Louisiana Coast Braces for Oil Slick Landfall

For the past few days, northern winds have kept the Gulf of Mexico oil slick from crashing into the beaches and wetlands of Louisiana. Last night, our luck ran out.

Oh, and another cheery bit of news: it looks like the oil is actually leaking at a rate of 5,000 barrels a day, fives times faster than the initial estimate. At that pace, it will now take the Deepwater Horizon spill only a couple of months to one-up the Exxon-Valdez disaster.

Attempts to use robots to turn off the well at the source - 5,000 feet below water, on the ocean floor - are going nowhere, so we’ll be waiting at least half that time before BP can deploy a dome to catch the leaking oil as it rises to the surface. While this trick has worked before, it has never been attempted in deep water. If that fails, we’re looking at 2 to 3 long months for oil rigs to plug the leak with mud and concrete.

There is, however, a key difference between the Deepwater Horizon and the Exxon-Valdez. The Gulf of Mexico is, surprisingly, even more ecologically vulnerable than the Alaskan coast. The Gulf is one of the most productive fish and wildlife habitats in the world. Affected wildlife include sperm wales, marine birds, and oysters. (In all, around 400 species are at risk.)

In fact, the timing could not be any worse: It’s peak nesting and migration season for hundreds of the Gulf’s species. Blue-fin tuna are spawning as you read this. Endangered sea turtles are burying their eggs into beaches that will soon be coated with crude. For the next two weeks, upwards of 25 million tropical birds will fly over the Gulf. Many will make pit stops on the Louisiana coast.

The debate about what this unfolding tragedy will mean for offshore drilling is just getting started.

Since day one, BP and the Coast Guard have been attempting to contain the slick by corralling it with booms, skimming it with boats, and spraying chemical dispersants on it with planes. With the slick now 40 miles wide by 80 miles long (and growing), this strategy now appears to be painfully limited.

So as the slick widens and thrashes toward the shore, the Coast Guard has turned to a startling last-ditch trick: They're lighting it on fire. That’s right, burning thousands of gallons of oil has become our best option.

While flashy, this scorched-seas tactic probably won’t do much: the oil will only burn if you can get it to a certain thickness, and 97% of the spill is a mixture of oil and water. So coastal states are now scrambling to deploy booms along vulnerable coastal areas. There is talk of using shrimp boats to skim the oil as it reaches shallow waters and to use cannons to scare the birds away.

We can only hope this blunts the coming blow. There aren’t enough booms and shrimp boats on this earth to insulate those hundreds of miles of coastline.

Photo credit: Unified Command Center