
Deepwater Horizon Dispersants Backfired - curtis
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/11/oops-deepwater-horizon-dispersants-backfired/414846/?single_page=true
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crygin
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.

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theoh
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".

~~~
crygin
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.

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

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giaour
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.

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

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jacobush
He was playing DEVIL's advocate

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mhurron
Still requires you to be accurate.

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midnitewarrior
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.

~~~
TrevorJ
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".

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Houshalter
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...](http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-
world/national/article24589243.html)

"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.

~~~
crygin
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...](http://dels.nas.edu/Report/Spill-Dispersants-Efficacy-
Effects/11283)

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/...](http://www.pwsrcac.org/wp-
content/uploads/filebase/programs/oil_spill_response_operations/Report%20on%20the%20Non-
Mechanical%20Response%20for%20the%20Exxon%20Valdez%20Oil%20Spill.pdf)

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).

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athenot
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.

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

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hodder
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.

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cryoshon
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.

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kbutler
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...](https://www.sciencenews.org/article/five-years-deepwater-horizon-oil-
spills-impact-lingers)

