Oil gushes endlessly as hurricane season nears

By Will Parry

As these words are written, oil from BP’s Deepwater Horizon spill continues for the 35th day to gush out of the sea floor into the Gulf of Mexico at a rate estimated by scientists at from 56,000 to 84,000 barrels a day.

The flow has been continuous, night and day, since April 20, and neither BP nor anyone else knows for sure when the leak will be capped and the gushing checked.

Now hurricane season is at hand, and weather scientists are predicting a season worse than usual. The effect of hurricanes under these circumstances is simply unknown. There is no record of a hurricane having crossed paths with an oil spill.

Already, the Deepwater Horizon spill is the largest on record, bigger even than the 1999 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska. It’s bigger, and it’s much more destructive. The Exxon Valdez spill coated mostly rocky coastline. This one is already invading a spongelike coast, entering the pores of mangrove forests and sea-grass beds and the breeding grounds for crabs, shrimps and oysters.

Birds are imperiled as well. The coastal wetlands are a refuge for migrating geese and ducks and for hundreds of songbirds. Pelicans are especially vulnerable, at risk of eating tainted fish and feeding it to their young. Soaked in oil, they drown or die of hypothermia.

Oil disasters don’t just kill birds. This one took the lives of eleven men, and another 17 were seriously injured, facts that tend to be buried in the flood of media coverage and conjecture that gushes out endlessly, like the oil itself. Memorial services for the eleven were conducted May 24 in Jackson, Mississippi.

Survivors describe a scene from hell. Steven Davis, 36, was flung against a wall by the powerful explosion. He saw screaming workers sliding through mud, searching for their assigned lifeboats. Exploding reserves of helicopter fuel and diesel created a blazing inferno. Davis escaped by jumping 60 feet into the water, where he was pulled into a lifeboat.