Weather Making Oil Spill Containment Difficult
Strong winds and rough seas hampered efforts to contain a vast spreading oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico on Saturday.
The explosion that sunk the Deepwater Horizons rig and claimed the lives of 11 workers has now evolved into a significant environmental crisis that is on the verge of threatening the Gulf fishing industry and already fragile marshlands that are home to numerous wildlife species.
President Obama plans on visiting the Gulf region on Sunday after officials from his administration reached out across the Gulf states pledging assistance. In an already weak economy, the oil slick is threatening to disrupt the region’s fishing and tourism industries. Shipping along the Mississippi River will also be affected.
On Friday, Louisiana’s departments of Health and Hospitals and Wildlife and Fisheries announced severe restrictions on fishing and oyster harvesting east of the Mississippi River.
The oil slick continues to grow at an exponential rate with no end in sight as the oil continues to spill into the ocean almost a mile down.
“Any exact estimation of what’s flowing out of those pipes at this time is probably impossible due to the depth of the water,” said Adm. Thad Allen, the commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard, at a Satureday news conference. Allen was also named the "national incident commander" of the federal response to the spill on Saturday.
The weather has caused two oil rigs to shut down production and a third was cleared for safety reasons, the Minerals Management Service of the Department of Interior announced Saturday.
The Pentagon is airlifting oil containment booms to Mobile, Alabama to supplement more than 275,000 feet of barriers already in place, according to the agency. The heavy surf has tangled the booms in some locations.
The crisis, now in its 11th day since the rig caught fire and sank, is being questioned by state officials and environmental groups, who wonder whether the oil industry and Interior Dept regulators had done enough to prepare for such a devastating catastrophe.
BP submitted a plan to federal regulators in February 2009, stating that dangers of a spill were minimal. The company said “it is unlikely that an accidental oil spill release would occur from the proposed activities.”
While it acknowledged that a spill could “cause impacts to wetlands” and to beaches, it added that “due to the distance to shore (48 miles) and the response capabilities that would be implemented, no significant adverse impacts are expected.” It said any effects on fish or shellfish would be “sub-lethal.”
Allen said Friday that the company’s plans for responding to oil spills did not address the complete failure of equipment on the seafloor designed to prevent a blowout of the sort that took place on the massive drilling rig.
“We’re breaking new ground here. It’s hard to write a plan for a catastrophic event that has no precedent, which is what this was,” Allen said, defending the company against not writing a response for a plan that could not be anticipated.
The federal agency never planned for an oil spill of this size, said Hammond Eve, who did environmental impact studies of offshore drilling for the Minerals Management Service. “We never imagined that it would happen because the safety measures were supposed to work and prevent it from happening.”
He added that the MMS began from the “premise that if something like this happened, that it would be shut down fairly soon and a discrete amount of oil would be released and these cleanup measures would begin and you would never end up with a situation like this.”
Eve, who lives on the water 20 miles east of New Orleans, said strong oil fumes were beginning to engulf the neighborhood.
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