A Sea in Flames: The Deepwater Horizon Oil Blowout

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‘A Sea in Flames: The Deepwater Horizon Oil Blowout’

By CARL SAFINA
Reviewed by GREGG EASTERBROOK

A report from a marine ecologist who scrutinized the Deepwater Horizons oil rig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

An Ecologist’s Surprising Assessment of the BP Spill

Chris Graythen/Getty Images

The Gulf of Mexico off New Orleans, April 28, 2010.

By GREGG EASTERBROOK

Published: April 22, 2011

In April 2010, an explosion aboard the BP drill rig Deepwater Horizon killed 11 workers and caused the worst oil spill ever in American waters. Initially, government officials and BP officers denied the situation was serious. As details of the spill volume, and of damage to Gulf of Mexico fisheries, became known, panic set in. President Obama called the spill “the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced”; Rush Limbaugh said the event was “Obama’s Hurricane Katrina”; Brian Williams asked on “NBC Nightly News” if the spill would “give off oil unfettered for the rest of our lives on Earth.”

Carl Safina on BP Oil Spill Anniversary & "A Sea in ... 14분 - 4일 전 - 업로더: mediagrrl9 DemocracyNow.org - Today marks the one-year anniversary of the worst maritime oil spill in US history. Last year on April 20, the ... youtube.com

A SEA IN FLAMES

The Deepwater Horizon Oil Blowout

By Carl Safina

Illustrated. 352 pp. Crown Publishers. $25.

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• Times Topic: Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill (2010)

During the panic period, Carl Safina, a renowned marine ecologist, spent several weeks near, on and above the gulf, inspecting the harm, talking to locals and wondering about the government and corporate response. The result is “A Sea in Flames,” an impressive book that provides a vivid account of how the spill happened, coupled with a report on the anxiety experienced by those who had no way of knowing how long the spill would last or how bad it would get. The book should be read in conjunction with “Deep Water,” the recent presidential commission report on the spill — a work supervised by William Reilly, former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and one of the country’s most credible environmentalists. Combined, the commission report and “A Sea in Flames” offer a revealing, thoughtful history of a moment when human manipulation of nature malfunctioned spectacularly.

Much of Safina’s book recounts the worst-case assumptions common in the early weeks of the spill — that huge areas of the gulf would be rendered lifeless, that “dozens of vulnerable fish species” might fall extinct, that toxic dispersants used by BP to reduce the visual shock value of the spill might do more harm than the petroleum, that government was supine while BP relentlessly lied about the spill volume. “Oil companies basically own the whole gulf region,” Safina writes, viewing American addiction to petroleum, indifference to greenhouse gases and political genuflection to the oil lobby as more disturbing than the failure of supposedly foolproof devices to prevent the blowout.

Lax federal regulation, BP’s obsession with profit over safety, and management arrogance led, Safina writes, to a “chain disaster” in which several problems, none of which alone would have been fatal, amplified one another. In his book “Normal Accidents,” the sociologist Charles Perrow argued that when complex technology meets large corporate and government hierarchies, lack of accountability will lead inexorably to destructive failures of systems that might have been operated safely. The gulf oil spill surely was that.

“A Sea in Flames” is written in a clear, conversational style. There is considerable detail but no daunting techno-­babble: readers will find the book accessible and agreeable. Safina relates a bit more than perhaps necessary about what he heard on the radio while driving around the Gulf Coast, and repeatedly relies on anonymous quotations, for no apparent reason. He will quote “a certain tugboat captain” or “a New Orleans businessman who loves the bayou” without any hint of why their names should be withheld. Readers might be suspicious: if the author interviewed these people, why doesn’t he mention their names? Safina attaches considerable significance to George W. Bush’s attempt to suppress global warming science (this subject is a standby of Al Gore talks) without noting (neither does Gore) that the hush-up failed. In 2006, the federal Climate Change Science Program, under Bush, declared “clear evidence of human influences on the climate system.”

These minor faults aside, “A Sea in Flames” is an insightful work. Safina zaps Sarah Palin for calling BP “foreign” — her husband, Todd, worked for BP for years — and for her loopy implication that Alaska would welcome another oil spill. He documents the weirdness of BP’s posting private guards who closed off public beaches to keep journalists and witnesses away; local, state and federal authorities did nothing. “The flow BP is getting good at stopping is the flow of news,” Safina observes. He blasts Congress for demanding cheap oil, no questions asked; lauds Obama for twisting BP’s arm to put $20 billion into a compensation fund (the company’s liability limit was lower, and ExxonMobil stalled the final Exxon Valdez payments for an incredible 19 years); laments that people who tried to observe soiled beaches were threatened with arrest, while no one from BP was charged with any crime; and, though sympathetic to local fishermen, acknowledges that many fakers demanded compensation they did not deserve.

“A Sea in Flames” makes considerable sport of Adm. Thad Allen of the Coast Guard — whose early role appeared to be to say, “Aye, aye, sir!” to BP — and of the Frick and Frack of the gulf follies, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Jane Lubchenco, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Salazar had been in office more than a year before the spill but failed to notice that having the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service (since disbanded) both encourage offshore oil production and certify its safety was a perilous conflict. Lubchenco, a prominent environmental pessimist when outside government, became an apologist once inside: Safina has fun with her denying there were oil “plumes,” insisting instead that only “anomalies” existed. Salazar and Lubchenco both graduated from landlocked Colorado College, a top liberal arts school but, a thousand miles from seawater, perhaps ill suited to prepare them for April 2010.

As “A Sea in Flames” progresses, its author undergoes several conversions. Expecting to find evidence of terrible harm to the gulf biosphere, instead he finds only mild problems. Expecting to discover that the dispersants caused widespread marine death, instead he discovers that by breaking up crude, these chemicals speeded the oil’s natural decomposition. After Allen and Lubchenco grant him an interview, Safina switches ground and decides they are not as bad as he thought.

By the end, Safina is nearly a contrarian. Fertilizer runoff from the Mississippi, he concludes, causes the gulf more harm than did BP, while the fishing ban that went into force just after the spill might have helped marine wildlife more than the oil hurt it. Is gasoline always bad? “A whale might think, ‘Thank God for petroleum,’ ” Safina writes; the end of demand for whale oil saved some whale species. Government officials may have sugarcoated the situation, the author supposes, but the Deepwater Horizon spill just did not do much environmental harm.

Safina concludes that greenhouse gases from routine fossil fuel use — “That spill is invisible” — are far more worrisome than what happened in the gulf. He asserts that true market pricing of gasoline to reflect its cost in atmospheric harm — that is, a carbon tax — would be a better response to the gulf spill than cleaning birds.

What “normal accident” is next? Safina notes there is almost no regulation of the new technique by which drillers fracture geologic formations to reach natural gas, then inject large volumes of toxic “proppants” to hold fractures open. Surely the proppants won’t seep into groundwater. Surely the artificial fractures won’t play a role in seismic activity. After all, deep­water drilling was perfectly safe.

Gregg Easterbrook’s most recent book is “Sonic Boom.” He writes a politics column for Reuters and a sports column for ESPN.

A version of this review appeared in print on April 24, 2011, on page BR12 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: State of Petroshock.

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