In April 2010, an explosion aboard the BP drill rig Deepwater Horizon killed 11 workers and caused the worst oil spill ever in American waters. Initially, government officials and BP officers denied the situation was serious. As details of the spill volume, and of damage to Gulf of Mexico fisheries, became known, panic set in. President Obama called the spill “the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced”.
During the panic period, Carl Safina, a renowned marine ecologist, spent several weeks near, on and above the gulf, inspecting the harm, talking to locals and wondering about the government and corporate response. The result is A Sea in Flames, an impressive book that provides a vivid account of how the spill happened, coupled with a report on the anxiety experienced by those who had no way of knowing how long the spill would last or how bad it would get. The book should be read in conjunction with Deep Water, the recent presidential commission report on the spill — a work supervised by William Reilly, former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and one of the country’s most credible environmentalists. Combined, the commission report and A Sea in Flames offer a revealing, thoughtful history of a moment when human manipulation of nature malfunctioned spectacularly.
Much of Safina’s book recounts the worst-case assumptions common in the early weeks of the spill — that huge areas of the gulf would be rendered lifeless, that “dozens of vulnerable fish species” might fall extinct, that toxic dispersants used by BP to reduce the visual shock value of the spill might do more harm than the petroleum, that government was supine while BP relentlessly lied about the spill volume. Lax federal regulation, BP’s obsession with profit over safety, and management arrogance led, Safina writes, to a “chain disaster” in which several problems, none of which alone would have been fatal, amplified one another.
A Sea in Flames is written in a clear, conversational style. There is considerable detail but no daunting techno-babble: readers will find the book accessible and agreeable. Safina relates a bit more than perhaps necessary about what he heard on the radio while driving around the Gulf Coast, and repeatedly relies on anonymous quotations, for no apparent reason. He will quote “a certain tugboat captain” or “a New Orleans businessman who loves the bayou” without any hint of why their names should be withheld.
These minor faults aside, A Sea in Flames is an insightful work. Safina zaps Sarah Palin for calling BP “foreign” – her husband, Todd, worked for BP for years – and for her loopy implication that Alaska would welcome another oil spill. He documents the weirdness of BP posting private guards who closed off public beaches to keep journalists and witnesses away; local, state and federal authorities did nothing. “The flow BP is getting good at stopping is the flow of news,” Safina observes. He blasts Congress for demanding cheap oil, no questions asked; lauds Obama for twisting BP’s arm to put $20 billion into a compensation fund (the company’s liability limit was lower, and ExxonMobil stalled the final Exxon Valdez payments for an incredible 19 years); laments that people who tried to observe soiled beaches were threatened with arrest, while no one from BP was charged with any crime; and, though sympathetic to local fishermen, acknowledges that many fakers demanded compensation they did not deserve.
As “A Sea in Flames” progresses, its author undergoes several conversions. Expecting to find evidence of terrible harm to the gulf biosphere, instead he finds only mild problems. Expecting to discover that the dispersants caused widespread marine death, instead he discovers that by breaking up crude, these chemicals speeded the oil’s natural decomposition.
By the end, Safina is nearly a contrarian. Fertiliser runoff from the Mississippi, he concludes, causes the gulf more harm than did BP, while the fishing ban that went into force just after the spill might have helped marine wildlife more than the oil hurt it. Government officials may have sugarcoated the situation, the author supposes, but the Deepwater Horizon spill just did not do much environmental harm.
Safina concludes that greenhouse gases from routine fossil fuel use – “That spill is invisible” – are far more worrisome than what happened in the gulf. He asserts that true market pricing of gasoline to reflect its cost in atmospheric harm – that is, a carbon tax – would be a better response to the gulf spill than cleaning birds.
What “normal accident” is next? Safina notes there is almost no regulation of the new technique by which drillers fracture geologic formations to reach natural gas, then inject large volumes of toxic “proppants” to hold fractures open. Surely the proppants won’t seep into groundwater. Surely the artificial fractures won’t play a role in seismic activity. After all, deepwater drilling was perfectly safe.
A SEA IN FLAMES
The Deepwater Horizon
Oil Blowout
Carl Safina
Crown Publishers.
Illustrated. 352 pp; $25
The New York Times
