After hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the nation's
attention rightly was focused on the human misery unfolding along the Louisiana and Mississippi Gulf Coast.
Barely
noticed was a rash of oil spills whose cumulative effect rivaled the 1989 Exxon
Valdez disaster in Alaska. Katrina's and Rita's winds and waves
wrecked drilling platforms, ruptured pipelines and yanked 2-million-gallon
storage tanks off their foundations. More than 9 million gallons of oil
spilled.
The damage
illustrates the inherent risks of offshore oil production, which now is likely
to move 100 miles closer to Florida's west coast if drilling bans are
lifted. Hundreds of oil rigs could be constructed in an area certain to be
buffeted by hurricanes and close by a coast suffering pollution-related maladies
such as red tide and coral die-offs. 'We're looking at putting hundreds of
drilling rigs in the middle of a hurricane highway,' said Mark Ferrulo, director
of the Florida Public Interest Research
Group, a nonprofit environmental
organization.
Congressional opposition to new offshore drilling has
melted in the face of rising gas prices and an increasingly tenuous supply of
oil from the Middle East. This month, the U.S.
Senate approved opening an 8.3-million-acre lease area in the eastern Gulf known
as Area 181. The move would bring rigs to within 213 miles of Tampa Bay and 125 miles of the Florida
Panhandle.
A House
bill would go much further, allowing offshore drilling within 50 miles of
coastal states. The two houses will hash out their differences after Congress
reconvenes Sept. 6. Florida's political leaders have said they will only accept
the Senate plan to open drilling in Area 181, and that plan seems the most
likely to be passed.
How
concerned should Florida's west coast residents
be?
Most of the
oil spilled by Katrina and Rita occurred at onshore storage facilities, a
scenario unlikely to occur in refinery-free Florida. And though there always is some
spillage when drilling platforms and underwater pipelines are damaged, those
spills have been relatively modest because of advances in deepwater drilling
technology.
Still,
environmental groups say expanding the amount of drilling in a hurricane-prone
area is risky. Making it more worrisome are predictions by weather scientists
that hurricanes are growing more powerful and frequent because of warming ocean
waters.
Last year
hurricanes Katrina and Rita destroyed 113 oil platforms and damaged 457
pipelines, according to the Minerals Management Service, the federal agency that
regulates offshore oil production.
The agency
reported 124 spills totaling 741,000 gallons of petroleum from offshore rigs,
platforms and pipelines.
Oil
companies say several thousand drilling platforms survived Katrina and Rita
without spills. That's a tribute, they say, to the industry's continued
investment in safety. Though there were spills, they were relatively small and
dispersed harmlessly into Gulf waters, industry officials say. 'They resulted in
no long-term environmental damage,' said Tim Sampson, coordinator of drilling
and production operations for the American Petroleum
Institute.
That
assessment is debatable. Scientists say some of the oil evaporates, but the
remainder forms little tarlike balls that fall to the bottom of the Gulf and can
be toxic to aquatic life. 'If it washes up on the beach, it's very noticeable,'
said Wilton Sturges, a retired professor of oceanography at Florida State University. 'If it doesn't wash up on the
beach, that doesn't mean the angels took it away. It's still there. It's just
mixed up in the water.' One of the larger spills last year occurred when a
double-hulled tanker barge hit a submerged oil platform toppled by Hurricane
Rita. A gash in the barge's hull emptied 3 million gallons of fuel oil into the
water, according to federal agencies.
Katrina
also wrecked oil storage facilities onshore, causing several large spills that
accounted for more than half the total oil spilled.
Louisiana's
Department of Environmental Quality is working with other state and federal
agencies to assess the damage done to natural resources by the spills. The
analysis could take an additional year or more, said Chris Piehler, a senior
environmental scientist with the state DEQ. Piehler said he expects to find
wildlife covered with oil and damage to inland waters and marshes. 'It may
represent one of the largest oil spill events that we've seen in coastal
Louisiana,'
Piehler said. 'It was easily the most widespread and largest impact on a
square-miles basis than any we've seen.' In the past 10 years, eight hurricanes
and 11 tropical storms have passed through or near the area where oil companies
and Congress want to put hundreds of drilling platforms.
