Reply #17: K&R and, what to make of this? here:

[amborin]

http://www.miller-mccune.com/science-environment/oil-cleanup-cure-may-be-worse-than-disease-15722/


Despite the agony of watching oil-sodden waters lap at pristine shores, our ham-fisted cleanups can do more harm than good, experts say.

By Melinda Burns


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As oil from the massive BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico creeps toward land, experts say cleanup efforts can do more harm than good. (Wikipedia.org) Related Stories

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Pay, Baby, PayIrving Mendelssohn, a Louisiana wetland ecologist, knows what won’t work if and when the oil slick in the Gulf reaches his marshy coastline.

Unfortunately, he’s not sure what will.

“The most important thing is that you don’t send hundreds of people walking into the wetlands, pushing that oil into the soil,” he said. “You can’t have people stomping around in their boots. And you don’t want machines like tractors pushing the oil into the soil. That would definitely kill the vegetation.”

All other “remediations” are problematic, too, Mendelssohn said. As a professor at Louisiana State University who specializes in the effects of oil on wetlands, he’s been advising the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on cleanup of the massive slick edging toward the mainland. The oil has now reached the sandy beaches of Louisiana’s barrier islands, even as crews struggle to contain more than 200,000 gallons of oil gushing every day from BP’s exploded Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico.

Bioremediation, or breaking down the oil with bacteria, wouldn’t work well in Louisiana because the coastal wetlands are flooded with water, Mendelssohn said. Setting the marshes on fire or flushing them with low-pressure hoses could be effective in plots of 20 or 30 acres, he said, but those methods aren’t feasible in larger areas.

“Would you want to burn hundreds of thousands of acres?” Mendelssohn asked. “That’s a tremendously hard call.”

There are no good cleanup options for the orange-colored slick the size of Delaware, just as there were none for the Exxon Valdez tanker spill off Alaska in 1989, the Amoco Cadiz tanker spill off Brittany, France, in 1978, or the platform blowout in the Santa Barbara Channel in Santa Barbara, Calif., in 1969.

Robert Bea, a University of California, Berkeley, professor of civil environmental engineering who spent nearly 60 years in the oil business, was sent as a troubleshooter to all of those and several dozen more onshore and offshore spills.

In Santa Barbara, he recalled, people tried to mop up the black tide on the beaches with paper towels and bales of straw. “It’s more sophisticated today, but it’s the same damn thing. Unfortunately, we have not progressed very far since the miserable experiences of Santa Barbara and the Exxon Valdez.”

In the sensitive marshes of the California’s Bay-Delta 35 years later, Bea said, workers used buckets to scoop up the mess from a 60,000-gallon pipeline oil spill.

“We killed the marsh,” he said.

Along the coast of Brittany, some of the salt marshes there are still recovering from being trampled after the Amoco Cadiz accident, in which the supertanker split in two, spilling 68 million gallons of oil. Other marshes were bulldozed and the topsoil was carted away, leaving areas below water unable to regenerate. Effectively, studies show, the excavated marshes will never come back, while untreated areas are doing fine.

The Exxon Valdez spill, totaling 11 million gallons of oil, is still the largest in the U.S. and arguably one of the worst anywhere in terms of the environmental damage it caused. It covered more than 1,300 miles of wild coastline along Alaska’s Prince William Sound with black sticky goo.

John Robinson, a Santa Barbara resident who was NOAA’s scientific adviser on the Exxon Valdez spill, recalled this week how he advised the U.S. Coast Guard to use high-pressure hoses to blast steaming hot water on the rocky shores of Alaska. It enabled the cleanup workers — 11,000 in all — to push the oil back into the ocean where it was corralled and skimmed off behind booms. But it “cooked” everything in sight.

Robinson said he feared that if the oil was not removed, it would swirl around and cause damage elsewhere.

“In the end, it was proven pretty clearly that we did the wrong thing,” he said. “We were approaching sterilization of the coast with that kind of equipment. It turned out to be a mistake. This kind of aggressive cleanup does nothing but delay the eventual recovery that nature is going to do anyway.”




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