, experience, intentions, and capabilities of the scientific professionals advising on this response effort. The clean-up response to Deepwater Horizon is by no means perfect at any level; however, it is not because of the knowledge base of the professionals drafted to assist in this effort. Coordination of governmental, non-governmental, and corporate entities at this mass scale is no small feat, and it results in what can be called nothing less than a clusterf*ck.
2. It Really Isn’t As Bad As It Seems
This brings me to the second thing I learned while serving at the ICP. The impact of the spill is not as bad as it seems. This is a FACT, not government CYA spin, and it is due to several factors. This is not to say that there is no impact on human health and the environment from millions of gallons of crude oil spewing forth unchecked into the Gulf of Mexico. There is, and an incredible impact at that. Hundreds of dead adult, juvenile, and baby shore- and seabirds. Hundreds of dead sea turtles. Dead dolphins; dead whales. Wildlife that is dead, dying, distressed, and oiled. There are miles of oiled marsh and beach. Oil spilled into the environment; however, for the amount of oil that spilled it could have been so much worse. Working at the Houma ICP made me feel BETTER about the spill and the effort to clean up the spill than watching from the outside. Working at the Houma ICP let me know what the mitigating factors are that aided in avoiding the damage that we all expected to see from this spill
ONE: The type of oil.
Sweet Louisiana crude is lighter and more volatile than the crude we all saw from Exxon Valdez. It is made up of less complex bonds between its molecules – bonds that microbes find easy to break. Therefore, oil from Deepwater Horizon is more likely to biodegrade. Further, Deepwater Horizon oil contains relatively lower levels of highly toxic and persistent chemicals called polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). More information on the nature of Deepwater Horizon oil and how it weathers in the environment can be found here.
TWO: The environment into which the oil spewed: hot, stormy, and buggy.
What oil made it to the surface and was not skimmed or burned or otherwise recovered got washed up on shore, got evaporated or weathered, or got further broken down by oil-eating microbes.
For the oil that made it to the marsh, in some instances it’s a better tactic to let sleeping dogs lie. The marshes of the Gulf are sensitive habitats. Stomping into the marsh to dig up the oil is in many cases more destructive than letting the oil sit in the marsh and weather. Seeing marsh that was improperly treated – i.e., stomped on and mangled by response personnel, instead of allowed to sit and recover – nearly caused a colleague in the Houma ICP Environmental Unit to cry during our daily meeting. Photographs showed that in areas adjacent to the damaged marsh, biodegradation of the oil was already taking place in the humid and hot summer of Southern Louisiana, and new, green shoots of marsh grass were already popping up.
The Gulf has natural oil seeps that leak nearly 40 million gallons of oil into the Gulf each year. These seeps support a multitude of oil-eating microbes. In fact, a new microbe was discovered that is gobbling up the oil droplets in the Gulf.
THREE: The response.
We used every tool in our toolbox: skimming, burning, booming, capping, and dispersants. Yep. I said it. Dispersants. Dispersants have been around for decades and are a part of the National Contingency Plan for oil spill response. The use of dispersants is not without risk; however in large offshore oil spills, such as Deepwater Horizon, oil dispersant use is pre-approved by the Regional Response Teams. The novel sub-sea use of dispersants at the Source allowed for even lower concentrations of dispersant to be applied than if the oil reached the surface. In my book, this is a plus. Use less of one chemical, perceived by the public to be highly toxic, to achieve the same effect? I like it better than the alternatives.
So, how do oil dispersants work? Oil dispersants act like dish soap, by “lowering the tension between oil and water and allowing small droplets of oil to break away from the larger clumps…Smaller, dispersed droplets are less threatening for two reasons: they present more surface area to the water, so ocean bacteria can degrade the oil faster; plus, the small droplets are much slower to rise to the surface, keeping the oil at sea instead of in coastal wetlands and giving the bacteria more time to do their magic.”