The most
powerful storm during that period was Hurricane Ivan, with top wind speeds of
145 mph and a 16-foot storm surge. Katrina, which passed to the west of the
proposed drilling area, had top wind speeds of 140 mph and a storm surge
estimated at 25 to 35 feet.
Supporters
of drilling in the eastern Gulf say the hundreds of miles that buffer Florida from the new
lease area will provide a measure of protection against a catastrophic spill.
And since most of the refineries in the Gulf region are in Louisiana and Texas,
pipelines that funnel the oil onshore and oil tanker traffic probably will head
toward those states, not Florida.
Distance,
however, isn't the only variable in how spilled oil might travel in the Gulf. At
least as important are winds and currents.
Scientists
say the west coast of Florida, though closer to the proposed drilling area, is
fairly safe from large oil spills because it has a wide, shallow continental
shelf that keeps Gulf currents about 60 miles from
shore.
The Florida
Keys and the east coast are more likely to be victimized by a spill in the
proposed drilling area because of powerful loop currents that enter the Gulf
from the Caribbean between Cuba and the Yucatan Peninsula. The currents, pushing waters at
up to 4 knots, travel to the north-central Gulf before looping around to the
south toward Cuba. They then head east through the
Straits of Florida and up along the east coast.
'Anything spilled in the water in the eastern Gulf can very rapidly make its way
to the Florida Keys and the east coast of Florida,' said Robert Weisberg, a
professor of physical oceanography at the University of South
Florida.
Oil
companies concede there are risks in offshore oil production, but they say
technological advances have reduced the dangers. An example that came into play
after Katrina and Rita, they say, was a safety valve that automatically shuts
off an oil well if the drilling platform is
toppled.
Plus,
government regulators require all drilling operations to have plans that detail
how they will corral an oil spill after a storm, said Chris Oynes, director of
the Minerals Management Service, Gulf of Mexico
region.
The agency
has 55 inspectors who fly out every day to check on drilling operations. The
agency also inspects equipment used by contractors to clean oil
spills.
Oynes said
the agency's close oversight is the reason spills from drilling platforms during
Katrina and Rita were relatively small.
Altogether,
more than 700,000 gallons of oil leaked from drilling platforms damaged by
Katrina and Rita. These spills were deemed inconsequential by Oynes and by the
Coast Guard.
Yet an oil
well spill of just 200,000 gallons off Santa Barbara, Calif., in 1969, is considered a watershed
event that produced revolutionary changes in safety technology. The Santa Barbara spill created a slick 800 miles long and
oiled 35 miles of California
beaches.
Critics say
too many oil spills are due to negligence, poor maintenance and oil companies'
reluctance to spend enough money on the best safety technology. This argument
was validated, they say, by the recent forced shutdown of BP's pipeline at
Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. Corrosion in the 16-mile stretch of
pipe went unnoticed because of a buildup of sludge. The pipes had not been
cleaned since 1992.
The
shutdown came just five months after up to 267,000 gallons of oil poured from a
corroded pipe at Prudhoe Bay. The pipe leaked
for five days before BP employees discovered it.
John Amos, a former oil
industry consultant, said he thinks government regulators and oil companies
downplayed last year's hurricane-related spills to soften resistance to a new
offshore drilling area. The organization Amos founded, SkyTruth, has dozens of
satellite photos on its Web site showing oil slicks snaking away from drilling
platforms overturned by Katrina and Rita. 'Before we move forward with a bunch
more drilling,' Amos said, 'I think we better ask a lot more questions about
what really happened after Katrina and Rita.' Researchers Buddy Jaudon, Melanie
Coon and Catherine Hammer and reporter Neil Johnson contributed to this article.
