Deepwater Horizon Dispersants Backfired | Hacker News Reader

Deepwater Horizon Dispersants Backfired

theatlantic.com

85 pointscurtis36 comments

This is, unfortunately, quite well-known in the oil spill management community. We've chosen to measure incident response using visible oil on the surface of the water, so the companies use a method which reduces that metric but causes exponentially more environmental damage throughout the water column.

I believe it, but what other way is there to measure?

Donations to the church.

Local fish production.

Number of words in public apology.

Average number of different bacteria cultures you can grow from a sample of water.

There's no end to ways you could measure incident response. Measuring based on visible oil makes the statement "the problem with oil spills is that you can see them".

Well, implicit in the question is, what better way is there to measure the damage? Local fish production I could see, I guess maybe I could see the bacteria. The others are clearly worse than visible oil.

Honestly not being pedantic, what do you mean by "exponentially" in this case? Usually it implies a rate of growth though some people, increasingly, seem to use it just to mean "a lot".

Fair point, it's somewhat hyperbolic phrasing. A perhaps somewhat retroactive defence:

Surface contamination is deadly, particularly to bird/shore life, but dispersed oil is deadly throughout the water column (until it resurfaces, at which point it becomes deadly to birds again). There's relatively little life at the surface compared to the pelagic zone, so the impact of dispersants doesn't merely multiply the effect of the oil by the depth of the water, but actually moves that oil into the regions where life is densest.

The dispersants did exactly what BP wanted them to do: obscure the environmental damage caused by the blowout.

To play devil's advocate, the dispersant contained the damage to low-impact areas (the deepwater ocean) and away from high-impact areas like beaches and shallow-water fisheries.

Can you fix your post? Low impact should be low visibility and high impact should be high visibility.

He was playing DEVIL's advocate

Still requires you to be accurate.

Out of sight, out of mind.

It's more than just visibility: dumping oil all over a shrimp fishery will have an immediate and devastating economic impact.

It is entirely possible that both karmajunkie and giaour are right. The dispersant could have:

a) obscured the environmental damage

and

b) contained the damage to low-impact areas

Now in this particular case I think the trade-off was completely worth it. That's because the sea-shore is one-dimensional whereas the sea-floor is two-dimensional. An amount of oil that could damage a huge fraction of the Gulf coastline can damage a much smaller fraction of the Gulf sea-floor.

It depends how you measure impact. Front page news needs pictures and the bottom of the sea is hard to photograph. That's about the only way the sea floor is low impact.

And also, nothing that lives or dies down there has any effect on humanity.

*as far as we know, from what little research we have done, even though every time we go down there we discover something new.

If there were some significant energy flow back up the continental slope, someone would have noticed it by now. The only thing I can think of is sperm whales' predation of squid, but even squid are more pelagic than benthic. The pressure at depth keeps gases in solution, so they're probably not going anywhere either. What else could there be?

That is rather unlikely.

Except it didn't contain the damage, at least according to the documentary The Big Fix. Instead of having a highly visible oil slick, the dispersant (Corexit) spread it out. It also had the effect of making the oil more bioavailable and therefore damaging to wildlife and humans. Lots of gulf coast folks are showing symptoms of being affected by the oil, the Corexit, or both.

I'd love to hear people who live in the affected area chime in, as I don't have any corroborating evidence beyond what's offered by the documentary, but it suggests that the use of a dispersant created a much bigger public health problem than it solved.

I live on the Mississippi coast. It was definitely a big deal when it happened since fishing/seafood is one of the major industries here.

I heard lots of reports of folks who were doing the cleanup who were affected by the dispersants. I haven't heard of anyone getting sick from going out on the water or eating coast seafood, and I feel perfectly safe myself eating them. (I certainly don't like the idea of eating oil and dispersants, but I don't weight it as a very high-risk activity.)

From time to time you still see oil or tar in the bayous or on the beach, but it's become increasingly uncommon. Fishermen have vociferously complained that it affected seafood harvests.

Unfortunately a lot of the "cleanup" money is being wasted on things like gigabit Internet (which I would love, but come on) and damming up the biggest continental US river to create two recreational lakes in the middle of nowhere. (Coincidentally a county supervisor owns a lot of land that will have to be bought up by the county.)

