If the new cap on the BP wellhead continues to hold we may be moving from containment to consequences. Still, it's hard to measure the long term impacts of the Deepwater Horizon Disaster on the Gulf of Mexico. By my second trip to the region last week there were over 45,000 people and 6,000 vessels and aircraft involved in the response.
Still, some of the clean up effects are questionable. Off Ocean Springs Mississippi with Gulf Coast Research Lab Director Bill Hawkins I watched a crew of ten men with three flat boats trying to spray wash about 80 feet of oiled marsh grass to little effect. Nearby they were protecting a rock jetty rather than wetlands. In Louisiana's Barataria Bay I've seen miles of oiled wetlands that act as the nurseries and filters of the sea and provide a livelihood for fishermen and their communities.
Flying over the Gulf in June with Waterkeeper John Wathen and SouthWings conservation pilot Tom Hutchings I'd seen 100 dolphins and a sperm whale trapped and dying in the oil. Off Mississippi I saw dozens of brown pelicans. Their return to the Gulf in the past decade, years after DDT was banned is considered a huge environmental success story. Now these birds are threatened by the oil and chemical dispersants as are sea turtles, tuna and whale sharks.
I went out with scientists Jim Franks and Steve Curran from the lab sampling possible toxic impacts on juvenile tripletail fish. These baby fish live under floating sargassum algae. Some change their colors to
gold and green to look like the weedy algae. Others are now living under floating oil blobs and camouflage themselves by turning black and brown like the oil. Our nets and boat bottom were soon splashed with oil.
At the entry to Biloxi Bay there are extensive booms to try and protect the estuary and a fleet of shrimp boats skimming oil. Nearby Horn Island has already been hit by the oil as have many of the Gulf's barrier islands. Last time I was here less than five years ago many of these shrimp boats were driven ashore by Hurricane Katrina along with floating Casino Barges. The beaches that I once saw covered in debris are now clean and empty in mid-July as tourists are flocking away from the oil-threatened Gulf to other safer sands.
I drive from Louisiana and Mississippi to Pensacola Florida where the sugar white sands of local beaches are also boomed off and clean up crews are removing tar balls that have also washed ashore.
Here I board the Coast Guard Cutter Resolve heading out to the Deepwater Horizon spill site where a new cap is being placed that will hopefully stop the ongoing eruption of oil from the wellhead until a relief well can kill it.
Steaming to the source we pass through different kinds of ugly, oil that looks brown as maple syrup in our wake and oil sheens in deep purple and gold and aged orange oil and new black oil. The last time I flew over this part of the Gulf there were oil slicks out to the horizon.
The BP source has become a floating city of some 75 rigs and ships and workboats and a giant supertanker. The Q-4000 rig is burning off 6,000 barrels of oil a day in a black plume of oily smoke while collector ships like the Helix Producer are flaring natural gas and controlled burns of surface oil are being set off on the horizon. This reminds me of oil terminals off Iraq I visited in the Persian Gulf war zone -- only this is more like cancer than war, with the metastasizing oil spreading across the water.
We visit BP's Command and Control ship Seacor Lee where I'm told the cap is now in place and ready for testing (the tests will prove inconclusive but the cap will hold for now).
A Coast Guard Dolphin Helicopter flies me and a crew from CNN back to Air Station New Orleans where their helicopter crews saved over 6,000 people during hurricane Katrina. On the way we fly over streaks of aging oil spread for miles across the Gulf.
Though fewer have died this is a longer lasting and potentially more destructive disaster than Katrina for the Gulf's people and marine wildlife.
And if this hurricane season is as bad as predicted it could also be raining oil and blackening beaches from Florida to Texas by the fall. Our efforts to boom off bird rookeries and protect the coastline may be valiant but still seem feeble more than 80 days into this mess.
Among other needed changes we have to end our dependence on coal and oil, energy systems of the 16th and 19th centuries and develop clean offshore energy. After all no coastline or culture was ever destroyed by a wind spill or a turning tide.
As a writer I realize we're also entering the age of multiplatform media. You can watch the video version of this report I narrated and shot. My friend Ted Woerner edited it together.
Thank you.Powerixir
http://www.examiner.com/x-10438-Human-Rights-Examiner~y2010m7d24-Censored-Gulf-news-Impending-refugee-health-humanitarian-crisis-Day-100
She said, "Tell people to contact me. There is help. We need to get this information out to the women."
New Help Gulf People non-government placement program
World renown atmospheric aerosol operations expert, A.C. Griffith and his partner have begun a new placement program for U.S. refugees. They base their actions on predictions that "Continental United States is to experience a chaotic fleeing north of many millions of people from the Gulf who will die in the process beginning as early as August of this year."
Thank you for doing the reporting on the hazardous aftermath of the oil explosion to people and wildlife.
Huffington Post and CNN have been the most responsible, and informative sources on the effects of the petroleum and Corexit dispersants on people's health and it's deadly impact on animals and marine life.
This is the link to Nalco's MSDS sheet on Corexit and an excerpt: http://www.deepwaterhorizonresponse.com/posted/2931/Corexit_EC9527A_MSDS.539295.pdf
Our hazard evaluation has identified the following chemical substance(s) as HAZARDOUS.
2-Butoxyethanol 111-76-2 30.0 - 60.0
Organic sulfonic acid salt Proprietary 10.0 - 30.0
Propylene Glycol 57-55-6 1.0 - 5.0
WARNING
Eye and skin irritant. Repeated or excessive exposure to butoxyethanol may cause injury to red blood cells (hemolysis), kidney or the liver. HARMFUL BY INHALATION.
I am currently reading "Power Trip" by Amanda Little. It was only in 2006 that oil companies were permitted to do "so-called ultradeep" water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico off the Louisiana coast.
The "oil field" is below 7200 feet of water and 30,000 feet "under the seabed, occupying a geological layer formed in the Cenozoic Era more than 60 million years ago", according to Amanda Little.
We have NO business being in ANY ocean OR on ANY land. These are homes to wildlife and marine animals and NOT ours to destroy.
We must DEMAND that President Obama FULFILL HIS CAMPAIGN PROMISE and END ALL OFFSHORE DRILLING IMMEDIATELY.
Let's return the Earth to nature and the animals. We'll start with your house.
400 parts per million of carbon has recently been found to be the Arctic Tipping Point, which could conceivably endanger everyone. We are approaching 390 ppm and adding 2 ppm each year. The safe limit is 350 ppm. If we are truly about 5 years from a life threatening cataclysm leadership needs to emerge - fast!
According to one scientist, a very thin oil film on the surface of the Atlantic and Arctic oceans that could spread from the Gulf, threatens to raise temperatures toward the catastrophic Tipping Point.
It seems possible to effectively attack the problems we face only with a monumental effort on a wartime scale.
If the threat is real, renewable energy systems that can be deployed in time should rapidly be produced on a 24/7 basis. The White House and Congress should check the facts without delay - and if confirmed, provide whatever incentives are necessary to make that possible.
See What to Do! at http://www.aesopinstitute.org The subtitle is: A 5 Step Program...
Little known and hard to fathom breakthroughs involving radically new energy technologies can help to supersede petroleum much more rapidly than might be readily understood or believed.
See Moving Beyond Oil on the same Aesop Institute website.
If the threat is confirmed, Congress and the White House must quickly initiate the action needed to prevent catastrophe and provide effective climate legislation.
After all, the lives they save may include their own!