Next Up for BP Oil Disaster: Hurricane Season

June 1st, 2010

Via: Miami Herald:

If the growing oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico isn’t contained soon – and the latest efforts suggest that’s unlikely – then the damage to the fragile region will intensify over the coming summer months as changing currents and the potential for hurricanes complicate the containment and cleanup efforts.

“It’s all lose, lose, lose here,” said Rick Steiner, a retired University of Alaska marine scientist who’s familiar with both the current Gulf oil spill and the Exxon Valdez disaster two decades ago.

“The failure of the top kill really magnified this disaster exponentially,” he said. “I think there’s a realistic probability that this enormous amount of oil will keep coming out for a couple months. This disaster just got enormously worse.”

As the federal government and BP try yet another strategy to curb the flow of oil from the blown well a mile below the surface of the Gulf – one that could increase the flow of oil by as much as 20 percent – scientists anticipate a range of disastrous effects, only some of which are well understood.

The damage to the shorelines of Gulf states such as Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida is literally only the surface of the problem: The damage to the sea floor could be extensive, and oil could also devastate marine life between the Gulf floor and its surface, as well as in coastal areas far from the leaking wellhead.

If none of the short-term solutions plugs the well, the only long-term fix – drilling two relief wells to stem the flow of oil – likely won’t be completed until late July or August. President Barack Obama on Saturday called the news about the latest failed attempt “as enraging as it is heartbreaking.”

“As I said yesterday, every day that this leak continues is an assault on the people of the Gulf Coast region, their livelihoods, and the natural bounty that belongs to all of us,” he said in a White House statement.

Larry Crowder, a professor of marine biology at Duke University, said if the spill continues for a couple more months, then oil almost certainly would get into the Loop Current that flows clockwise around the Gulf. It then would be a week to 10 days before it got to the Florida Keys, and a couple of weeks more before the Gulf Stream carried it to North Carolina.

If the leak had been stopped this weekend, the oil might have been diluted, but if there’s two to three times the current amount by August, he said: “It could go anywhere.”

“If you have enough oil, it can go a big distance,” and some 100 million gallons could be spilled by this summer. “There’s almost no place that’s off-limits,” Crowder said.

With summer approaching, hurricanes are the most obvious complication. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts an above-average hurricane season, and a hurricane getting into the Gulf and moving toward the Louisiana coast could force BP to halt its effort to drill the relief wells until the storm passed.

Hurricanes also could disperse the oil farther and wider – or roil the waters so oil at the surface plunges to great depths and poisons the deepwater ecosystem.

Any hurricane and its accompanying storm surge also could drive oil onto land, even into the rice and sugarcane fields that aren’t far from the coast in Louisiana, said James H. Cowan Jr., a biological oceanographer at Louisiana State University.

“It will probably get stranded if it gets to the upper estuary, and it’s very difficult to clean there,” he said.

One Response to “Next Up for BP Oil Disaster: Hurricane Season”

  1. Eileen says:

    We do live in interesting times, don’t we? I wrote a note to myself several weeks ago to start listening to the Guru Gita tapes I have, again. I saw that note to myself on the table this weekend and thought why did I write this?

    Chanting the Guru Gita was a spiritual practice that helped me to strengthen my spiritual soul when the waves were crashing around me after my Mother had her stroke. I guess I’m looking for a log to hold onto in the shitstorm ahead.

    If its any solace for anyone out there, I have learned enough from Eastern “religions” that I believe we chose this life. We knew what we were getting into and what we were going to experience this world of ours as we experience it now. So I guess be fair to yourself, the planet, and those around you by not dwelling on being a victim of circumstances.

    I went to my Amish friend’s farm the other day. Told him of my fears. He said, “but you have no control over any of this.” Mose is right about that, he and his family calm me down just being in their presence. They have problems too that the are grappling with.

    ButI’m still going through a psychic shitstorm. Hence the need to return to a spiritual practice (not the Catholic church) to remind myself I am just a soul traversing the universe.

    Thank you Kevin, for not painting this cataclysm in pretty colors.

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