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HOUMA, La. (AP) - Inside a sprawling command post in southern
Louisiana, The Blob is everywhere.
It stains the many maps tacked to white walls. Computer monitors
beam satellite images of it floating in the Gulf of Mexico, a
magenta mass that looks more like an island than the colossal oil
slick that it is. It sometimes changes shape on these screens, or
breaks off into bits and pieces, but The Blob itself never
vanishes.
Coast Guard Capt. Roger Laferriere oversees this command center,
coordinating the unprecedented cleanup of oil off of the Louisiana
coast. There are other posts like it in Mobile, Ala., and Miami,
but none has more manpower, equipment - or more of The Blob, as
Laferriere and his staff have christened their enemy - than this
base inside what once was a BP training facility for offshore oil
production.
On any given day, some 40,000 people are working all along the
Gulf Coast to track where the oil is headed, lay protective boom,
skim what they can and clean shorelines; nearly half of them are
under what is known as the Houma Incident Command Post.
Some are analysts who sit in darkened rooms at the BP warehouse,
feeding satellite data into computerized maps that show where the
oil is moving, what marshes have already been boomed and what areas
skimmers are toiling.
Others - many of them shrimpers and fishermen turned cleanup
contractors - work out of quaint docks converted into "forward
operating bases," hitting the water after sunup to do the hands-on
tasks necessary to contain and clear the oil. There's displaced
boom to be repositioned. Torn boom to be picked up, brought to
shore and repaired. Absorbent boom soaked through on one side that
must be turned or swapped out.
The spilling may have stopped at least for now, but their work
goes on. Before a new cap fitted onto the busted wellhead corked
the leak this past week, anywhere from 92 million to 184 million
gallons of oil had gushed into the sea. Somehow, it's got to be
cleaned up.
Leading that effort for the Louisiana coastline is Laferriere, a
man of boundless energy and confidence who holds a degree in
environmental science and has worked any number of oil spills big
and small - from Exxon Valdez to the post-Hurricane Katrina spills
that dumped more than 8 million gallons.
Securing the leak does little to change his mission over the
next weeks and months. "Even given that," he says, "we've still
got a lot of oil on the water. We're going to continue to push
forward until all the oil is removed and the people of Louisiana
can get back to their way of life. We're going to be here until the
end."
Laferriere's job is to not only coordinate efforts on the
ground, but to meet with parish presidents, city councilmen and
mayors, to answer their many questions, and to fend off criticism
that not enough has been done to stop and capture the crude.
"Not enough" is something he's heard a lot since arriving in
Louisiana on May 22, almost a month to the day after the Deepwater
Horizon explosion. It may be a complaint that there's not enough
boom, or not enough skimmers, or not enough boots on the ground to
pitch in.
And so he's made it his job to explain to anyone who will listen
just how this all works - which methods clean the most oil fastest
and the many obstacles out there to getting the job done. One day
it could be a thundercloud that shuts down work. The next, high
waves that prevent vessels from skimming. Or a full moon that makes
sea states even more challenging.
Coast Guard Capt. Meredith Austin is Laferriere's No. 2 and runs
the daily operations of the command center.
"Normally when you do an oil spill response, you have a release
of oil ... but at some point in the near term, the source stops and
then you know: This is what I'm fighting. You've got to skim as
much as you can and burn as much as you can, do protective booming
and clean up what's on the beach. This one, you're doing that every
day but you don't know when it's going to end" once and for all,
she says. "We get up every day and say, `Who's the enemy today?
What does the blob of oil look like today? Let's go attack it."'
The surface slick from the oil covered 2,700 square miles on
Thursday - down sharply from its peak on June 14 but still an area
slightly larger than Delaware, says Hans Graber, who has been
tracking its movements via satellite imagery from the University of
Miami's Center for Southeastern Tropical Advanced Remote Sensing.
Although the heart of the slick has fluctuated with weather and the
amount of oil coming out of the seafloor, Graber says 44,000 square
miles of the Gulf have seen significant amounts of oil pass
through.
Even if the cap holds and no more oil spills, Coast Guard
officials say cleaning what's left of the oil offshore could take
anywhere from several weeks to several months. Long-term
restoration of soiled marshes and other affected areas could take
years, depending on the extent of damage.
Barring bad weather, which itself can be a regular occurrence,
the command post routine rarely changes: Mornings start with
spotter flights to get a sense of where the oil is on any given
day. While much of it remains amassed near the wellhead, other
so-called streamers and ribbons have broken off and made their way
into inlets such as Barataria Bay, forcing crews to constantly
monitor the moving oil and shift resources as necessary.