They dispersed the oil into the food chain. How is that not high-impact?

Just because it's out of sight doesn't mean it's not affecting us or the environment.

That company really should have been given the death penalty. Immediate suspension of trading and cancellation of all it's stock value and confiscation of all assets to be sold off for damages and repairs. It is really the only way that corporations and their executives will learn. Executives hiding under the corporate rock may not be able to be prosecuted directly, but there is no reason that corporations themselves shouldn't be able to be held to the same consequences as other people. They are, after all, "people, my friend", right?

Remember people work at these organizations. To assume that "BP" wanted to obscure environmental damage implies intent on behalf of employees. I can assure you, BP did not want to spill the oil and they didn't want to do a poor job in cleaning it up.

If the dispersants didn't work as intended that isn't the same thing as employees intentionally using dispersants as a shroud to obscure environment damage.

Corexit dealt effectively with BP's PR problem. Oil soaked birds and beaches bring lawsuits and lower share prices.

It was never intended to solve the ecological problem they created.

If you tried to come up with the name of a product like that for a comic book about some evil megacorp, it would be hard to do better than "Corexit".

This thread is full of hindsight bias. The EPA defended the use of dispersants at the time: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/articl...

"The EPA said Monday those dispersants hastened the decomposition of the oil, a process that may also have kept vast quantities of oil from fouling the shoreline."

Most of the concern was about the specific dispersant used, and if it might be toxic to marine life. But in general everyone thought dispersants would be effective. And it's been standard practice for cleaning up oil spills.

Preauthorization for use of dispersants had already been withdrawn for Prince William Sound (the only zone in Alaska where they had been preauthorized) by the Department of the Interior in 2008 following this consensus report: http://dels.nas.edu/Report/Spill-Dispersants-Efficacy-Effect...

This is also an interesting and well-known report discussing the non-mechanical response to the Valdez spill from 2006: http://www.pwsrcac.org/wp-content/uploads/filebase/programs/...

I can't be clear enough on this -- the impact of dispersants on the environment and their lack of efficacy at actually decomposing oil (see: resurfacing) was well-known at the time of the Deepwater Horizon spill. There's ample discussion from the actual professionals in this field at the time of the incident regarding the obviously inadequate cleanup process. The responses from both BP and the EPA were meant to reduce metrics like visible sheen while ignoring the environment (it's even worse in the gulf since current variation at depth results in a much broader resurfacing pattern than simply leaving the oil on the surface would have done).

Well of course they'd defend it. The EPA would look like idiots if they admit they approved something that made a disaster worse.

I'm alawys amazed at how much of our ecosystem is powered—and regulated—by microbial activity. And yet we still have so much to learn about these organisms and their effects.

Serious question: Why instead of dispersant (another chemical contaminant) did we not disperse large quantities of lab-grown oil digesting bacteria?

The USGC is already home to large quantities of oil digesting bacteria, and that is largely why the ecosystem has recovered to the extent it has.

Not a biologist, but I would guess that adding oil-digesting bacteria beyond the carrying capacity is very inefficient. The bacteria would clean up oil for one generation and die.

However, increasing the carrying capacity (e.g. by adding nitrogen as suggested in the article) lets the microbes reproduce, possibly exponentially (2^t).

Shrug, the environment was ultra-fucked as soon as that platform exploded. The question is whether it would have been destroyed even worse (and it was completely destroyed, and has not recovered to this day) without the use of dispersants. Given the level of ecosystem collapse we've seen (total), I think that's an open question.

Yes, that is the question the article endeavors to examine.

Not to minize the damage, but "completely destroyed" and "total" collapse are exaggerations.

"The spill was certainly dramatic, but the long-term toll on wildlife has been mixed; some species in the Gulf are struggling while others are doing fine. Instead of a dramatic collapse of life, researchers are finding subtle effects — some that only emerged three or four years after the spill — that they are still trying to sort out, says coastal ecosystem scientist R. Eugene Turner of Louisiana State." https://www.sciencenews.org/article/five-years-deepwater-hor...

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