Oil drilling worsened Katrina

Upton · #1 (**permalink**) 01-20-2008, 02:15 PM

10,000 miles of oil canals, up to 1000 sq. miles of wetlands lost directly related to oil drilling. Now it looks as if Katrina was made immeasurably worse by the oil industry's thirst for profits. Are the oil companies helping pay to restore the delta? You already know the answer to that.

Quote:

Did oil canals worsen Katrina's effects?

ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

IN THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER DELTA -- Service canals dug to tap oil and natural gas dart everywhere through the black mangrove shrubs, bird rushes and golden marsh. From the air, they look like a Pac-Man maze superimposed on an estuarine landscape 10 times the size of Grand Canyon National Park.

There are 10,000 miles of these oil canals. They fed America's thirst for energy, but helped bring its biggest delta to the brink of collapse. They also connect an overlooked set of dots in the Hurricane Katrina aftermath: The role that some say the oil industry played in the $135 billion disaster, the nation's costliest.

The delta, formed by the accumulation of the Mississippi River's upstream mud over thousands of years, is a shadow of what it was 100 years ago. Since the 1930s, a fifth of the 10,000-square-mile delta has turned into open water, decreasing the delta's economic and ecologic value by as much as $15 billion a year, according to Louisiana State University studies.

The rate of land loss, among the highest in the world, has exposed New Orleans and hundreds of other communities to the danger of drowning. Katrina made that painfully clear.

"I remember when I was a young boy we had a camp out in the marsh," said Don Griffin, a grocer and seafood dealer in the delta town of Leeville, which became an oil-drilling center for decades. "The same places you used to have to get around with a pirogue and a push pole now you can go with a 25-foot outboard. There's no more marsh, which is your first barrier of defense for hurricanes."

In Katrina's wake, the Army Corps of Engineers has gotten the brunt of the criticism for the disaster. Besides building suspect levees, the Corps' mission to control waterways with spillways, floodgates and other measures has played havoc with nature by restricting the Mississippi's sediment and fresh upriver water from replenishing the delta's wetlands.

There are other reasons for the disastrous wetlands loss: Human development, cypress logging, ill-advised farming on the coast, hurricanes, slipping-and-sliding geologic faults and even a South American semi-aquatic rodent called nutria imported to Louisiana in the 1930s.

But many scientists say the oil industry's 10,000 miles of canals - enough to stretch nearly halfway around the world - and the drilling they supported played a decisive role. Some scientists say drilling caused half of the land loss, or about 1,000 square miles.

"The whole thing was manifest destiny written large on a marshy landscape," said John Day, an LSU professor emeritus who specializes in delta ecologies.

The industry denies that and points to disagreement among scientists over who or what caused damage, and how much.

"I've got duck leases out there and I remember when they were covered in grass. They're all ponds now," said Don Briggs, president of the Louisiana Oil & Gas Association. "It's not gone because of drilling. It's because nutria ate all the grasses."

However, a substantial body of evidence points to oil's heavy toll.

The canals, most dug to access wells by bucket dredges between the 1930s and 1970s when restrictions and mitigation requirements were lax to nonexistent, crisscross the marshy coast like a liquid maze.

In many places, they run perpendicular to the Gulf of Mexico shoreline, allowing salt water to intrude far inland. One spot is dubbed "The Wheel" because a series of canals looks like a wagon wheel from the air.

The muddy slop dredged from the canals had to go somewhere. Oil companies piled it where they found it, creating an estimated 13,000 miles of tide-blocking spoil banks.

R. Eugene Turner, an LSU oceanographer, has calculated that every square mile of the delta is bounded on three sides by oil-canal ridges. Turner has spent more than 30 years studying the oil industry's footprint on the delta.

"If the water is blocked from going in, the wetlands on other side is drier for a little longer and also stays flooded longer than it otherwise would be," Turner said. "By drying it, the land oxidizes and dries out; and if it's wetter, it's like leaving a lawn sprinkler on and the plants are going to die."

The damage doesn't stop with the canals. For example, U.S. Geological Survey scientists say the sucking out of the ground of so much oil and gas likely caused the land in many places to sink by half an inch a year. In oil's heyday 30 years ago, Louisiana's coastal wells pumped 360 million barrels a year, an eighth of what Saudi Arabia ships to the market today.

Oil wells also discharged about a billion gallons daily of brine, thick with naturally occurring subsurface chemicals like chlorides, calcium and magnesium, as well as acids used in drilling.

"It was poured into the marshes," said Virginia Burkett, a longtime researcher of the Louisiana wetlands and the chief scientist for climate change at USGS. It contaminated soils and killed plants and animals, she said, before brine dumping was finally regulated in coastal marshes in 1985.

Still, when politicians in Washington or Louisiana talk about Katrina guilt they blame the Corps of Engineers, global warming and the French for building a city in low-lying swamps nearly 300 years ago - but not the oil industry.

"It's the elephant at the dinner table and nobody wants to say there's an elephant there," said Luke Fontana, a New Orleans lawyer for Save Our Wetlands, one of the state's oldest grassroots environmental groups that has fought the draining of swamps and oil company activity since the 1970s.

But the industry's legacy is getting new attention. Some contrast record petroleum profits with staggering cost estimates - up to $60 billion - to save New Orleans and restore the delta. In 2006, major U.S. oil companies, some of which moved offices from New Orleans to Houston, earned about $162 billion.

Meanwhile, locals increasingly ask why oil shouldn't be made to clean up its profitable mess the same as mining operations had to do in Appalachia.

Delta folks like Griffin, the grocer in Leeville, wonder why Shell, ExxonMobil and other oil behemoths aren't paying for the disappearance of his boyhood duck ponds and dune-lined islands.

