Ten years ago this week, a drilling rig called the Deepwater Horizon exploded 41 miles off the Louisiana coast, setting in motion the biggest oil spill in U.S. history. Eleven men lost their lives, more were injured. Defying weeks of frantic efforts by BP and the Obama administration to plug it, the damaged wellhead sitting a mile below the ship poured millions of barrels of oil into the surrounding waters, crippling valuable fisheries, destroying livelihoods, fouling 1,300 miles of shoreline from Florida to Texas and leaving many square miles of residue on the ocean floor. The disaster also revealed a culture of carelessness in both the oil industry and the federal agencies whose job it was to police that industry and to make sure it operated safely.
Some good things have happened since then. Thanks partly to nature’s resilience, within two years the oil had mostly gone from sight — evaporated, consumed by bacteria or dispersed to deep water and the ocean floor. The beaches are now largely clean, and the fishing industry has rebounded, with notable exceptions, oyster and crab stocks in particular. And the damage to deepwater corals and fragile reefs may never be repaired. Truth is, the full toll on the Gulf and its marine life may not be known for years.
By far the most positive development — promising is probably a better word — has been the steady accumulation of evidence that the most vulnerable stretch of coastline, in Louisiana, can someday be restored, or at least saved from the steady erosion that has afflicted it for years. When all is said and done, BP and its partners will have forked over well north of $50 billion in cleanup costs, settlements with individuals and businesses in Gulf Coast states and criminal penalties for damages to natural resources. Of that amount, a big chunk — $7 billion to Louisiana alone — is intended largely for environmental restoration.
Louisiana will need all of that, and more. Since the 1930s, the state has lost more than 2,000 square miles of land, about the size of Delaware, to subsidence, sea level rise and the loss of sediment that a free-flowing Mississippi once reliably deposited along the coast until the whole length of the river was hemmed in by levees built for flood control. That, along with the slicing and dicing of coastal wetlands by the oil companies, not only destroyed nurseries vital to the fishing industry but also, as Hurricane Katrina memorably demonstrated in 2005, robbed the state of natural protection against superstorms.
In response, the state in 2007 developed a 50-year, $50 billion master plan. Its most recent iteration includes an ambitious roster of projects — marsh creation, barrier island restoration, oyster shell reefs, river sediment diversions — that it hopes will neutralize land loss over the next quarter-century. Even now, the coast is bristling with ambitious engineering projects.
Inaction is not an option, David Muth recently told the Times’ John Schwartz, especially given the menace of climate change and its threat of slow but ineluctable sea level rise. Muth is Gulf restoration director for the National Wildlife Federation, which, along with the Environmental Defense Fund and the National Audubon Society, has joined with local groups to support coastal projects. Muth believes the BP money can turn things around and is happy it’s beginning to flow. But without steady progress, he says, “the sea is going to win the fight.”
The spill also triggered a long-overdue examination of the oil business and its regulators. Two major reports — one by a presidential commission in January 2011 and another one later in the year by the National Academy of Engineering and the National Research Council — found that the Deepwater Horizon explosion resulted from poor decisions by BP and its drilling partners, including a major miscalculation of the well’s ability to withstand sudden increases in pressure, as well as a misplaced faith in the ability of blowout preventers to seal off wells in an emergency. More broadly, the reports said that the industry was more interested in profits than preparedness, and that the absence of a strong safety culture was not unique to BP and its partners.
As a result, the Obama administration developed new rules for each stage of the drilling process — from rig design to spill response — including tougher standards for well design and for vital equipment like the blowout preventers. The administration also took aim at a long-standing and very cozy relationship between the oil companies and their overseers in the Interior Department. For years, safety issues had been the province of Interior’s Minerals Management Service, an agency with a dubious history of self-dealing that also collected royalties from offshore oil production, which gave it as much an interest in production as it did in responsible behavior. Recognizing a clear conflict of interest, the Obama administration broke the service into two parts, one of which would focus entirely on enforcement and environmental protection.
All well and good, until the Trump administration appointed Scott Angelle to run the Interior Department’s Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement. Angelle is an apostle of the very industry he is charged with regulating. Under his stewardship, the blowout preventer and well-control rules have been weakened, and many staff members are reportedly demoralized. Environmentally minded groups like the Center for American Progress believe that the agency is on its way to being recaptured by the oil companies.
This is all of a piece with the Trump administration’s “energy dominance” doctrine, which consists largely of doing favors to those same companies, most recently the rollback of President Barack Obama’s ambitious fuel efficiency standards. The oil companies, in fact, have done very well in the decade since the spill, and until the recent price drop, and the crimp the coronavirus has put in driving, stood to do even better; the Interior Department’s latest five-year plan, now on hold because of court rulings, would open nearly every square inch of America’s coastal waters to new exploration.
Therein lies one of the nasty little ironies facing the friends of coastal restoration. So far, their only dependable financing model has been the revenue from the catastrophic spill, but the BP money won’t last forever. One thing the state had been counting on is a steady stream of money from offshore oil leases under a 2006 revenue-sharing law passed by Congress. Which implies a robust oil industry, which in turn means more risk of offshore spills and more emissions of climate-forcing emissions from automobile tailpipes, which in turn means more sea level rise.
One more argument, if any were needed, to wean the country off a carbon-based economy.
c.2020 The New York Times Company
