[StBernard] Slick, Well Inundated With Dispersants

[Westley Annis]

Slick, Well Inundated With Dispersants 
Agents That Break Up Oil Are Deployed From Air, at Seafloor.
 
By JEFFREY BALL 

CHALMETTE, La.-The huge oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico still hadn't
inundated the shore on Tuesday, and officials speculated that was partly
because it was being pummeled with massive amounts of chemicals designed to
break up the oil. 

Those fighting the spill are spraying an unprecedented amount of dispersants
into the Gulf in an attempt at environmental triage. Though there are
questions about the environmental impact of using so much dispersant and
using it at the seafloor, experts say, any such impact pales compared with
the damage that would occur if the slick made it to the ecologically fragile
Gulf Coast with full force.

 News Hub: Are Clean-Up Methods Harmful Too?2:17WSJ's Jeff Ball reports from
Louisiana on the use of dispersants to clean the Gulf oil spill and explains
why their use could cause unintended harm to the already-fragile eco-system.
.
"Spill response is always a weighing of alternatives. It's not removing the
damage. It's which one will reduce the damage," said Kerry St. Pe, director
of the Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary Program and former director of
oil-spill response for a region in southern Louisiana. 

The thousands of gallons of dispersants being used in the Gulf daily are
"designed to be fairly low toxicity," said Charlie Henry, a National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration official working on the spill response. 

Dispersants break up oil into tiny particles that then sit in the water,
where natural bacteria can attack them. The bacteria steadily reduce the
toxicity of the particles. 

"The dispersants may well be working," said Doug Helton, a NOAA official
tracking the oil slick's path. Along with efforts to stop the leaks and to
protect the coastline by laying pipes, known as booms, on the water's
surface to keep the oil sick at bay, the dispersants are "a partial
solution," he said.

Thousands of barrels of oil have been gushing each day from a pipe connected
to the well since a rig leased by BP PLC sank April 22, raising fears of
environmental disaster. It had caught fire two days earlier, killing 11 rig
workers.

In addition to the dispersants, rough weather and shifting winds in the Gulf
in recent days have helped to keep the spill offshore, bobbing the slick to
and fro in the water, giving officials valuable time to prepare and to try
to fight the spill.

 In Louisiana, Oil Slick a Coming Storm2:44While orange boom lines guard
nesting Brown Pelicans oblivious to the coming storm of oil, wildlife
advocates fear the booms won't do much to save Louisiana's wetlands. WSJ's
Andy Jordan reports.
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While the oil continues to gush, BP hopes to install a 70-ton dome that will
funnel the oil up to a drilling rig. The containment dome is scheduled to
leave an engineering yard in Port Fourchon, La., at noon Wednesday. The trip
to the site of the leak will take 12 hours, and installing the device
requires an additional two days. Pipes will then be installed connecting the
dome to the rig, which will capture the oil, "hopefully" starting in six
days, BP executive Doug Suttles said Tuesday.

Meanwhile, BP and government authorities are using C-130 planes in the sky
and remote-controlled robots a mile down on the seafloor to spray the oil
with dispersants. They are scouring the globe for large stockpiles of the
substance, bringing it in from Saudi Arabia and Malaysia on 747 cargo planes
and from Hawaii on a ship. And they are working with dispersant
manufacturers to increase production quickly.

"It's been an interesting couple of days of logistics," said Dave Salt,
operations director for Oil Spill Response, a U.K. company that specializes
in using dispersants to combat oil spills and who is on the scene in
Louisiana to assist in the dispersant campaign. 

 Animation of Oil-Spill Cleanup Methods1:41The animation provided by the
American Petroleum Institute demonstrates different methods of oil-spill
cleanup.
.
Given the temperature of the Gulf water, the oil particles should be broken
down in a matter of "days to weeks," Mr. Salt said.

Environmentalists are voicing concerns. "There are very explicit trade-offs
here," said Regan Nelson, senior oceans advocate for the Natural Resources
Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group. "What we don't understand
is the impact of that toxic soup on marine organisms that come into contact
with it." 

The planes spraying dispersants are taking off from an airport in Kiln,
Miss. Each is flying multiple dispersant-dropping missions a day, weather
permitting, meaning that the spill-response effort is capable of dropping
about 60,000 gallons of dispersants on the slick every day, Mr. Salt said.

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Those quantities significantly outweigh what Mr. Salt said was the biggest
use of dispersants before this spill: a 1996 spill from the tanker Sea
Empress off the U.K. coast. That spill leaked roughly 500,000 barrels of oil
into the water, and about 166,000 gallons of dispersants were used to fight
it, Mr. Salt said.

On top of that, in a move that BP officials say hasn't before been tried at
these depths, they are injecting dispersants directly into the oil spewing
from the leaking well on the seafloor, using robots holding sprayer wands
that BP officials liken to those that gardeners attach to backyard hoses. 

The idea is to mix the dispersants into the oil as soon as possible, before
it rises to the sea surface and forms a slick. Sonar images that BP has
taken of the operation on the seafloor suggest the dispersants are
succeeding in breaking up the oil, Bob Fryar, a BP senior vice president,
said in a conference call on Sunday. "You could clearly see, before and
after, the true difference."