Glimmer of hope? "After 1979 Spill, A Stunning Recovery" (link)

[scheming daemons]

The oil was everywhere, long black sheets of it, 15 inches thick in some places. Even if you stepped in what looked like a clean patch of sand, it quickly and gooily puddled around your feet. And Wes Tunnell, as he surveyed the mess, had only one bleak thought: "Oh, my God, this is horrible! It's all gonna die!"

But it didn't. Thirty-one years since the worst oil spill in North American history blanketed 150 miles of Texas beach, tourists noisily splash in the surf and turtles drag themselves into the dunes to lay eggs.

"You look around, and it's like the spill never happened," shrugs Tunnell, a marine biologist. "There's a lot of perplexity in it for many of us."

For Tunnell and others involved in the fight to contain the June 3, 1979, spill from Mexico's Ixtoc 1 offshore well in the Gulf of Campeche, the BP blowout in the Gulf of Mexico conjures an eerie sense of déjà vu.

Like the BP spill, the Ixtoc disaster began with a burst of gas followed by an explosion and fire, followed by a relentless gush of oil that resisted all attempts to block it. Plugs of mud and debris, chemical dispersants, booms skimming the surface of the water: Mexico's Pemex oil company tried them all, but still the spill inexorably crept ashore, first in southeast Mexico, later in Texas.

But if the BP spill seems to be repeating one truth already demonstrated in the Ixtoc spill - that human technology is no match for a high-pressure undersea oil blowout - scientists are hoping that it may eventually confirm another: that the environment has a stunning capacity to heal itself from manmade insults.
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Full article:

http://www.newsobserver.com/2010/06/13/530250/after-big-1979-spill-a-stunning.html?story_link=email_msg



If we get this thing stopped in August with the relief wells, maybe...just maybe... we can recover quicker than we think.

[thelordofhell]

1. Shhhhhhh..........be quiet

You don't want to upset the "World Is Doomed" "Worst Environmental Disaster Ever" crowd

:hide: :tinfoilhat:

[BeFree]

5. Ixtoc was different, and it caused great harm

And this is the worst environmental disaster in the US.

Of course, if one doesn't have a clue about environmental matters then what they hell do they know about this? Of course they would just dismiss it. And even make apologies to BP for owning up to paying 20B. Now, why would they do that if there were no problem? Seems BP does have a clue unlike some, eh? A 20B clue, at that.

[Hissyspit]

7. 30 years.

Great.

[Arctic Dave]

2. Maybe.

I think what will prove to be the largest problems is the depth and the dispersants. They have basically turned a two dimensional problem into a three dimensional problem. Why they did this I don't know.
At some point you would think that keeping the oil as bound together as possible for recovery would be ideal and then use dispersants on the rest.

[dipsydoodle]

4. In the UK

we've always use dipserants whenever there have been tanker problems to avoid the situation where slicks hit the coast in one piece. I do however appreciate you have a considerably bigger problem in the Gulf.

[dipsydoodle]

3. I've posted that before

see reply #1 http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=8568773 and elsewhere too where I just got flack about the origin being RW.

[truedelphi]

6. Already the Gulf Of Mexico Oil Gusher has been recorded as being

Four times larger than the Valdez Oil Spill. And it gushes on, with entire sections of the sea floor perhaps coming unglued and leaking more oil.

And for the record, herring never came back to that area of Alaska. Many fishermen and fisher women did not get their lives back.

Those involved cleaning up that spill have an average age life expectancy of 51 years.

The lawyer, O'Neil, who attempted to get the Alaskans who were put out of business or materially harmed in any of a number of ways a decent settlement - those billions as settlement were recently thrown out of the Supreme Court for being "too big" as settlement monies for the little small people.

BP is already talking about re-organizing, so good luck on getting any where with them regarding settlement. BP officials are not even making good on the commitment to pay the cleanup workers recently hired.

[dipsydoodle]

9. The OP isn't a comparison with the Valdez

its a comparison with Ixtoc 1 which remains the world's worst oil disaster.

[truedelphi]

12. But the entire purpose of the OP being placed on this discussion board

Is to say, "Look, everything is A-okay and all is well."

When that is just another facet of the Big Lie.

[KittyWampus]

18. Misconstruing the OP as saying "everything is A-okay" seem very dishonest.

You do it deliberately. Sad.

[truedelphi]

19. Says who?

You.

My viewpoint says differently.

[drmeow]

8. A generation (30 years)

to recover - scientists are saying it's going to take that long for Prince William Sound to recover, too.

Some key differences - if the latest estimate of 100,000 barrels a day gushing is accurate then we'll have exceeded the total estimated oil in the 1979 spill by August 20th. Also the US had 2 months to prepare booms to protect the Texas coastline. Did none of the spill hit areas of Mexico which are closer to where the oil rig exploded - what kind of shape are they in?

I think this is going to end up being more of a 2 generation recovery (2070 instead of 2040) - once the thing is capped, that is.

[bvar22]

10. Only 32 years later....

YAY...something to look forward to!

How do the quantities of oil dumped into the environment compare?

