Re: US may send Navy to oil spill as environmental threat grows
- From: Dennis <tsalagi18NOSPAM@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 30 Apr 2010 03:51:09 GMT
What'd I tell you!
Otis Willie PIO The American War Library wrote:
US may send Navy to oil spill as environmental threat grows
http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/04/29/1604424/us-may-send-navy-to-oil-s
pill.html
The Miami Herald
Posted on Thu, Apr. 29, 2010
U.S. may send Navy to oil spill as threat to environment grows
Lesley Clark and Curtis Morgan
McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON ? Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano on Thursday
designated a widening oil slick pill in the Gulf of Mexico as "a spill of
national significance" as government officials acknowledged that the
amount of oil spewing daily from the well is far more than earlier
thought.
The designation of the spill as a national event allows the White House
to dispatch the U.S. military to assist in efforts to contain the spill,
which now covers more than 4,000 square miles of the Gulf and threatens
to become the largest oil spill in the nation's history.
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said the administration may
dispatch military ships to the area, and a spokesman for BP, the oil
company whose well exploded last week, said the company would welcome
such help.
President Barack Obama began his daily intelligence briefing with an
update on the spill. Obama then announced that he was dispatching three
Cabinet secretaries, including Napolitano, the head of the Environmental
Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson, and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to
the site.
Meanwhile, Democratic and Republican members of Congress from Florida
urged Obama to rethink his plans to lift a ban on offshore oil drilling,
and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a Republican, declared a state of
emergency. In Mississippi, state officials began compiling a priority
list of where to place booms to intercept the oil and environmental
groups took names of volunteers will to clean oil-soaked birds.
Tampa-area U.S. Reps. Kathy Castor, a Democrat, and Bill Young, a
Republican, said the administration plan, which could place oil rigs
within 125 miles of Florida's Gulf coastline, threatened Florida's
economy.
"Fisheries, tourism, the health of the Gulf's pristine beaches are all
imperiled by this massive slick looming just 90 miles from the Florida
Panhandle,'' the two wrote. They were circulating the letter to the
entire Florida delegation and hoped to gather as many signatures as
possible, Castor said.
The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which oversees
offshore energy development, will hold a hearing May 6 to look at the
Interior Department's plans to lift the drilling ban, as well as the
accident in the Gulf of Mexico.
Coast Guard efforts to contain the spill have met with little success.
Efforts to burn off part of the spill were on hold Thursday because of
high winds.
National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration experts are estimating that
5,000 barrels a day of oil are spilling into the gulf. The slick's
leading edge drifted toward the salt marshes of the Louisiana Delta, only
20 miles from a fragile wetland rich with shrimp, crabs and crayfish. But
response teams in Mississippi, Alabama and the Florida Panhandle were
carefully watching shifting winds that could ultimately steer the blob
just about anywhere on the Gulf Coast.
The spill was near the Gulf's powerful "loop current,'' which could
potentially suck in the brown goo and spit it back out in the form of tar
balls, fouling the Florida Keys and beaches along the Atlantic Coast. But
the Coast Guard's highest-ranking officer said South Florida appeared to
be out of the impact zone -- at least for now.
"I'm not going to rule anything out, but it's pretty remote,'' said Adm.
Thad Allen, commandant of the Coast Guard, which is directing efforts to
contain the spreading spill while BP Exploration and Production struggles
to seal its well 5,000 feet below the ocean.
Allen, in an interview with The Miami Herald's Editorial Board Wednesday,
said if the well can't be capped quickly, the accident could potentially
surpass the notorious Exxon Valdez -- which dumped 11 million gallons of
crude into Alaska's Prince William Sound in 1989 -- as the largest
discharge in North American history.
BP, which operated the floating rig that exploded last week, killing 11
workers, has failed in efforts to close a shutoff valve with robotic
subs. Deploying a dome to collect and pump leaking oil has worked in
shallower coastal areas, but never in such deep water, and could take
weeks. The permanent fix, drilling a relief well, could take months.
There also is concern that the damaged wellhead could give way, spewing
up to 100,000 gallons a day from the site about 50 miles south of Venice,
La.
"If we lose the integrity of that wellhead, it could be a catastrophic
spill,'' Allen said.
The Coast Guard was already treating the spill as a worst-case scenario,
Allen said, putting coastal crews on notice from Venice to Pensacola and
using every tool in the slick-fighting book. Nearly 50 vessels were
working the spill, either skimming oil or spraying dispersant to break it
up.
With the plume still growing, the Coast Guard took the extraordinary step
of trying to burn off large patches of it, beginning with test fires
Wednesday.
"What we want to do is fight the oil spill as far off shore as we can,''
Allen said.
Wherever it winds up, the spill promises a messy and expensive cleanup at
the least and potentially a major ecological disaster. Because the spill
is far from land, industry experts predicted the sun and waves would
dilute the impact to a degree, breaking up and evaporating much of it.
Edward Overton, a professor emeritus of environmental sciences at
Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, said it could still be nasty
stuff to clean from marshes or beaches. Overton, who tested samples for
the Coast Guard and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,
said the oil has an unusually high amount of asphaltene -- heavy
ingredients that make it more suitable for paving roads than powering
cars.
"My level of apprehension went from moderate to the red zone when we
found this stuff,'' he said. "It's not going to be easy to degrade. It's
not going to be easy to burn. It's not going to be easy to disperse.''
While the slick might not roll ashore as feather-coating ooze, the oil
could still do broad and chronic damage. Those tarry lumps, scientists
say, can become poison pills spread through the food chain from sea
grasses to pelicans to crabs.
Nick Shay and Villy Kourafalou, professors at the University of Miami's
Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science who have been
tracking the spill, said a shift to the south could pull it into the loop
current, which pushes into the Gulf in a clockwise swirl, spills back
into the Straits of Florida through the Keys and then back north in the
Gulf Stream, where prevailing winds push material onto tourist-filled
beaches.
Shay, a professor of meteorology and physical oceanography, said it was
impossible to predict where the spill might wind up. He said some oil
could get swept up in small ``cyclones'' that swirl from the loop. The
loop moves larval shrimp and fish from shallow estuaries into open water,
but it also can pump everything from chemical runoff to red tide down
toward the Keys, Shay said.
"Whether it's nutrients, whether it's bacteria, whether it's toxic
material, it's a transport mechanism,'' he said.
Kourafalou echoed Shay, saying the loop current was largely overlooked in
the decision by the White House this year to expand oil and gas
exploration into areas of the Gulf where the effect is the strongest.
"Things come through the Keys. Things that happen in the Gulf will find
their way here one way or another,'' said Kourafalou, a research
associate professor.
Doug Helton, incident operations coordinator for the NOAA team tracking
and projecting the spill's movement, echoed Allen's view, downplaying
risks to South Florida.
Helton said the current remains well south of the spill but stressed that
NOAA's predictions extend only out 72 hours. The slick already has
floated back across the rig site once. It's also continually changing and
unlike anything crews have dealt with before -- a mix of both degrading
and fresh oil.
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