Catastrophe in the Gulf: How Bad Could It Get?

The ongoing oil spill is an environmental calamity like none the U.S. has ever faced. And it's not just residents of the vulnerable Gulf who will get hit by it. This time we're all going to feel the pain

By Bryan Walsh/Venice, La. Thursday, June 03, 2010
    • Peter van Agtmael / Magnum for TIME

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    It may not be a valid oil-spill-response plan, but the sand berms have the benefit of being big and visible — a comfort for the worried and angry natives of southeastern Louisiana, watching as their land and their livelihood are taken away from them. At the annual Plaquemines Parish seafood festival over Memorial Day weekend — where the turnout was strong despite concerns about the safety of oysters and shrimp — locals wore T-shirts that read, "Dredge, baby, dredge." In the end, Allen seemed to agree with the sentiment — late on June 2 he announced that he had approved five additional sand berms and that BP would foot the bill. Anything, it seems, is better than waiting helplessly for the oil to envelop the wetlands completely. "When it does, you try to imagine how much marshland and animal life it might kill," says Cody Mouton, a boat captain from north of Venice involved in the cleanup. "We're talking about years, easily, to recover from that."

    The Long Term
    The truth is, of course, that no one can begin to know what the final toll might be if the spill continues for weeks, in part because no one knows exactly what's happening to the oil right now. According to the latest government estimate, 12,000 to 19,000 bbl. of oil are leaking from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico each day. Yet the size of the surface oil slick — a radius of 200 miles (320 km), though the exact size and location fluctuates daily — doesn't match the sheer amount of crude fouling the Gulf. That's partly because some of it has been burned off or has evaporated away. But it's also the result of BP's use of nearly 1 million gal. (3.8 million L) of chemical dispersants, sprayed onto the surface and injected directly into the wellhead to break up the crude and speed the evaporation process. Dispersed oil tends not to float but instead falls below the surface and drifts at mid-depths, meaning that a lot of what's been spilled so far is invisible. "So much of it is still hidden," says Ian MacDonald, an oceanographer at Florida State University and one of the most outspoken researchers on the spill. "Something is missing."

    Slowly, that something is turning up — and what it's doing is not pretty. On May 27, scientists from the University of South Florida (USF) returned from a six-day voyage into the Gulf with evidence that huge plumes of oil — broken into bits and beads by the dispersants — were moving thousands of feet beneath the surface in a great toxic cloud. That underwater mix of oil and dispersants could poison fish larvae, with cascading effects up the food chain, and damage the corals found in some parts of the Gulf. "The whole water column from the top to the bottom is getting it on the chin," says the EDF's Rader.

    That's not what BP seems to believe. On May 30, while touring a BP staging area for cleanup workers in Louisiana, CEO Tony Hayward told reporters there was "no evidence" that oil was massing underwater. "The oil is on the surface," he said. "There aren't any plumes." Jane Lubchenco, the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is less sure but says she's still awaiting firm data on underwater oil plumes.

    Researchers from USF aren't the only ones to report finding oil plumes beneath the surface. Scientists from LSU and the University of Southern Mississippi have done so as well. And on the same day as Hayward's denial, scientists from the University of Georgia (UGA) aboard an ongoing research voyage to the spill found direct evidence of oil in water samples collected nearly 1,000 meters below the surface. "Seeing is believing," blogged UGA marine scientist Samantha Joye. After nearly a month of denials and obfuscation by BP on the technical details of the spill, Joye's words carry a lot more weight than Hayward's.

    If the well continues to spew for weeks more — and BP continues to apply chemical dispersants at the site of the spill — those underwater plumes will likely continue to grow. If oil hits the shorelines and wetlands and remains underwater as well, no amount of rescue and cleanup efforts will protect sea life. It took years for the fertile salmon fisheries of Prince William Sound to recover from the Exxon Valdez spill, in part because fish that were juveniles at the time of the disaster were severely affected, devastating fish populations for generations. The Gulf spill — far larger and far longer — could be far worse. "We have no idea what an oil spill like this does to the most productive time of the most productive part of the Gulf," says MacDonald. "None."

    In some ways that is true of the entire Gulf ecosystem, from shoreline to deep sea. The environment here has been under stress before — the 1979 Ixtoc 1 blowout off the coast of Mexico spilled 3 million to 5 million bbl. of oil into the Gulf — and has bounced back. Like New Orleans itself, the inevitable city in the impossible place, the Gulf coastline has maintained a tenuous balance over the years, with incredible wildlife existing next to intense exploitation of underwater oil. The Gulf is the nation's gas station and its fishing grounds, and until now, the people of Louisiana have enjoyed both, just as Americans have demanded cheap fossil fuels along with blue skies, clear water and crawfish étouffée. But if we fail to stop the worst oil spill in U.S. History — and fail to learn from the country's biggest environmental catastrophe — we may find that we can't have everything we want any longer.

    — With reporting by Tim Padgett / Venice, La.; and Michael Crowley / Washington

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