Is the recovery simply about people splashing in the surf and turtles, or has the ecosystem been restored.

I am not a hysterical Doom Preacher..
I lived on the Gulf Coast for over 40 years, and worked on the offshore rigs for a good number of them.
There have been other spills.
One the MSM has ignored was in 1970 off Grand Isle in 1971....Bay Marchand.
I was directly involved with this one. The company I worked for drilled several of the relief wells.
IIRC, a Shell production platform exploded and 19 wells were blowing.
You could see the fire burning from Grand Isle.
This went on for months.
I can find very little information through Google, and NONE about the quantity of oil that was spilled.
I KNOW this happened. I was there.

There were also many Oil Tankers sunk in the Gulf of Mexico by German submarines in WW2.
That oil went somewhere, and the ecosystem recovered.

The point is that NOTHING has ever approached the quantity of Oil being spewed into the Gulf by this current catastrophe. There is NOTHING to compare it to.

Life IS durable, and nature will recover as long as it is still alive.
So will Human Beings who have been poisoned short of death.
At some point, the quantity of toxins will cause DEATH.
Breaking points can be reached.
After that? :shrug:

So an example of some oil washing up on a beach in Texas 32 years ago really doesn't tell us anything.

[geek tragedy]

11. Nature endures, we perish.

Long after humans have killed ourselves off and our cities have crumbled, birds and animals will be here.

[thelordofhell]

15. +1,000,000

To think we matter to the world in general is the biggest hubris and curse of the human race. I wonder if the dinosaurs talked shit like this when they "ruled" the earth?

[doc03]

13. The environment has an amazing way of revitalizing

itself. I remember back in the 50s 60s and 70s the Ohio river was an open chemical dump and sewer and the only fish in it were a few bottom feeders. In just a few years after the EPA was started the river made an astonishing recovery, by 1980 the river was loaded with Largemouth, Kentucky, Smallmouth, Stripped Bass, Walleye and other game fish. We have bass tournaments every week in the Ohio.

[Uncle Joe]

21. Except the environmental catastrophes continue to grow larger along with human technological ability

to extract or exploit, so the dynamic of Earth (environment) healing it self and still being capable of supporting humanity can only go on for so long before it reaches an inevitable tipping point, were humanity; or at least a very large percentage won't be coming along for the ride anymore.

[closeupready]

14. Yes, it will absolutely recover. It will just take a very long time.

Decades.

[Duer 157099]

16. Except for the Corexit part n/t

[KittyWampus]

17. I posted about the Hudson River comeback. It takes time, effort, participation.

[Uncle Joe]

20. Fundmental differences in scope, risk and complexity.

1. Whereas Ixtoc was aproximately 160 below the surface of the ocean, human divers can dive that deep and it still took 10 months to stop it.
The current GOG is aproximately 1 mile below the surface of the water and inherently more difficult to stop.

2.The GOG is closer to the main conveyor belt of the Gulf current flow spreading it's oil over a much larger area.

3. The volume of oil released by Ixtoc with a high of 30,000 reduced to 20,000 and 10,000 barrels being a fraction of that from the GOG with anywhere from 60,000 to 100,000 or more.

4. I don't know whether Ixtoc released much if any methane, but apparently the GOG is.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x8621266

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ixtoc_I_oil_spill

Ixtoc I was an exploratory oil well being drilled by the semi-submersible drilling rig Sedco 135-F in the Bay of Campeche of the Gulf of Mexico, about 100 km (62 mi) northwest of Ciudad del Carmen, Campeche in waters 50 m (160 ft) deep.<2> On 3 June 1979, the well suffered a blowout resulting in the fourth largest oil spill and the third largest accidental spill in history.<3><4>

Volume and extent of spill

In the initial stages of the spill, an estimated 30,000 barrels of oil per day were flowing from the well. In July 1979, the pumping of mud into the well reduced the flow to 20,000 barrels per day, and early in August the pumping of nearly 100,000 steel, iron, and lead balls into the well reduced the flow to 10,000 barrels per day. Pemex claimed that half of the released oil burned when it reached the surface, a third of it evaporated, and the rest was contained or dispersed.<7> Mexican authorities also drilled two relief wells into the main well to lower the pressure of the blowout, however the oil continued to flow for three months following the completion of the first relief well.<8>



<snip>

In the next nine months, experts and divers including Red Adair were brought in to contain and cap the oil well.<7> An average of approximately ten thousand to thirty thousand barrels per day were discharged into the Gulf until it was finally capped on 23 March 1980, nearly 10 months later.<9>

Aftermath

Prevailing currents carried the oil towards the Texas coastline. The US government had two months to prepare booms to protect major inlets. Pemex spent $100 million to clean up the spill and avoided paying compensation by asserting sovereign immunity.<10>
The oil slick surrounded Rancho Nuevo, in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, which is one of the few nesting sites for Kemp's Ridley sea turtles. Thousands of baby sea turtles were airlifted to a clean portion of the Gulf of Mexico to help save the rare species.

Thanks for the thread, scheming daemons.