The wrong response
Most of the media focus on the Gulf oil spill has been on the oil that is coming ashore. It is a disaster, to wildlife and to local economies that depend on tourists drawn to formerly pristine beaches and clear water. These effects won’t be easily overcome.
According to Dr. Bob Shipp, head of Marine Sciences at the University of South Alabama, the greater long-term effects may be felt by what we can’t see.
Shipp, a marine biologist and recent appointee to the Alabama Conservation Advisory Board that will be developing the state’s response to the spill, spoke to the Alabama Press Association in Orange Beach, and what he had to say was not encouraging.
We’ve heard little to nothing about sargassum, the free-floating mats of seaweed that provide crucial habitat and nutrition for a wide variety of marine animals in the open ocean. According to Shipp, almost all of the highly migratory species such as mahi mahi, billfish and tunas depend on the sargassum beds, which serve as a nursery for those species. These fragile mats of vegetation float below the surface, where the oil is settling, aided by the dispersants applied on the surface.
Shipp told the APA group that he and other marine scientists feel that applying dispersants is the wrong thing to do for several reasons. One is the uncertainty about what is in some of these dispersants and how toxic they will be to marine life. The other is that when the oil is dispersed on the surface, it sinks to the bottom where it cannot be burned or more easily collected.
“We don’t want the oil down in the water column or on the bottom where it gets into the sediments and starts traveling through the food chain. There are so many unknowns regarding the composition of dispersants. When the oil is on the surface some of it evaporates. That’s not going to happen if it’s under water.”
So why would BP continue applying dispersants against the consensus of scientists who warn of the dangers of doing so? Shipp believes it is all about public relations efforts on the part of BP. From the beginning the company was minimizing the amount of oil being leaked and the damage being inflicted. If the oil could be broken up on the surface so less would reach land, it really would seem like less. Out of sight; out of mind.
If the well is not capped until August, which almost seems optimistic the way efforts have failed thus far, Shipp feels that most of the Gulf will be closed to fishing. And that may last much longer than just this year.
We have learned from this that companies like BP can’t be trusted to be responsible, and if they are allowed to engage in dangerous activities like deep water drilling, they need close and constant oversight and stringent safety requirements. We can only hope that we haven’t re-learned this lesson too late for future generations to be able to enjoy what we once took for granted.
