In terms of damage done, how does the current oil spill compare to the Valdez? I guess right now we can only count sea-life, as the oil spill hasn’t reached land yet. But if it does, I wonder if it will be as bad for the Gulf of Mexico as the Valdez was for Alaska.
The damage wrought by the Exxon Valdez was considered incalculable, because who could put a price on the damage wrought to one of the Earth’s most pristine environments? That damage has never been fully measured, or understood.
This disaster should also rightly be considered incalculable. We lack the science to even grasp the breadth of what can be lost when an entire regional ecosystem is smothered to death. The last report was 210,000 gallons every day spewed into the Gulf.
But this enormous oops will not just finish off the stressed ecosystem of the Northern Gulf of Mexico, it will result in…
Actual, calculable misery to hordes of real humans. All those cultures and mini-economies that relied on the soon-to-be dead ecosystems that border the gulf are about to be destitute.
The lawsuits against British Petroleum have already been filed. It is conceivable that BP may not weather this storm. Would the demise of BP even begin to right the enormous wrong?
There will be many calculations that attempt to summarize the breadth of this tragedy in terms of dollars and numbers of displaced people. Those calculations will be correct, but they will fail to account for the fact that that several entire bioregions have been putrefied.
Cite? The Times reports “Rear Adm. Mary E. Landry of the Coast Guard said a scientist from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had concluded that oil is leaking at the rate of 5,000 barrels a day, not 1,000 as had been estimated.” The article Here indicates that the slick seems to be a lot thinner than the Exxon Valdez slick.
5,000 barrels of oil is over 200,000 gallons - First Google Result for 5,000 barrels of oil.
There is also the apples/oranges bit. Valdez spill was ‘thick/heavy’ crude, while the BP spill is ‘sweet’ crude, much thinner, so to speak. It dissipates quicker, but is still horrible no matter what density it has. I am sure that I did not use the correct terminology, but the product that is leaking is not quite the same as Valdez’s.
This is also “adding insult to injury”, as the gulf coast is still struggling to survive post-Katrina.
The biggest difference is that the Exxon Valdez disaster, as horrible as it was, was oil from one tanker. This disaster involves an open-ended amount of oil released from the gulf’s floor. If they had been able to stop the flow a comparison might be made, but so far they can’t stop it. If this continues, any measurement in “barrels” would be inadequate. There is simply no end in sight.
I stand corrected. Ignorance fought!
At first I was thinking that the Valdez was worse because of all the penguins and other such creatures who lived on the beach getting oil on them, but then I thought about all the sea creatures in the current spill which not only effects them, but also people who fish or in other ways make their living from the sea.
But I guess the final analysis will be made after the leak stops and the oil spill is contained.
A lovely horror scenario out today:
I’ve yet to find any discussion of the effect of the spill on the gulf dead zone.
Has the algae already bloomed? If not, will the oil prevent that, and allow nutrients to spill into a larger than normal portion of the gulf?
There are no penguins in the wild in the Northern Hemisphere, save one species and those are near the equator.
Maybe I was thinking of seals or sea-lions. It’s been a long time.
I have no cite, but I heard on the local news that the over all number of gallons of oil is estimated to be over 100 times that of the Valdez. approxmately 140 million gallons compared to 11 million.
If I recall, they also said that the light oil will do more damage on land than the heavier, because more of it will reach land.
The Valdez was a boat with a certain capacity. They knew how much it held.
This one is spewing oil about 1 mile down under pressure. Nobody knows how much is there but it seems enormous. The guesses are made from cameras in orbit. Not very precise. It is all estimated.
Earlier in the news I heard that in a week it could be worse than the Valdez.
I am a biologist who has worked oil spills in the past, although not for more than 25 years. This spill will be bad. I have seen no toxicity data on this oil, but the lighter oil will be more toxic, probably, than the heavy stuff, at least over the short term. However, most of the damage from oil spills is not from the toxicity, it is from things getting oil on them and coated. The biggest oil spill ever was in the Gulf, the Ixtoc spill in Mexico. It hammered gulf beaches all the way to Mississippi, and even Florida felt some of the effects. One thing to remember about oil is that it breaks down through bacterial action, and in sand there are lots of bacteria to break it down. But in Alaska, temperatures are not conducive to bacterial breakdown of the oil, so it stayed around and was problematic for a very long time. There will be heavier and lighter portions of this oil spill, and the heavier portions will take longer to break down, but the Gulf coast is mostly sand and fine sediments, and not rock. Which makes a difference, because the sand will mix with the oil, (or the other way around). Most of this oil will break down after a relatively (less than a year, anyway) but there will be chunks of the heavier portions around for a long time, the heaviest pieces floating in as tarballs for decades or longer. About half the tarballs on the Gulf beaches are from natural seeps; there is a lot of natural oil escapage in the Gulf. The pre-columbian native americans used to bury their dead with tarballs, for some unknown reason. This spill will add to the human-origin half, but there won’t be any major environmental damage from those tarballs. The damage will come this year and early next. A lot of birds will die. I worry about the sea turtles and marine mammals too. The fish won’t be hurt much, probably, unless this is a particularly toxic spill. They might pick up a bit more PAH than usual, but it won’t be that toxic to them, and most of those PAH will be metabolized and excreted with only slight effects. There will be some exceptions, where fish are trapped in mostly oil, but not amount to much in the bigger scheme of things. If the oil penetrates heavily past the barrier islands, there will be substantial loss of oysters and crabs, especially if tides (which are not substantially lunar-driven in the Gulf, but based on wind speed and direction, and barometric pressure plays a part, I’m told) cause normally subsurface areas to be exposed.
And hey, tarballs can be fun. They are flammable as all getout. My neighbor was camping out on the beach with all his fireman buddies, with a big bonfire, of course, as firemen are wont to enjoy. So this hard tarball about the size of half a volkswagon floats up, and they decide to roll it up and throw it on the fire. I was tooling up the beach in my truck from the 4WD area, and I see flames shooting 40 feet in the air. WTF??? I pull up and my neighbor and his buds are dancing around the fire like a bunch of demons in hell. Woohoo. Hot times in South Texas!
And still is. Scrape away the surface material on those shores and you quickly find that all that goo is still there.
The economic impact is expected to be pretty huge. The investor analysis linked to here estimates that the total cost of repairing the damages will range between tens of billions and hundreds of billions, a large proportion of which will have to be covered by the government through deficit spending.
It will particularly affect the economies of the Gulf states, adding an increase to unemployment and loan defaults and damaging economic growth. It will damage the seafood industry, for instance, where Louisiana alone provides 40% of US-caught seafood. The investor group who drew up the analysis actually thinks that the disaster has made a double-dip recession more likely.
To expand, there are 42 gallons in a barrel.