Despite the agony of watching oil-sodden waters lap at pristine shores, our ham-fisted cleanups can do more harm than good, experts say.
Irving 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.”
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. . . 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.”
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. . . 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 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.
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. . 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.
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. . . 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.”
It turns out that driving oily sand below the tide line, where many plants and animals had escaped the spill, the blasts of hot water only made matters worse, according to a report by NOAA in 1991.
“Sometimes, the best thing to do in an oil spill is nothing,” the report concluded.
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. . . And in a 10-year study on the effects of the spill, Bowdoin College researchers concluded that 90 percent of the plants and animals in the Exxon Valdez spill zone had recovered by mid-1990, in part because of the cleanup and in part because of natural forces.
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... Robinson said his own experience has made him a skeptic. When the Exxon Valdez cleanup was in full swing, he fought for nine areas — totaling less than a mile of coast — to be set aside and not cleaned. Within a few years, he said, “It was clear that the areas that had not been cleaned were faring a lot better in terms of their recovery. The areas that were cleaned were in much worse shape.”
As the head of NOAA’s Hazardous Materials Response Team, which he founded in 1976, Robinson oversaw about 100 oil spill cleanups. “I can’t think of any good example where a cleanup has been anything other than useless. It causes more damage than not doing anything at all. Once the genie gets out of the bottle, there’s no getting it back in. That seems to be proving itself once more in New Orleans.”
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http://www.miller-mccune.com/science-environment/oil-cleanup-cure-may-be-worse-than-disease-15722/
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