by Emilie Karrick Surrusco
We’ve all seen the horrifying footage of the oil leaking,
leaking and still leaking into the Gulf of Mexico.
And we’ve watched as BP’s CEO Tony Hayward has made such ludicrous statements
as the Gulf is a big place, there really isn’t that much oil if you compare it
to all that water. What’s more, we’ve read that BP repeatedly told Minerals
Management Service (MMS), the federal agency charged with overseeing offshore
drilling in our nation’s waters, that their proposed plans for the Deepwater
Horizon rig posed minimal risk to the environment so there really was no reason
to prepare for a disaster. And, MMS took them at their word.
Fast forward 43 days and we could be watching the same story
unfold in one of our nation’s last pristine, untouched places—Alaska’s
Arctic Ocean.
Right now, Shell Oil is moving forward with plans for
exploratory drilling, the very same type that Deepwater Horizon was doing in
the Gulf, in the Arctic’s Chukchi and Beaufort Seas. As they await the final
permits from MMS, Shell has submitted their final assurances on the soundness
of their plans—a letter sent on Friday contains such common sense-defying
assertions as “in Arctic conditions, ice can aid oil spill response.” Like BP,
they never bothered to put together much of a plan for a blowout because “a
large oil spill, such as a crude release from a blowout, is extremely rare and
not considered a reasonably foreseeable impact.” And just as they did with BP,
MMS thus far has taken Shell at their word.
There are some differences between the Gulf and the Arctic.
One difference, that Shell continues to trot out as their top
nothing-to-worry-about-here talking point, is that the Arctic
is much shallower than the Gulf. While this may be true and this may sound
oddly reassuring to those of us who like to be able to see the bottom of the
pool when we’re treading water, it doesn’t mean much when it comes to an
offshore well blowout. In fact, according to a recent report by Elmer P.
Danenberger III, who was an expert witness in front of Congress just last week,
blowouts are more likely in shallow waters than in deep waters. From 1992
to 2006, the majority of the blowouts that occurred in our nation’s offshore
waters were from shallow water wells. So much for Shell’s “we don’t need to
plan for a blowout because it would never happen in shallow water” messaging.
And the ice thing. First thing I should mention is that not
only does sea ice cover the Arctic Ocean for much of the year but the weather
conditions that come with it are far from hospitable to activities such as
cleaning up an offshore oil spill. In the Gulf, clean up was held up by 8-foot
waves. In the Arctic, the waves tend to form
20-foot crests, with gale force winds and negative temperatures in October. It
could be months before the clean-up crews could travel the hundreds of miles
between them and an Arctic spill site—and find conditions that would lend
themselves to effective spill response. In the Gulf, there were 32 vessels on
hand within 24 hours of the Deepwater Horizon explosion. In the Arctic,
that capacity is 13 vessels. The closest boat dock is 250 miles away from the
proposed well sites in the Chukchi Sea and it abuts the tiny village of
Wainwright (population: 546). As numerous other federal agencies
(including MMS) and the U.S. Coast Guard have said: “There has been little
experience with under-ice or broken-ice oil spills, and there is little
evidence to suggest that the capability exists currently to successfully clean
up a spill of this type up in a timely manner.”
But all that’s okay because in Shell’s world, the ice will
take care of things and the oil will be easier to clean up because it will be
contained within the ice that forms the basis of one of our planet’s most
abundant and unique ecosystems. This isn’t just ice we’re talking about people—the ice plays host to algae, that feeds a phytoplankton bloom in the water
beneath the ice, that feeds crustaceans and other invertebrates, that feeds numerous
fish species, that feed seals, birds and whales, that feed polar bears and
humans. I’m no scientist, but that sounds like a lot of life under that ice
that would be destroyed by oil. And, as a young man in Point Hope, Alaska,
who grew up hunting, eating and celebrating fish, birds, seals, whales, and
polar bears and now feeds his own family with the same subsistence traditions,
said: “The ice may contain the spill but who will contain the ice?”
Folks like that young man, who call the Arctic Ocean their
garden because it feeds their past, their future, their way of being, have been
watching the footage in the Gulf with a horrific sense of foreboding. We and
the Obama administration owe it to them—not to mention our planet—to stop
taking oil companies at their word. The Gulf disaster has shown us what can
happen. Let’s not tempt fate and wait for worse to happen in the Arctic.
Related Links:
U.S. bans more Gulf fishing as oil fears grow for Florida
Obama’s ocean chief dismisses loop current threat: ‘Very little tarballs!’
A new oil rush endangers the Gulf of Mexico and the planet