As we know, the Gulf of Mexico is home to tons of oil-eating microbes because of natural oil seeps. Additionally, it is important to note that dispersants act to disperse the oil into small droplets that are slower to rise to the surface. This does not necessarily mean these droplets sink. They remain in the water column. Where the microbes are. And where the fish are. Thus, there is a trade-off. Risk toxic oil reaching our sensitive coastal wetlands, which are already stressed from a multitude of human activities including agriculture, industry, shipping, and waste disposal; or risk potential effects of dispersed oil on fish and other sensitive marine species with a chemical concoction that is less toxic than the crude oil<. Dispersants, while chemical, have a smaller half-life than crude oil and utilize component chemicals found in most household cleaners. The toxicity of oil-dispersant mixes also depends on a number of factors including the type of crude oil, the dispersant used, and the environmental conditions (e.g., salinity, weather patterns). If given the choice between the lesser of two evils, between the rock or the hard place – I choose the lesser, the movable rock. During the days when oil was still gushing into the Gulf, researchers detected sub-surface oil presumed to be lurking below the surface because of dispersant. Current sampling efforts are having trouble detecting oil in the Gulf, however, sub-surface or otherwise. Teams of response personnel are trawling the nearshore waters of the Gulf searching for oil. They aren’t finding it. Louisiana shrimpers are back on the water. Well, Louisiana shrimpers not making more money as a vessel of opportunity for the response effort are back on the water. They aren’t finding oil. How do I know? Because I was there at the ICP for the daily report from the forensic sampling teams. What no one wants to admit, at least in the media: the dispersants did what they were invented to do – they dispersed the oil. Although, as one small voice said yesterday, “the media was reporting the past as the present.” The results of what was found during studies completed in May or June when the oil was still spewing forth are being reported as the current situation in the Gulf. This is wrong. It distorts the truth and it damages our ability to respond to future spills.
So the choice to use dispersants was made, and it was an effective choice. Questions remain about the lasting impact of this difficult choice. [A choice that, by the way, was left to the experts handling the response and not to the public or to reporters or to armchair scientists.] During the recent Senate hearings on the use of dispersants, scientists testified that the lasting impact of dispersants is unclear. At the end of NPR’s report, chemist Dana Wetzel from Mote Marine Laboratory poses a bevy of questions about the future of the Gulf. I say we would be asking these questions regardless of whether dispersants were used or not.
3. The Gulf Is DIRTY
The third thing I learned from my time at the Houma ICP was that the Gulf of Mexico was not a clean place before this event. There are thousands of oilrigs in the Gulf. Spills from these rigs, and from the thousands of ships transiting the area, happen every single day. Hurricane Katrina and Rita triggered numerous hazardous-materials releases from industrial facilities and storage terminals onshore, as well as from oil and gas production facilities offshore in the Gulf of Mexico. Last month, a presentation by the Louisiana State Governor’s office during the Houma ICP’s all-hands meeting emphasized the existing pollution from rigs and refineries in the aftermath of several recent storms and hurricanes. The sampling reports during my unit’s daily briefings reinforced the fact that not all of the oil encountered during the response is Deepwater Horizon oil. Further, the water rushing down the Mississippi River isn’t clean. It’s filled with industrial, agricultural, and wastewater run-off, which continues feeding the growth of an enormous ead Zone.
What do I want you to take away from these first three lessons learned? I want you to realize that, despite the inherent issues of a response effort this big and of so many competing interests working together, the effects of this spill could have been so much worse. I want you to realize that there is really GREAT science going on right now, and people that the media would like to label as representatives of “evil special interests” are conducting some of that science. I want you to realize that the whole truth is not getting reported in the mainstream media. Most of all, I want you to realize that eleven people died, thousands of animals died, and thousands more are working to make sure more death does not result from this event or from any future event like it. Reasonable people do not make the news headlines. Unfortunately, the Deepwater Horizon clean-up response entails the work of a lot of reasonable people trying to do their best with the information available.