"It seems that the government should hold them accountable for some of the problem," Griffin said from behind his cash register.

Did oil canals worsen Katrina's effects?

Still Dizzy · #2 (**permalink**) 01-20-2008, 02:58 PM

CHARGE the oil companies? Hell we should thank them. Their efforts helped clean most of the dregs out of N.O.

Badmutha · #3 (**permalink**) 01-20-2008, 03:34 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Still Dizzy

CHARGE the oil companies? Hell we should thank them. Their efforts helped clean most of the dregs out of N.O.

I agree--Send the oil companies a thank-you letter--when the levees broke the average IQ of the US went way up.

#4 (**permalink**) 01-20-2008, 03:42 PM

Nice......didn't many of yorur fellow americans die in NO???

Still Dizzy · #5 (**permalink**) 01-20-2008, 04:44 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Unregistered6

Nice......didn't many of yorur fellow americans die in NO???

Actually no. MY fellow Americans work, pay taxes, obey the laws, and support those who put their lives on the line to protect us. Yours?

Tokenconservative · #6 (**permalink**) 01-21-2008, 07:49 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Upton

10,000 miles of oil canals, up to 1000 sq. miles of wetlands lost directly related to oil drilling. Now it looks as if Katrina was made immeasurably worse by the oil industry's thirst for profits. Are the oil companies helping pay to restore the delta? You already know the answer to that.
Did oil canals worsen Katrina's effects?

Left-advocacy in the "news media!?

What, are you crazy!?

Notice the placement of the "other" possible causes....buried in the center of a very long piece and surrounded by monstershouting about Big Oil!

Here's a question for shrieking lefties: you want the US to be free from dependence on other places for energy, but you work very, very hard to make sure we aren't.

If that were not the politics of destruction (rational thinkers know that your real plan is the socialist-communist dream of destroying Western free market capitalism) it would be laughably ironic.

Typical.

Hypocritical.

Liberal.

Tokie

P.s.: if these canals caused "most" of the destruction of the Katrina hurricane...what caused the destruction of hurricanes in the past, that make Katrina look like a joke, in places where such canals don't exist?

This is, in microcosm, the larger question at the foundation of AGWism: if it's human activity that's causing the massive, deadly, rapidly rising global temps today...what caused the temps to rise in times previous to industrial humans?

Anyone?

Anyone?

Hello?

Is this thing on?

Tokie

Tokenconservative · #7 (**permalink**) 01-21-2008, 07:54 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Badmutha

I agree--Send the oil companies a thank-you letter--when the levees broke the average IQ of the US went way up.

That's a bit cruel...true, but cruel.

I mean if you are so stupid that you wait around for Big Brutha to come rescue you, or stay in the path of a hurricane because you are hoping to loot empty houses and stores...and you get killed, I see that as evolution at work.

Keep in mind however that in order to cook the "death" books on Katrina, they counted people 200-300 miles away who dropped dead of heart attacks or who got into car accidents on the way to the movies as "Katrina deaths" because they had evacuated.

This, by the way, is the same approach the anti-American left and their 5th Column, the "news" media use for calculating war-related deaths in Iraq. Anybody who has died in Iraq since the invasion is a "war-related" death. So some 96 year old shepherd in an area that's never seen a moment of combat (of course the left won't admit there ARE such areas in Iraq) who dies in his sleep is "war-related" simply because the war is going on.

The only thing that surprises me is that they have not extended this to the US...hey, we ARE in a war...so if your great Aunt Bess, 87, drops dead tomorow when she's out slopping the hogs on her rural Missouri farm, clearly she should be counted as a casualty!

Tokie

rob · #8 (**permalink**) 01-21-2008, 10:35 AM

My question still is that if the left wants this country to no longer be dependent on ME oil why are we drilling more wells in this country? The EPA has kept oil companies from building new refieries for at least 25 years.

nathanbforrest45 · #9 (**permalink**) 01-21-2008, 10:43 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Unregistered6

Nice......didn't many of yorur fellow americans die in NO???

Well, we really don't know how many died in New Orleans. We don't know how many died as a direct result of the flood and how many died because the flood provided a cover for the rampant murders that go on there anyway or how many died because it was just thier time to die. I lived in New Orleans in 1965 when the city was hit by hurricane Betsy. The levee broke on that one as well. Next morning the Times Picayune stated over 200 had died. The official count was around 65. I would be willing to bet the numbers after Katrina would be comparable.

Its tragic for any to die under the circumstances but if you live in a soup bowl you have to have some expectation of becoming soup at some point.

countryslim · #10 (**permalink**) 01-23-2008, 01:26 AM

You can't make a Silk purse out of a Pigs Ear...

In studying Basic American History I read the actual fact that New Orleans Is well "Below Sea level"...Duh... is there a Sea anywhere near?

In Antarctica you can Freeze to Death because its too cold for the Human design. In NO its below sea level and Hurricane prone..go Figure!

Any Idiot who chooses to live in a pumped out Flood plain of a Delta must know the risks and to rely on OLD Earthen levee's.

Anyway, I thought it is all Bush's fault.. oh wait, he is big Oil, so this is tied directly to him.. not the level of the oceans, tides, Moon, and the fact that Humankind does not have Gills to breathe underwater..

Its like Nathan's Soup bowl comment said.. Or Go set up a tent on the Railroad tracks and you'll get those same consistent results. Hurricanes, Trains and Oceans are Dependably Big and not to be fooled with.... so are Oil companies, but we kinda need them.

Its the Liberal Mindset that Frightens me.. Consistently Stupid, and also well below sea level stretching to the Moon.