Gulf Faces ‘Difficult Reality’ of Storm-Whipped Oil (Update1)
By Brian K. Sullivan
May 21 (Bloomberg) -- As oil, tar balls and dead wildlife wash up on the coast of Louisiana from a leaking well at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, another threat looms on the horizon -- hurricane season, which officially starts June 1.
“It is a very difficult reality for people to fathom right now,” said Courtney Howell, 32, the executive director of Bayou Grace Community Services in Chauvin, Louisiana. “They know how big this threat is, but trying to think about that on top of a hurricane is too much to bear.”
Forecasters are calling for 14 to 18 storms with sustained winds of at least 39 miles (62 kilometers) per hour to form in the Atlantic before Nov. 30. Sitting in the Gulf is the slick created by the April 20 explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, leased by BP Plc from Transocean Ltd.
“It’s a huge mess and the liabilities are in the billions possibly the tens of billions,” said Gregory W. Slayton, an adjunct professor and expert on reinsurance at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business in Hanover, New Hampshire. “This is a failure of risk management of epic proportions.”
If Storm Hits
If one or more storms hit the slick before making landfall, work on plugging the leak would have to stop and oil may be pushed miles inland, soiling beaches and marshes or even spreading all over the Gulf, said Barry Keim, Louisiana’s climatologist and a professor at Louisiana State University.
Waves of about 25 feet can come with a tropical storm and 50 to 75 feet with a hurricane, Keim said.
“If we do get a storm, even a tropical storm, it is going to hamper all these efforts to try to cope with the spill,” Keim said. “You can’t put people out there under those circumstances. Any boom that you put down is rendered virtually useless.”
A storm that took a track similar to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 would also push oil into Lake Pontchartrain, on the northern edge of New Orleans, Keim said. Chauvin is in Terrebonne Parish, where the ocean rose by 9 feet during hurricanes Gustav in 2008 and Rita in 2005, Howell said.
“There aren’t many scenarios here that are really good for the state of Louisiana in particular, and almost the whole Gulf could be affected by this,” Keim said by telephone. “Florida is not out of the woods, and certainly Alabama and Mississippi are right in the thick of it.”
Thousands of Jobs
More than 3.1 million people live in the 19 coastal counties and parishes from Louisiana to Florida that form an arc above the spill, according to LSU. It estimates 7,773 people make their living from fishing, forestry and agriculture along the coast, while 19,284 work in oil and gas extraction and more are employed at related industries inland.
BP and U.S. federal agencies have estimated the leak rate from the rig at 5,000 barrels (210,000 gallons) a day since April 28, a figure disputed by scientists who say that it may be 10 times bigger than that.
An interagency task force was formed earlier this week to determine the flow rate, Jane Lubchenco of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said yesterday during a conference call with reporters. The 5,000-barrel figure was “always understood to be a very rough estimate,” she said.
BP is prepared to deal with storms, said Toby Odone, a company spokesman.
BP is ‘Ready’
“We’ve operated in the Gulf of Mexico for a long time and will be ready to respond appropriately,” Odone said by telephone. “It’s too early to give the details.”
Forecasters are already watching a tropical wave in the western Caribbean and a system that may form off the coast of northern South America and move across the island of Hispanola next week.
“Mid-August to the first week of October is really the heart of the season,” Keim said. “That is when the vast majority of storms occur and that is typically when you see the really big, bad storms.”
Hurricane winds rotate counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere, so a storm hitting the slick with its northeastern edge will drive the oil inland, said Alex Kolker, of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium. A system striking the spill with its southwestern edge may push some of the oil away from shore because its winds would be blowing out to sea.
Oil and Water
“Another thing about a storm is that it is going to mix up the water a lot,” said Kolker, also an adjunct professor at Tulane University in New Orleans. “On the positive side for the oil is that you could break it up into small pieces, making it easier to be broken down. On the other hand, if there is stuff deep in the water, you could bring it up to the surface.”
Keim said a storm could smear the oil all over the Gulf.
“The wind could literally come from several different directions,” Keim said. “When you have winds virtually from all directions pushing oil at one stage or another, it could cast this stuff across the Gulf of Mexico spreading it much more widely than it is.”
Any oil coming ashore would accelerate coastal erosion because it would kill the grasses that hold marshes together, Kolker said. After hurricanes Katrina and Rita, coastal Louisiana lost 246 square miles of land, he said.
Keim said the state is studying if it can build barrier islands to protect the coast from an oil surge.
“This is a disaster, this clearly is a wakeup call for directors and officers across the country,” said Slayton, also former U.S. General Counsel and Chief of Mission to Bermuda under presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. “Because if you are in any kind of a business where you have this type of potential impact on the environment and climate, you had better understand what it is.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Brian K. Sullivan in Boston at bsullivan10@bloomberg.net.
Last Updated: May 21, 2010 13:16 EDT |
