Below is the copied text of an email YRHT reader joejoejoe sent me, with slight edits. It relates to the ubiquitous and misleading
right-wing talking point that there were no "major" oil spills after Katrina and Rita (even though the cumulative toll of all the many "minor" spills equaled at least seven MAJOR spills) . Big thanks to joejoejoe for his research.
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Atrios posted on Gov. Jindal repeating the false statement that "that’s one of the great unwritten success stories, after Katrina and Rita, these awful storms, no major spills." and wondered what the origin was of the idea that there were no spills. So I asked myself...
Q: What is the origin of the idea that there were no spills during Katrina and Rita?A: It was a PR campaign from the American Petroleum Institute.I googled the ("no oil spills" + Katrina) and ("no spills" + Katrina) to find my answer.
Washington Post, 10/26/05: 'Oil Doesn't Want Focus on Big Profit'
And the industry's trade group, the American Petroleum Institute, has purchased seven ads in The Post so far this year, compared with none last year.
Chevron and Exxon Mobil increased their ad spending in the third quarter of this year at the New York Times, the newspaper company reported in its earnings call last week.
"You still have 100 hours of press time on any oil spill versus a tiny blurb or nothing at all if a company spends hundreds of millions on pollution control," said Lyle Brinker, an analyst for the John S. Herold Inc. energy research firm. "Sometimes, they just throw up their hands. The best thing they can do is keep the debate focused on educating the public."
Red Cavaney, president of the American Petroleum Institute, said the ads partially are designed to correct no-longer-true misperceptions about his industry. For instance, he said, even though 90 percent of the Gulf Coast drilling platforms and refineries were hit by either Katrina or Rita, there were no oil spills.
The industry's ads range from simple conservation messages to those that attempt to re-brand the oil companies as something else.
The definitive MMS study did not come until August '06 but the NOAA but Incidentnews.gov ( the website maintained by NOAA's Emergency Response Division which "has responded to virtually every major marine spill in the U.S.") listed no fewer than 15 incident response reports related to Hurricane Rita , 28 incident response reports related to Hurricane Katrina in LA, and 16 incident response reports related to Hurricane Katrina in MS & AL. All of these incident reports were public and known to the oil industry prior to the American Petroleum Institute PR campaign begun in October 2005.
Here is a compiliation of contemporary reporting on oil spills from the Institute for Policy Studies. One report stands out.
Wall Street Journal, 9/23/2005: 'Oil, Saltwater Mar Louisiana Coast, Threaten future'
More than three weeks after Katrina came ashore in Louisiana, the Coast Guard says the storm's surges and winds unleashed at least 40 oil spills -- 10 of which are major -- from ruptured pipelines and battered oil-storage facilities. In total, at least 193,000 barrels of oil and other petrochemicals were blown or driven by tides across the fragile marshy ecosystems and populated areas of the Plaquemines and St. Bernard parishes, southeast of New Orleans. The spills, the largest ever loss of oil in the state, approach the scale of the famous 1989 Exxon Valdez tanker spill, which dumped 240,000 barrels of crude oil in the fish-rich waters of Alaska's Prince William Sound.
One month later the American Petroleum Institute rolled out a PR campaign saying there were no spills.
The comprehensive MMS report one year later confirmed in a one definitive report what all the contemporary accounts from neutral sources said all along -- there were many serious oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico.
South Florida Sun-Sentinel, 8/16/06: 'Katrina and Rita triggered significant oil spill, report says.'
WASHINGTON - When hurricanes Katrina and Rita swept across the Gulf of Mexico last year, they destroyed scores of offshore oil and gas rigs, damaged hundreds of pipelines and spilled 741,384 gallons of petroleum products into the sea, federal records show.
A damage assessment released this week by the U.S. Minerals Management Service said the largest of the spills poured about 76,000 gallons of condensate, a toxic form of liquefied gas, into Gulf waters.
Initially overlooked during news of the storms' human toll, the offshore leaks could become an important consideration when Congress resumes debate next month on legislation that would spread energy exploration into the eastern Gulf, closer to the shores of Florida.
Many members of Congress supported a House-passed energy bill on the argument that offshore drilling would pose little risk to clean waters and beaches. They pointed to assurances from drilling advocates that production in the western Gulf had withstood major hurricanes with little or no pollution.
