[ed. I helped direct the Exxon Valdez cleanup and know many of the scientists, responders and Coast Guard officials mentioned in this article. While I disagree with one assertion (that high pressure washing on Prince William Sound beaches did more harm than good) this account does a pretty good job of capturing the chaos, distractions, competing interests, and power struggles that typically fuel a large oil spill response.]It has become conventional wisdom that the BP-funded response to the spill was a chaotic and mismanaged affair, driven by corporate avarice, lacking in urgency, and at times willfully negligent of the problem’s scope—the idea being that any organization that had caused such a catastrophe, and that was so clearly unprepared for it, could not in good faith clean up the scene of the disaster. The evidence for this is much like the imagery of heavy oiling: vivid and convincing upon first consideration, but also fragmentary, anecdotal. At the peak of the cleanup effort, forty-seven thousand people were fighting the oil, a community equivalent in size to Annapolis, or the workforce of G.M.—as one federal scientist called it, “a company built in the middle of the night.” In just half a year, the response expended nearly sixty million man-hours, roughly nine times what it took to build the Empire State Building. After the well ruptured, BP accepted help from competing oil companies, and hired the world’s leading oil-pollution specialists to run key operations. The logistical demands on the effort, which spanned the entire Gulf coast—a region of varied geography and political culture—were immense. President Obama was not exaggerating when he announced in June, “This is the largest response to an environmental disaster of this kind in the history of our country.” (...)
The old saying has it that oil and water don’t mix, but every day the world’s oceans absorb colossal amounts of oil. When hydrocarbons flow into the sea—whether from spills, or leaky ships, or natural seeps—experts call them “petroleum input.” The world’s total petroleum input is thought to be about three hundred and eighty million gallons per year—a quantity similar to the catastrophic Gulf War spill—with a fifth of it happening in American waters. Much of the input off the United States comes from natural seeps. Some of the largest of those are in the Gulf of Mexico, which is thought to absorb more than fifty million gallons of oil annually.
Approximately twenty thousand oil spills are reported in America every year. Most of them are small and do not attract much attention; only a tiny fraction cost more than a million dollars to clean up. An economy based on oil must be prepared to deal with large amounts of pollution, and over many decades this country has evolved a way to respond to spills. “There is no plan,” one politician took to saying as the response progressed last summer. But there was a plan. Its origins dated back to the first major industrial oil spill at sea: the collision of a tanker called the Torrey Canyon against Pollard Rock, off the coast of England, in 1967.
When the Torrey Canyon ran aground, its broken hull released thirty-seven million gallons of Kuwaiti crude into the water. Oil poured forth in heavy slabs: one drifted toward France; another coated two hundred miles of shoreline in western Cornwall. Twenty-five thousand birds died, and local communities and the British government fought to contain the mess. People on beaches tried in vain to soak up the oil with straw, or they used bulldozers and pumps to recover the oozing petroleum. From the other side of the Channel, the French government dumped three thousand tons of chalk containing stearic acid into the oil, hoping it would sink or disperse. Eventually, the Royal Navy bombed the tanker with a mixture of napalm, sodium chlorate, and aviation fuel, in an effort to incinerate the oil. This, too, was largely ineffective.
The American government watched the incident with alarm, and the following year Congress created the first National Contingency Plan—a blueprint for dealing with a similar catastrophe. A few years later, the Coast Guard set up three oil-spill strike teams in different parts of the country. But when the Exxon Valdez ran aground, in Prince William Sound, in 1989, this evolving system of spill response was put to a tremendous test, and in many ways it failed. Though the Exxon Valdez spill is only the world’s fifty-seventh largest, it was ecologically devastating. The rocky, remote Alaska shoreline was difficult to clean, and the subarctic weather made it impossible to work in winter. On a number of occasions, the response’s methods, such as the use of high-powered jets to blast crude off rocks and beaches, did more damage to the environment than the oil did—but public outrage often demanded action, even if scientists advised against it. Eleven thousand people gathered in Prince William Sound to assist in the effort, and they fell into arguments over basic decisions. Vice-Admiral Clyde Robbins, who led the federal spill response, struggled to get Exxon and government authorities to set aside their mutual distrust and collaborate. “It made it difficult to move ahead on anything,” he told me. “I didn’t really have authority.”
The problems that the Coast Guard faced in Alaska were not entirely about the oil. They were also about emergency response and public perception. “All oil spills are emotional events,” Ann Hayward-Walker, a responder who had worked on the Exxon Valdez incident, told me one evening in Houma. It is possible to fight a forest fire and not be distracted by how the calamity was caused, and whether the cause taints the integrity of the people who deal with it. But oil spills are saturated in blame and political confusion—and opportunity. There is a sense that they are not accidents but accidents waiting to happen, and thus acts of greed. As a result, oil-soaked birds and fish come to symbolize a reviled industry’s heedless behavior. Every year, as many as four hundred thousand birds are killed in America by electricity-generating wind turbines, but they do not make the cover of Time. Incremental ecological damage, even if it is severe, does not easily cause outrage.
by Raffi Khatchadourian, New Yorker | Read more:
Photograph by Daniel Beltrá.