4. Deepwater Horizon Was My Fault, And Yours
The fourth thing I learned from serving at the Houma ICP was that ultimately, this spill was my fault, and your fault. Our need for oil caused the situation that resulted in Deepwater Horizon. Because demand for oil is so high, the profit margin for oil companies is HUGE. So huge that I cannot even fathom what hundreds of billions of dollars in quarterly profits looks like – or feels like. I imagine it is pretty powerful. So powerful that corners were cut in all areas of oil and gas production. Regulators didn’t regulate. Governments didn’t govern. Engineers didn’t engineer safe rigs. Safety officers didn’t enforce safe rigs. People at every level cut corners on every aspect of permitting, regulating, and developing oil production facilities because they could and because it was lucrative. And we all let it happen because we want to microwave, drive, air condition, charge our iPods, iPads, iPhones, heat our water, compute…to fuel our electronic, technologically driven lives. To be bold: don’t point the finger at BP for giving us what we want. We need to point the fingers at ourselves for not demanding more accountability for where our fuel comes from, and for not acknowledging our own role in the excessive consumption of fossil fuels.
This summer, I went to Oil Spill Response Camp. My job required and continues to require me to advocate for the needs of threatened and endangered species at the Deepwater Horizon Houma Incident Command Post (ICP) in Louisiana. What I learned during my rotations at the ICP changed my entire perception of this unprecedented oil spill, and the subsequent emergency response. What I learned also eased my fears; however, in the face of my first-hand knowledge of the data and information coming into the Environmental Unit at the Houma ICP, the media coverage of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and its effects on human health and the environment have me feeling incredibly frustrated and angry.
1. Dedicated, Smart Professionals Are On The Job
The first thing I learned when I rotated through the Houma ICP was the incredible dedication of the people working at the ICP. Many, if not most of the people working in my unit had been there since the start of the spill. They continuously work 12+ hours a day, 7 days a week – and they will continue to do so until all the environmental data needs of the response are satisfied. These people are BP managers, U.S. government agency personnel, and contractors – all of whom have come from near and far, away from their families, friends, and routine lives – to solve this problem in the Gulf. They are samplers, water quality analysts, waste managers, endangered species biologists, meteorologists, hydrologists, restoration scientists, crisis managers, scientific support staff, lab staff, off-duty tree-huggers, and experienced retirees called back into duty for their expertise. The ICP is host to the foremost experts in oil science, including many that cut their teeth on the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska. They are smart, educated, and experienced. Individually, these experts have decades of experience, collectively they have centuries, and they all are my generation’s mentors.
All of us in the Environmental Unit of the Houma ICP have the same goal: find out where the oil is going or has gone, find out what is being impacted, and find out how to remedy those impacts appropriately. This means taking samples wherever and whenever oil is spotted. Find out if the oil sampled is from Deepwater Horizon. If it is washing up on beaches or into marshes, how do we clean it up? What tools, machines, or methods do we use? What wildlife is in the area? How will these methods affect water quality? How will the waste be disposed? How can we clean up the oil without doing further harm? All of these questions, and many more must be answered in the screaming face of local municipalities and a nation that wants the oil cleaned up NOW.
This brings me to my big beef: the media and its portrayal of the science driving the decisions of this emergency clean-up response. The poor reporting and sensationalism that continues does an extreme disservice the knowledge, experience, intentions, and capabilities of the scientific professionals advising on this response effort. The clean-up response to Deepwater Horizon is by no means perfect at any level; however, it is not because of the knowledge base of the professionals drafted to assist in this effort. Coordination of governmental, non-governmental, and corporate entities at this mass scale is no small feat, and it results in what can be called nothing less than a clusterf*ck.
2. It Really Isn’t As Bad As It Seems
This brings me to the second thing I learned while serving at the ICP. The impact of the spill is not as bad as it seems. This is a FACT, not government CYA spin, and it is due to several factors. This is not to say that there is no impact on human health and the environment from millions of gallons of crude oil spewing forth unchecked into the Gulf of Mexico. There is, and an incredible impact at that. Hundreds of dead adult, juvenile, and baby shore- and seabirds. Hundreds of dead sea turtles. Dead dolphins; dead whales. Wildlife that is dead, dying, distressed, and oiled. There are miles of oiled marsh and beach. Oil spilled into the environment; however, for the amount of oil that spilled it could have been so much worse. Working at the Houma ICP made me feel BETTER about the spill and the effort to clean up the spill than watching from the outside. Working at the Houma ICP let me know what the mitigating factors are that aided in avoiding the damage that we all expected to see from this spill
ONE: The type of oil.
