Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Rapidly Expands

As I watch the Deepwater Horizon disaster unfold, my mind keeps going back to a Senate hearing last autumn in which Mary Landrieu angrily chastised experts on oil drilling who were testifying about the risks inherent in expanding offshore oil drilling. Those experts referred to the just-resolved Timor Sea Montara well head blowout, which resulted in oil pouring into the ocean from a technologically-advanced drilling rig for 74 days, while repeated attempts to seal the leak failed.

Senator Landrieu said it couldn’t happen here. She suggested that we Americans know how to handle oil spills much better than the Australians who had so profoundly screwed up in the Timor Sea.

Just six months later, the Deepwater Horizon has provided us with certain proof that Mary Landrieu is wrong. What happened in the Timor Sea can happen here. It may be happening right now.

Remember all those oil spill drills that were held a month ago? They were meant to prove that we had nothing to fear from Sarah Palin and Barack Obama’s plan to expand offshore drilling up and down the coasts of the United States. Under highly controlled conditions, the drill teams released oil, and then, by gum, they were able to contain it.

Real world conditions have been quite different. In less than one day, the surface portion of the oil spill rising from the burnt out, sunken wreck of the Deepwater Horizon has expanded from 20 square miles to 600 square miles. That’s in spite of huge amounts of contaminated water that has already been collected, and massive amounts of toxic dispersants have been sprayed out onto the water that remains. Even more oil is still underwater, rising up at the rate of 1,000 barrels per day. Teams of vessels attempting to contain the growing spill have been shockingly ineffective, unable to deal with weather conditions. For most of Sunday, the boats couldn’t even leave port.

Already, as with the Timor Sea incident, several attempts to stop the Deepwater Horizon disaster have failed. Most recently, unmanned submersible robots attempting to activate the blowout preventer on the well head were unable to complete the task.

A spokesman from BP (British Petroleum), the oil company responsible for the catastrophe, said yesterday that if the effort to activate the blowout preventer failed, relief wells would need to be drilled nearby, and that strategy could take three months to stop the oil leak.

In just a little more than one month, it’s the start of the hurricane season.

Perhaps BP or the Coast Guard will come up with an alternative solution before then. Perhaps the oil leak will for some reason plug itself. Perhaps the disaster won’t be on the scale of the months-long oil spill on the Timor Sea.

We don’t know what the future holds, but we now know this: That the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling pollution could easily go on for as long as what we saw last year in the Timor Sea. It can happen here, and if we decide to expand offshore drilling up and down our coasts, it greatly increases the chances that it will happen – and not just once.