Long term implications?

Greater cancer rates in the human population in the states that border the gulf coast as the cancer causing chemicals (aromatic hydrocarbons etc) make their way up the food chain over a period of 1-10 years. The natural environment will recover to some extent but can take around 20 years if left to its own devices. The oil release won't help recovery of the dead zone found previously around the Mississippi delta in the Gulf due to the long term agrochemicals pollution, it will just increase the size of the dead zone.

NASA satellite photo of the Gulf Coast Dead Zone

I really feel for these fishermen who have been hired out by BP to run out all these booms and to do other clean up activities. Their physical health (in addition to the economic situation) could be negatively affected, the same way that many workers at Ground Zero have been affected. Depending on what BP eventually pays up, the people whose livelihoods depend on the sea could get a double whammy of economic and medical disaster. I don't think most folks realize how hazardous crude oil can be, and I don't think these guys are really given any special protection, at least not that I've seen on TV so far.

Of course, there's the hit to the seafood industry and all the knock on effects to employment, tax revenue, etc. Tourism will take a hit if the beaches are fouled.

I also wonder if the oil could further diminish the marshes protecting New Orleans from another Katrina-like event. The wetlands have already been shrinking significantly for a long time. I know there have been efforts to rejuvenate them after Katrina, but maybe all that effort will be destroyed by the slick.

If the crude comes ashore in great amounts the wetland, oyster flats, generally their entire interlocking ecosystems is destroyed. Estimates of time until recovery start at twenty years.

Exxon Valdez went aground in Prince William Sound in 1989 and parts of the area are still polluted. The black sheets of goop are gone but turning over a rock often produces visible oil and considerable amounts remain trapped in the gravel, sand and sediment of the area. So over twenty years may not be enough.

The good news is that Alaska is cold and biological processes run a bit slower in the cold and oil at those temperatures is thick and viscous. Florida and the gulf are much warmer so the thought is that biological activity is more aggressive and the oil will be easier to break down because it is less viscous.

One thing I haven't seen as a comparison between the two sites is that oil is not native to Prince William Sound so there was no great population of oil eating bacteria. The gulf has natural oil seeps that drain a few thousand gallons (WAG at 100 barrels) of oil into the gulf every year. This means that the populations of oil eating bacteria are naturally higher. Every gallon of seawater on the gulf is seeded with bacteria that love oil. Exposed to oil these bacteria eat, get fat, and double their population at an exponential rate.

That isn't a total solution, and it certainly doesn't mean we can kick back and do nothing, the gulf is screwed but that might offer a glimmer of hope that the majority of the area will clean itself more rapidly than what we saw in Alaska.

On the other hand, estimates of how fast the oil is leaking and how long it will take to staunch the flow mean that the spill in the gulf is likely to involve more oil than what we saw in Alaska. If they have to spend ninety days, longer if the weather doesn't cooperate, drilling a relief well the amounts could be huge. Pessimists are talking about waves of oil washing out of the gulf, engulfing the keys, and heading up the east coast. The sad part is that given the facts there is no easy to spot flaw in their logic that says that it can't get that bad.

On the bright side, given a few thousand years, nature can clean up most anything.

I have to point out that when that well was being designed someone asked how many layers of blow-out protection they would install. The cautious people in the room wanted more to protect the crews and lower the chances of a big spill. The accountants wanted fewer of those expensive devices installed, to save money. I wish they had installed at least one more.

Blow-out preventers are indeed expensive but how expensive are they in terms of the total cost of this situation?

I do wish we would factor in more redundancy when it comes to fragile ecosystems. The costs of cleanup and negative publicity must not be high enough to outweigh a little more safety.

Considering the cost of the rig, the cost of another back-up system would have been insignificant. . .except to a bean-counter.

The rigs already have a Plan B and a Plan C. The problem is that they didn't work, and nobody knows why yet.

Deepwater blowouts are rare and it's not clear how much actual real-world experience there is with the seafloor safety systems. Adding more unproven backups may actually hurt by leading to complacency: "we've now got Plans D, E, and F: what could possibly go wrong?"

At least one of the blowout cap systems on the seafloor is destructive (to the well). It might be best to focus on mechanisms that can be tested after installation and periodically during well operation. A safety system that is both destructive and lacks significant real-world usage is not a good thing to rely on.

Major events often seem to have ecological disasters shadowing them - September 11th turns out the debris field was bad for you. Katrina, toxins in the water...

Yeah. We're scrood. Tourism? Dead. Fisheries? Gone. Wetlands? Destroyed. Environmental impacts? Devastating. Health effects? Cancer, pulmonary disease and increased mortality. Economic consequences? Bleak. Prolonged regional depression on top of global short-term recession expected. Damages? Start at $2B and up. BP's limits on liability? $0.075B. Estimated cost of effective, proven preventative technology? Less than $0.001B. BP's profits for just the 1st quarter of 2010? $6B. And let's not forget 11 dead workers, and their families.

My prediction? The residents of the Gulf Coast and the American taxpayer will bear the lion's share of the costs, while the guilty parties, including the officers and executives of the corporations involved (British and Swiss foreign corporations, and the notorious Halliburton) as well as their bought-and-paid-for politicians (on which BP alone spent $16M last year), get away Scot-free with pockets full of cash. Watch and see if BP doesn't continue to post multi-billion dollar profits over the next several quarters regardless of this disaster.

I'm so angry I'm ready to string the guilty up from lampposts. This was, based on the available facts thus far, an entirely foreseeable and preventable disaster. It did not need to happen, and would not have happened, but for the greed and incompetence of the private sector and a failure of proper oversight and reasonable regulation in the public sector, as well as all of our ongoing addiction to oil.

My lungs were already a little fried from 9/11. Wonder what BP's oil disaster is gonna do to me? At least my Haiti rash finally cleared up.