I know you know all of this stuff but I just wanted to share that API PR campaign story and vent with a little bit of context. This "no spills" lie seems to be key to a central issue in a Presidential election -- increasing oil drilling offshore -- so I think it's worth harping on a bit. Thanks for hearing me out!
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Note - This is wild-arsed speculation but doesn't the Mississippi River act like a big spigot to keep the oil from washing ashore along Gulf Coast? Last time I checked FL and CA don't have giant rivers that push the oil back out to sea. Maybe a hydrologist or hypnotist or whoever studies this junk has the answers. I sure don't!
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Labels: Cons, Jindal, oil, YRHT
6 Comments:
Re: the River and oil washing ashore along the Gulf Coast...I not an expert, but in this photo it sure looks like the oil slicks are close enough to the shoreline. Maybe the coastal topology plays a role.
I'm curious as to whether any lawsuits have been filed. Do you know? The recent Supreme Court decision in the Exxon Valdez case isn't exactly a good harbinger...
michael - I've done some more reading and oceanographers characterize the Gulf of Mexico as a marginal sea and they try to plot the various inputs to water circulation (inlets, water depth, etc) to try and describe the currents. There is a complex set of variables invoving A) the Yucatan straights B) the outflow of the Mississipi River, C) the shape and depth of the Gulf of Mexico, and D) the Florida straights. I'm not sure why or how it happens but there is a clockwise rotation to the center of the Gulf and counterclockwise at some points along the shore. It's still way beyond my understanding but I did learn that it's oceanographers who study these effects, not hypnotists. See cool graph at link below (scroll down)
http://www4.ncsu.edu/eos/users/c/ceknowle/public/chapter12/part3.html
Anyhow, the central point of my email to Oyster was the American Petroleum Institute started pushing back against factual oil spill stories as soon as there started to be a serious accounting of them in the straight press (see WSJ, Sept. '05) and their PR campaign has been largely successful.
The WSJ reporter Ken Wells who covered the Katrina/Rita oil spills is now is a senior editor for Conde Nast's Portfolio -- maybe there is a bigtime magaizine piece in the story of how these lies about "no spills" became widely accepted as conventional wisdom.
http://www.portfolio.com/contributors/Ken-Wells-
Also today on Grand Isle, there is nothing happening.
There were definitely oil spills after Katrina. The worst, by far, was Murphy Oil down in St. Bernard Parish.
The biggest reason that minor spills (which happen with some frequency) don't get announced is there is hardly population (besides Grande Isle) right along the coast.
Another source of spills is upsets with platform discharges. Some (around, say, 50%) platforms are allowed to release "produced water" (water that comes from the oil wells). That Produced Water must go through an extensive treatment scheme and discharges are required to be no more than 27 parts per million of oil in water.
The trick is, under very still conditions, 25 ppm water can still produce a very faint sheen. In fact, a single drop of crude oil dropped into relatively still water in the Gulf can spread out to form a sheen the size of several football fields, even though the sheen is only a few microns thick.
The Coast Guard and MMS are moving towards no discharges (except of treated domestic water - i.e. toilets and sinks). On Thunderhorse, for example, all produced water is reinjected into the oil reservoir. One intermediate action they're contemplating is lowering the discharge requirement on existing platforms to 15 ppm, which is easily doable 95% of the time, but the last 5% will be very tricky for platforms. Under normal operating conditions, the discharges tend to be in the single digit ppm's, but if anything goes bad, they quickly go above the allowable limit. Too many violations and the EPA levies a big fine and might force a shut in to correct the problem.
What gets missed in the "no oil spills" posturing is that the environmental consequences of offshore drilling are much more far-reaching than the effects of any spills. Louisiana's coast hasn't been damaged by oil spills as much as it has by the eating away of pipeline construction and transport operations. When the public thinks of offshore drilling, and they hear things like "25 miles offshore", they think that they'll never have to see or directly experience the wells. But how do they think the stuff gets out of the wells and onshore? It's not being airlifted out by helicopter!
Here's where a lot of environmentalists are missing an opportunity. Quit focusing entirely on spills, and start showing people maps of pipeline coverage, like this:
http://tinyurl.com/5by4cr
Ask people if they want their vacation spots and beach front houses cluttered up with pipeline operations. I don't think you can bury pipelines under sand, can you?
You realize of course that Jindal is just being modest - he prayed and prayed and he exorised that spilled oil right out of existence.
