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As the crisis ebbs and emotions calm, it's time to begin looking back to ask what lessons have been learned, what should have been done differently, what there still is to worry about — and how things might go differently next time. Some fresh insights are beginning to emerge:
•Just how bad was the spill? In the days after the well blew out, damage forecasts started out bad and got dramatically worse. It was the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. It would kill the Gulf of Mexico. Oil would be captured by the "loop current," cover Florida's beaches and travel up the East Coast. One oil expert went on MSNBC to suggest that the only way to cap the well was with a nuclear bomb.
The alarmists were right about at least one thing: This was a huge spill. The latest official estimate of nearly 206 million gallons easily makes it the worst ever in U.S. waters, far bigger than the 1989 Exxon Valdez tanker accident (11 million-35 million gallons) or the 1979 Mexican Ixtoc I well blowout (almost 150 million gallons).
But the Gulf is an enormous and surprisingly resilient place. The spilled oil from the Macondo well would fill the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans about one-sixth full. If that sounds like a lot — and perhaps to some it doesn't — consider that it would take about 554 million Superdomes to fill the Gulf of Mexico. That's not exactly a drop in the proverbial bucket — particularly considering massive economic damage along the Gulf Coast — but it's a strikingly different image from one emblazoned in people's mind by the early reaction.
It's too early to be completely sure, but federal scientists said quite confidently Wednesday that the vast bulk of the oil is already gone (captured, evaporated, skimmed, dissipated, eaten by microbes), and survey teams have been surprised by how little of the coastline has been damaged. Even in oil-smeared areas in Louisiana's vulnerable coastal marshes, researchers have been gratified to see green shoots in oily grasses. Some areas are reopening to fishing, and so far, seafood from the Gulf shows no contamination.
As of Thursday, teams had collected 3,606 dead birds, less than 1% of the number killed by the Valdez spill. The Valdez dumped heavier oil into frigid waters, some of it into rocky bays where it persists 21 years later. The Gulf is much warmer, and heavy use of dispersants, the churning of the open Gulf and the force of the sun might have helped make most of the oil go away.
Is there seabed damage we don't yet know about? Are there still plumes of oil lurking underwater? Will the dispersants used to break up the oil cause long-term damage to marine life? Unclear. But so far, it seems the wildest predictions were just that — wild.
What to make of all this? Perhaps that it's human nature to assume the worst, which isn't all bad. It focuses attention on fixing the problem. Perhaps that the news media did not do a very good job in the early days of putting the scale of the spill in the context of the Gulf's size and biology. BP tried to, but it had blown its credibility so no one listened. More provocatively, it might suggest that deep-water drilling, while being riskier and harder to control, is less threatening than drilling near shore. A much smaller spill just off the coast of Santa Barbara in 1969 did enough damage to affect policy for decades — including drilling bans that endure today.
•So is it safe to drill again? If anything was clear in the days after BP's well failed on April 20, it was that neither BP nor the industry had any real plan for fixing a blowout a mile underwater or ensuring that no oil washed ashore.
All the industry's claims of technological mastery evaporated as the days ticked by without a fix, and BP cluelessly added to questions about the wisdom of drilling in ultradeep water by whining that trying to fix the broken blowout preventer a mile under the sea was like conducting "open heart surgery at 5,000 feet in the dark with robot-controlled submarines." OK, then what was it doing drilling there in the first place? It took trial and error and 87 days before BP finally put a temporary cap on the well.
The good news is that BP's fumbling attempts were a painstaking, real-world test of how to fix an out-of-control well in mile-deep water. Now the industry knows how to do it.
Better yet, there's a promising plan for doing so quickly in the future. Exxon and three other major oil companies have pledged to spend at least $1 billion designing, building and deploying a system in the Gulf region to contain a deep-sea blowout that would be ready to "begin mobilization" within 24 hours of an accident. The industry has also promised to ready a more robust system for cleaning up any oil that does escape.
The companies have major incentives for doing this. The Interior Department is signaling that it might lift or modify its drilling ban — scheduled to last at least until Nov. 30 while equipment and safety practices are reviewed — if companies can show that they can operate more safely. Further, no company wants to repeat BP's experience.
The biggest barrier might be BP itself. It has massive plans for Gulf drilling and a long record that says it won't reform. Investigators blamed the company's lax attitude toward safety and maintenance for a terrible refinery explosion in Texas in 2005 and a major pipeline leak in Alaska in 2006. There's not much indication the company's safety culture changed. Then there are the drillers. TransOcean, which operated the rig that exploded, also might also be a habitual safety violator.
Further complicating matters is that Exxon and its partners don't plan to have the new blowout response system ready for at least a year-and-a-half.
Caught in the middle are people and companies that depend on Gulf drilling.
The shrinking estimates of the catastrophe, the human suffering and the improving preparation all argue for shortening the drilling ban. But there's no question where the burden of proof lies. The industry — particularly BP — needs to make a convincing case that it has created the conditions that will allow drilling to proceed safely.
•What about the politics? It would be naive these days to expect politicians to join together in the face of a national disaster, but it was depressing nonetheless that so much energy was wasted on political finger-pointing. Republicans accused President Obama and the Democrats of responding ineptly, Democrats blamed President Bush and the Republicans for coddling the oil industry instead of cracking down, and politicians of various stripes in hard-hit Louisiana, led by Gov. Bobby Jindal, howled at every stumble, demanding more help. With all that the state has been through, now and in Hurricane Katrina, you could hardly blame them.
Even so, the record will show that a White House with vivid memories of how Bush was burned by the slow-footed response to Katrina got on the case quickly, deploying the Coast Guard and marshalling what resources it could. Some 1,200 ships were on site within a month under Coast Guard command. There were — inevitably — myriad small mistakes, but only a miracle could have kept the oil from reaching shore. It's a barometer of this polarized era that nothing Obama did short of swimming to the bottom of the Gulf and plugging the well himself would have made his critics happy.
As for the Democrats' complaints, Bush's affection for the oil industry is a matter of record, as is his push to call off regulatory watchdogs in a number of areas. But the Obama administration had been in office for more than a year when the spill happened, Democrats had controlled Congress for three, and Obama was confident enough about safety just before the spill to propose increasing offshore drilling. The regulators who had been captured by the industry were still doing the same sloppy job. That is where the fingers should have been pointing and where attention should focus now.
Also lost in the squabbling was a chance to raise awareness of the costs to national energy security as exploration stopped in an area that produces 30% of the nation's domestic oil. Plans for expanded offshore drilling elsewhere were shelved. The cost of banning drilling in some of the last places that could provide significant domestic oil supplies is that imports rise. The USA already imports about 68% of its oil and is dangerously vulnerable to the vagaries of the world petroleum market. It would be nice to think the nation will simply use more solar energy, more wind power or some other alternative source of energy. But there's no national plan to make that happen, and Congress is currently paralyzed over legislation that would barely begin the effort.
Future generations will probably look back years from now and wonder why this didn't galvanize the nation into changing course. The saddest lesson of all from this disaster so far is the one we didn't learn.
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