Reply #3: I heard on DemocracyNow this morning that the overwhelming bulk of the oil is beneath the surface... [View All]

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RICK STEINER: Well, it’s very—it’s tragic, actually. I mean, all these spills that we’ve worked on around the world, they have their own similarities and differences, but this one’s really historic in a number of ways. It’s the largest, deepest blowout in history. It’s coming out at 5,000 feet deep, as people know, and about fifty miles offshore. And it’s a light Gulf of Mexico crude, so it’s got some things different than the Exxon Valdez, for instance. By the—when the oil comes out of the wellhead, the blowout, it’s emulsifying very quickly with this very dense, high-pressure seawater. And then these things act in complicated ways, where then the plume will rise a few hundred meters, and some research has shown that in smaller blowouts in a little bit shallower water that then the plume will stabilize at a particular depth, that it will reach a terminal depth, and then just start flowing subsurface. So I think the easy way to look at this is that a lot of the oil that’s come out still probably hasn’t surfaced yet. But even the stuff that has surfaced, it’s covering two to three thousand square miles in broken patches. I mean, it’s not solid, but broken patches. If you use the conservative estimate that BP is putting out and the government apparently is concurring with, then there’s four to five million gallons that have come out so far over the last three weeks. And it’s a very complicated event.


The cause seems like a combination of human error, when they withdrew the muds from the well stem and replaced it with seawater before the concrete plugs were in, and then mechanical failure, when the blowout preventer failed, as well.


So the response—you know, the other thing we’ve learned from spills all over the world is that response just simply never works. And it never has and likely never will. Seldom is more than ten percent that is spilled actually recovered from the sea surface. So, you know, they’re very proud to say they’ve got 13,000 workers on this and 400-some boats and, you know, a million feet of boom and things like that, but the sad bottom line is they’re not going to be able to contain and recover much of the oil from the environment. It just simply hasn’t happened. I was watching a lot of shrimp boats pull containment booms through the oil, and the oil was unfortunately so saturated with water that when the booms contacted the oil, it just went beneath the booms, and there was as much oil behind the booms as inside of it. So they’re recovering, you know, three million gallons or so of oil-water mixture, but about 90 percent of that is likely water. So, at any rate, yeah, it’s a lot of oil in the water. It’s still coming.


The cause is obviously negligence and mechanical failure. And the impact of this thing has been quite serious. But it’s so different from a normal tanker spill, for instance, where all the oil is on the surface, at least to start with, and you can follow it. This oil is coming out at 5,000 feet deep, so a lot of the impact—and plus when it emulsifies with water and the methane dissolves off—a lot of the impact of this oil, this subsurface toxic plume, will be in the deep ocean and what we call the pelagic ecosystem. And that—that is a serious ecosystem. And that’s—you know, that’s a very rich ecosystem offshore there, several kinds of whales, dolphins. We spent an afternoon with a pod of fifty bottlenose dolphins out in and around the oil, thousands of seabirds. So, you know, there’s this traditional bias or chauvinism that—in oil spills, that we’re only concerned if the oil comes onshore and with the oil on the surface. Well, in this, we are concerned about that—the oil has started coming onshore, and there’s a lot on the surface—but because of the turbulent mixing energy of the wind and waves and also the chemical dispersant that they’ve applied, some 300,000 gallons of this stuff to the surface slicks, there’s a lot of this oil that’s down in the water column. And so, while that might be good if you’re a seabird, it’s not if you’re a bluefin tuna that’s getting ready to spawn.


And one other last thing about impact. There’s a lot of very precious, very unusual marine habitats in the Gulf of Mexico. There’s some deepwater coral reefs up on the—as you start going up the continental shelf. And then there’s these cold seeps where methane, this natural gas, just percolates out of the seabed and forms these really rich, unusual biological communities, extremely productive, that live just simply off the methane coming out of the seabed, and a number of endemic species that are found nowhere else. And I think, because a lot of this oil is entrained in the deepwater masses, likely, that some of these very productive special habitats will be hit. And we need to take a good look at that, so…


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http://www.democracynow.org/2010/5/12/as_gulf_of_mexico_oil_spill