1.
For those saddened by the scenes of thick oil washing into Louisiana’s coastal wetlands a month after the BP oil disaster began, experts on oil spills and the coastal ecosystem have some advice: Get used to it.
The crews mopping up oil on beaches and marsh shorelines this week are fighting just the first of what will probably be a series of rolling skirmishes that will last for months, if not years — even after the runaway well is finally capped. In fact, the untold millions of gallons of oil already fouling the Gulf off the Louisiana coast could stay in the area for at least a decade, and on the sea floor for more than 100 years.
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Researchers say there are numerous currents in that part of the Gulf between 5,000 feet and the surface, each of which can grab some of the plume and shuttle it in different directions. There also are different temperatures layers that also can redirect portions of the plume. At a depth of about 1,500 feet, a cold layer meets a much warmer layer of water, and the change in density creates a virtual wall that can trap particles.
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Video from the scene shows billowing clouds of the mixture spilling from the break. What it doesn’t show, Overton said, is what type of plume that mixture is forming.
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“So the reason we haven’t seen big coatings, may be because much of it is still below the surface.”
In fact, the consensus building among scientists and oil spill experts this week was that BP’s mistake likely will never result in a black wave soaking miles of coast in thick layers of black oil. Instead, Louisiana is probably in for a years-long war of mostly small skirmishes against random, low-volume oilings of coastal marshes and beaches.
2.
The federal government needs to be working on three fronts simultaneously. The administration ought to have a muti-layered plan for preventing the oil from reaching shore. It also ought to be crafting a long-term recovery plan for the Gulf Coast and Louisiana’s wetlands and developing rigorous safety requirements to ensure that this sort of disaster never happens again.
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