Sweet Louisiana crude is lighter and more volatile than the crude we all saw from Exxon Valdez. It is made up of less complex bonds between its molecules – bonds that microbes find easy to break. Therefore, oil from Deepwater Horizon is more likely to biodegrade. Further, Deepwater Horizon oil contains relatively lower levels of highly toxic and persistent chemicals called polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). More information on the nature of Deepwater Horizon oil and how it weathers in the environment can be found here.
TWO: The environment into which the oil spewed: hot, stormy, and buggy.
What oil made it to the surface and was not skimmed or burned or otherwise recovered got washed up on shore, got evaporated or weathered, or got further broken down by oil-eating microbes.
For the oil that made it to the marsh, in some instances it’s a better tactic to let sleeping dogs lie. The marshes of the Gulf are sensitive habitats. Stomping into the marsh to dig up the oil is in many cases more destructive than letting the oil sit in the marsh and weather. Seeing marsh that was improperly treated – i.e., stomped on and mangled by response personnel, instead of allowed to sit and recover – nearly caused a colleague in the Houma ICP Environmental Unit to cry during our daily meeting. Photographs showed that in areas adjacent to the damaged marsh, biodegradation of the oil was already taking place in the humid and hot summer of Southern Louisiana, and new, green shoots of marsh grass were already popping up.
The Gulf has natural oil seeps that leak nearly 40 million gallons of oil into the Gulf each year. These seeps support a multitude of oil-eating microbes. In fact, a new microbe was discovered that is gobbling up the oil droplets in the Gulf.
THREE: The response.
We used every tool in our toolbox: skimming, burning, booming, capping, and dispersants. Yep. I said it. Dispersants. Dispersants have been around for decades and are a part of the National Contingency Plan for oil spill response. The use of dispersants is not without risk; however in large offshore oil spills, such as Deepwater Horizon, oil dispersant use is pre-approved by the Regional Response Teams. The novel sub-sea use of dispersants at the Source allowed for even lower concentrations of dispersant to be applied than if the oil reached the surface. In my book, this is a plus. Use less of one chemical, perceived by the public to be highly toxic, to achieve the same effect? I like it better than the alternatives.
So, how do oil dispersants work? Oil dispersants act like dish soap, by “lowering the tension between oil and water and allowing small droplets of oil to break away from the larger clumps…Smaller, dispersed droplets are less threatening for two reasons: they present more surface area to the water, so ocean bacteria can degrade the oil faster; plus, the small droplets are much slower to rise to the surface, keeping the oil at sea instead of in coastal wetlands and giving the bacteria more time to do their magic.”
As we know, the Gulf of Mexico is home to tons of oil-eating microbes because of natural oil seeps. Additionally, it is important to note that dispersants act to disperse the oil into small droplets that are slower to rise to the surface. This does not necessarily mean these droplets sink. They remain in the water column. Where the microbes are. And where the fish are. Thus, there is a trade-off. Risk toxic oil reaching our sensitive coastal wetlands, which are already stressed from a multitude of human activities including agriculture, industry, shipping, and waste disposal; or risk potential effects of dispersed oil on fish and other sensitive marine species with a chemical concoction that is less toxic than the crude oil<. Dispersants, while chemical, have a smaller half-life than crude oil and utilize component chemicals found in most household cleaners. The toxicity of oil-dispersant mixes also depends on a number of factors including the type of crude oil, the dispersant used, and the environmental conditions (e.g., salinity, weather patterns). If given the choice between the lesser of two evils, between the rock or the hard place – I choose the lesser, the movable rock. During the days when oil was still gushing into the Gulf, researchers detected sub-surface oil presumed to be lurking below the surface because of dispersant. Current sampling efforts are having trouble detecting oil in the Gulf, however, sub-surface or otherwise. Teams of response personnel are trawling the nearshore waters of the Gulf searching for oil. They aren’t finding it. Louisiana shrimpers are back on the water. Well, Louisiana shrimpers not making more money as a vessel of opportunity for the response effort are back on the water. They aren’t finding oil. How do I know? Because I was there at the ICP for the daily report from the forensic sampling teams. What no one wants to admit, at least in the media: the dispersants did what they were invented to do – they dispersed the oil. Although, as one small voice said yesterday, “the media was reporting the past as the present.” The results of what was found during studies completed in May or June when the oil was still spewing forth are being reported as the current situation in the Gulf. This is wrong. It distorts the truth and it damages our ability to respond to future spills.
