The Spill Washington Forgot

After the 1969 Santa Barbara well blowout that smeared 100, 000 barrels of oil along California’s picturesque central coast, the resulting public outrage helped launch the modern movement that secured, with bipartisan support, environmental protection laws.

After the Exxon Valdez barreled into Bligh Reef and spilled more than 11 million gallons of crude into the pristine, wildlife-rich, waters and shorelines of Alaska’s Prince William Sound, Congress passed the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 requiring use of double hulled tankers and setting liability limits. The spill also led to Congressional and Presidential moratoriums on drilling offshore along most of the nation’s Outer Continental Shelf.

After the worst oil spill in U.S. history, the 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout that spewed 260 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico and made the two earlier disasters seem like mere dribbles in comparison, virtually nothing has changed.

President Obama did a few things. He split up and renamed the Minerals Management Service, instituted a temporary moratorium on deepwater drilling, and established a bipartisan commission that spotlighted what co-chairman and former EPA Administrator Bill Reilly called a “culture of complacency” at all of the key corporate players at Deepwater Horizon– BP, Transocean, and Halliburton.

However, Congress has been unable to agree on strengthening safety requirements, Republicans and oil state Democrats have been clamoring for fewer restrictions on drilling, and polling shows that the American public has pretty much shrugged off the spill over concerns about rising gas prices.

Obama appears to have bowed to political pressure by ending the temporary moratorium and stepping up the pace of issuing drilling permits. Some, if not all, of the new permits have been issued to companies whose spill prevention plans are dated 2009; the same pre-blowout plans that have been widely ridiculed for exaggerating spill response capabilities and borrowing liberally from Arctic spill response plans. Spot any walruses lounging on Mississippi beaches lately?

If that weren’t enough to curl your toes, Transocean, the incompetent owner of the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon rig, recently announced that it is awarding its top executives bonuses for achieving the "best year in safety." The company filing about the bonuses stated: “Notwithstanding the tragic loss of life in the Gulf of Mexico, we achieved an exemplary statistical safety record.”

If an exploding rig is “exemplary,” we would be curious to know what Transocean regards as mediocre.

It seems as if the lesson learned from the worst oil spill in U.S. history is throw caution to the wind and don’t worry about the consequences.

Meanwhile, alarming numbers of dead dolphins and sea turtles are washing up along the Gulf Coast. Researchers fear that the long-term ecological damage from the spill may be far greater than previously thought.

As disturbing as all of this is, perhaps the most troubling is the strong push by the Alaska congressional delegation and numerous Western or Gulf state Republicans to rush drilling in the remote waters of the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas off Alaska’s northern coast—without any reliable indication whatsoever that a spill in these arctic waters could be effectively responded to.

These are among the world’s most pristine and productive ocean areas. They support vital populations of marine mammals, including seals, walruses, and whales. The Chukchi is home to roughly half of America’s polar bear population. Millions of seabirds migrate to these food-rich waters each year.

A recent memorandum produced by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE), projects that a blowout in these icy waters would spill approximately 61,000 barrels a day—similar to the Gulf spill. That is where the similarities end.

The spill response assets available in the Gulf were as massive as they were inadequate.

The Chukchi and Beaufort Seas are located more than 900 miles from the nearest U.S. Coast Guard base, there are only a few small airstrips, winter response in subzero darkness would be impossible, ice cover most of the year would hinder containment and cleanup, and bad weather could ground workers for weeks any time of the year.

The report issued by the Gulf oil spill commission noted “serious concerns about Arctic oil-spill response, containment, and search and rescue,” and recommended that before the federal government issues any drilling permits, it must ensure that oil spill containment and response capabilities have been “satisfactorily demonstrated in the Arctic.” That is a pretty high bar.

The likelihood that oil spill clean-up can be successfully demonstrated in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas under all likely weather and sea conditions is highly unlikely, as is the prospect that Congress will provide the Coast Guard the necessary resources to station and maintain an appropriate amount of response equipment nearby.

But heck, who needs spill response capability when our elected leaders are willing to so completely throw caution to the wind in their insatiable quest for every last drop of domestic oil. Apparently, no cost is too great.

Edmund Burke, the father of modern conservatism, wrote:

Prudence is not only the first in rank of the virtues political and moral, but she is the director and regulator, the standard of them all.

As we sit here a year after the nation’s worst oil spill, prudence is sadly absent from those charged with overseeing oil drilling and managing America’s marine waters, as are many other virtues—political and moral.

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