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Robert Nelson in the Weekly Standard notes that the Gulf suffered less damage from the oil spill than feared, a development first reported by FF's Tim Mak.

Robert Nelson in the Weekly Standard notes that five months after the Gulf oil spill was capped, it’s turning out that the region has suffered less ecological and economic damage than feared.

Nelson writes:

Oddly enough, however, the ecosystem of the Gulf itself turns out to have suffered remarkably little damage from the continuous gushing of oil into the water from April 20 till July 15, when the leaking well was capped. …

After all the predictions of ecological disaster in the spring, government officials have been searching hard for more evidence of harm. In early November, a Penn State marine biologist announced that he had finally found a “smoking gun”: dead and dying coral reefs in 4,500 feet of water not far from the spill site. Coral in shallower waters and farther from the site was unaffected.

The search for damage to the Gulf, it seems, is a bit like the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. An armada of ships was assembled to respond to the leak caused by an explosion at the Deepwater Horizon well, and a virtual war was declared on it (and on the well’s owner, BP). It is—or should be—embarrassing that the predicted disaster failed to materialize.

This might be news to some, but not to readers of FrumForum’s Tim Mak.  In late September, Tim travelled to the Gulf coast to report on the recovery.  Tim wrote:

South of New Orleans, in Venice, Louisiana, locals on the Gulf Coast are saying what no one seems to wants to acknowledge: that they’re thriving thanks to BP’s response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

Fishermen who have signed on to do BP oil spill cleanup work say that their contracts forbid them from speaking to reporters, but off the record, talk about the boon that the Deepwater Horizon incident has left in its wake.

“As a fisherman, I worked twelve hour days – ten to twelve dollars an hour,” says one Venice contractor. “I make much more money now than I did fishing.”

As for the expected ecological damage to the region, Tim noted that:

… things are getting better. Fishermen expect to return to shrimping as soon as Americans start buying Gulf shrimp again, and it’s estimated that the oyster and crab fisheries will rebound after a couple of years.

Remember: You read it first at FrumForum.