So the choice to use dispersants was made, and it was an effective choice. Questions remain about the lasting impact of this difficult choice. [A choice that, by the way, was left to the experts handling the response and not to the public or to reporters or to armchair scientists.] During the recent Senate hearings on the use of dispersants, scientists testified that the lasting impact of dispersants is unclear. At the end of NPR’s report, chemist Dana Wetzel from Mote Marine Laboratory poses a bevy of questions about the future of the Gulf. I say we would be asking these questions regardless of whether dispersants were used or not.
3. The Gulf Is DIRTY
The third thing I learned from my time at the Houma ICP was that the Gulf of Mexico was not a clean place before this event. There are thousands of oilrigs in the Gulf. Spills from these rigs, and from the thousands of ships transiting the area, happen every single day. Hurricane Katrina and Rita triggered numerous hazardous-materials releases from industrial facilities and storage terminals onshore, as well as from oil and gas production facilities offshore in the Gulf of Mexico. Last month, a presentation by the Louisiana State Governor’s office during the Houma ICP’s all-hands meeting emphasized the existing pollution from rigs and refineries in the aftermath of several recent storms and hurricanes. The sampling reports during my unit’s daily briefings reinforced the fact that not all of the oil encountered during the response is Deepwater Horizon oil. Further, the water rushing down the Mississippi River isn’t clean. It’s filled with industrial, agricultural, and wastewater run-off, which continues feeding the growth of an enormous ead Zone.
What do I want you to take away from these first three lessons learned? I want you to realize that, despite the inherent issues of a response effort this big and of so many competing interests working together, the effects of this spill could have been so much worse. I want you to realize that there is really GREAT science going on right now, and people that the media would like to label as representatives of “evil special interests” are conducting some of that science. I want you to realize that the whole truth is not getting reported in the mainstream media. Most of all, I want you to realize that eleven people died, thousands of animals died, and thousands more are working to make sure more death does not result from this event or from any future event like it. Reasonable people do not make the news headlines. Unfortunately, the Deepwater Horizon clean-up response entails the work of a lot of reasonable people trying to do their best with the information available.
4. Deepwater Horizon Was My Fault, And Yours
The fourth thing I learned from serving at the Houma ICP was that ultimately, this spill was my fault, and your fault. Our need for oil caused the situation that resulted in Deepwater Horizon. Because demand for oil is so high, the profit margin for oil companies is HUGE. So huge that I cannot even fathom what hundreds of billions of dollars in quarterly profits looks like – or feels like. I imagine it is pretty powerful. So powerful that corners were cut in all areas of oil and gas production. Regulators didn’t regulate. Governments didn’t govern. Engineers didn’t engineer safe rigs. Safety officers didn’t enforce safe rigs. People at every level cut corners on every aspect of permitting, regulating, and developing oil production facilities because they could and because it was lucrative. And we all let it happen because we want to microwave, drive, air condition, charge our iPods, iPads, iPhones, heat our water, compute…to fuel our electronic, technologically driven lives. To be bold: don’t point the finger at BP for giving us what we want. We need to point the fingers at ourselves for not demanding more accountability for where our fuel comes from, and for not acknowledging our own role in the excessive consumption of fossil fuels.
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