It is already settled history that British Petroleum’s oil-well catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico has caused the worst oil spill in the nation’s history. Given the failure of BP’s top-kill attempt to suppress the uncontrolled gusher, the more compelling issue now is how much worse the disaster will become, especially in the shadow of the pending hurricane season.
If a hurricane just half the strength of Katrina strikes again along the same path, the worst-case scenario for environmental consequences could rise by an order of magnitude. That’s not idle speculation.
Indeed, if BP’s latest containment strategy fails, officials say it may be August before the planned relief wells can be drilled and used to defuse the gusher. In that period, a hurricane’s power could launch vast waves of oil-laden ocean over containment booms, coating the Gulf’s rich fisheries and estuaries, barrier islands and beaches, with a toxic oily coating that could endure in fragile aquatic environments for decades. That daunting risk is confirmed by the oil that yet remains in Alaska’s Prince William Sound from the 1989 spill from the Exxon Valdeez, the previous worst oil-spill in U.S. waters.
BP’s latest plan — its fifth — to plug the deep-water-well necessarily must be more dicey that its previous efforts. Otherwise it already would have been tried. It calls for a last-ditch effort to tame the blow-out by cutting off the riser tube — the 21-inch pipe that carries oil from the well to the crippled blow-out preventer module on the ocean floor — and placing it under a new containment dome. Pipes then would be inserted into the new dome to funnel most, but not all, of the gushing oil into lines to surface tankers.
At its best, the strategy would leave the completely open riser pipe uncontrolled for several days before a new dome could be lowered over it. Given the icy waters and technical difficulties that caused the previous at dome replacement strategy to fail, the risks remain enormous. As Carol Browner, the Obama administration’s energy policy adviser said Sunday, the administration is preparing for the worst.
Thankfully, the administration at last seems to have ramped up its disaster response efforts to a full-bore effort. It has put more than 20,000 personnel on around-the-clock clean-up and containment work. And since BP’s reckless operational decisions before the blow-out have been revealed, the Obama team has launched an all-out investigation into criminal and civil liability.
The administration said Tuesday it is now studying the far-broader picture of how the oil industry’s drilling and safety operations have been authorized and monitored. It’s no secret that the previous administrations and federal agencies have, for decades, allowed the oil industry virtual carte blanche control of their operations. In the hindsight of the current crisis, the paucity of regulatory and safety rules and checks seems appalling.
President Obama on Tuesday rightly promised stiff new regulatory and safety standards. He also reinforced a broad six-month moratorium on drilling permits pending a comprehensive review by a newly established National Commission on what went wrong and how the industry, and government authority, can be corrected to prevent such a disaster from happening again.
The glaring issue remains why such standards were not already in place, and why it took such a disaster to make the need for them apparent. That question is now a haunting refrain to Republicans’ last election chorus of “drill, baby, drill.”