Data integration teams update computerized maps to depict where
the slick has spread and to help operations managers in Houma
communicate with nine forward operating bases scattered across the
coastal parishes to determine where skimmers and boom-tenders
should focus their efforts. Weather forecasters keep an eye on
storms and tides, to help decide whether it's an optimal day to
burn some of the oil closest to the explosion site or use chemical
dispersants to break it up.
It's a complicated effort that can be set off course merely by
big waves or high winds. To understand how and why, consider the
three primary ways the oil is removed from the water's surface.
The first is skimming, and the Coast Guard has deployed a
combination of vessels all across the Gulf Coast to help with the
task. Closer to the source of the spill itself are some 19 to 23
Weir skimmers, which draw oil up through suction pumps and into
tanks. Smaller skimmers, including ones that use drums to absorb
the oil and others equipped with squeegee-like devices, work in
shallow waters closer to shore. In all, nearly 600 skimmers are
deployed in the response, although national incident commander Thad
Allen said this week that the Coast Guard was on pace to almost
double that number. Some of the vessels can remove up to 8,000
barrels - or some 336,000 gallons of oil and water mix - a day.
The challenge is this: While some of the spilled oil is a thick,
black mass, much of it is sheen, and sheen is too thin for skimmers
to be able to collect. Even near the source of the spill, the oil
is only about a tenth of a millimeter thick, Laferriere says,
meaning vessels equipped with booms must first surround the oil and
tow it into a thicker pool that can be sucked up.
If the tides kick up because of a full moon or bad weather, the
booms can't properly tow the oil and skimming is useless.
"Six feet of water, we can't skim," Laferriere says, likening
the effort to trying to capture oil being sloshed like water in a
washing machine.
A second cleanup method - burning the oil - is unsustainable if
waves reach just 2 feet high, again because the oil must be towed
into a thicker pile in order to catch fire. Even the slightest wave
action can keep too much water splashing onto the oil, making it
unlikely to ignite.
The more controversial use of chemical dispersants, which are
dropped from crop-duster type aircraft and help break up the oil so
it can biodegrade, can potentially disperse hundreds of thousands
of gallons of oil at a time, the Coast Guard estimates. But if
winds reach 20 knots, those operations are ceased because gusts
could carry the chemicals away from their intended target.
Some combination of these three techniques have been used to
purge the oil from the Gulf since the spill began on April 20. More
than 30 million gallons of oily water have been removed from the
surface, and another 10 million-plus gallons have been burned. More
than 1.8 million gallons of dispersants have been dropped, and the
Coast Guard estimates that with every gallon of chemicals used, up
to 20 gallons of oil may be disseminated.
Laferriere is explaining all of this one recent day at the Houma
command post, as he paces a cavernous room dubbed the fish bowl.
The walls hold maps of the Louisiana coast, all showing The Blob
colored red. Under a label that reads "Weather Forecast,"
graphics are hung depicting tide patterns, winds, and tropical
storm warnings and watches. Other maps show scheduled overflights
to drop dispersants.
Operational planning happens here, where dozens of men and women
- some Coast Guard employees, other BP workers, other contract
specialists (such as mapping experts from the National
Geospatial-Intelligence Agency) come together each day to develop a
strategy that is passed to field branches in places such as
Cocodrie, La. The fishing village two hours south of New Orleans
has been transformed from a fisherman's paradise into a warehouse
for oil removal equipment, like much of the Louisiana coast.
At the CoCo Marina, the dock is blanketed with row after row of
orange hard boom and softer absorbent boom, some awaiting repair or
cleaning, other pieces ready to be ferried to oil-tinged marshes
and bays. Anchors that hold the protective barriers into place are
piled near dozens of blue buoy balls.
Luke LeBlanc is 43 and used to spend days shrimping the many
bays in and around Cocodrie. His job now is to help clean those
waters. He's up every morning at 4 and over to the CoCo Marina,
where he signs in and gets his orders for the day. Then he heads
out in an airboat to check boom and, if necessary, help stretch and
anchor it to protect the canals.
"It's the same thing pretty much every day," he says.
"Sometimes it's shifted. Sometimes it's busted. Sometimes it's on
the bank. Sometimes the anchor's gone, and you've got to go find
it. It's been a nonstop battle just maintaining. And then sometimes
you maintain and the oil moves to a different area and you've got
to start all over again."
"Heartbreaking," he calls his daily trips down canals now
lined with barges stacked high with all the tools needed to face
down an environmental catastrophe.
"There are certain days you go out there and you want to just
put your head down and cry, but you can't. You've got to deal with
it and get it cleaned up. As much as you want to point the finger
and blame and get mad and relieve some frustration, that's not
solving the problem."
Despite that, much finger-pointing has ensued, especially from
local Louisiana politicians frustrated with what they saw early on
as a lethargic response on behalf of the government and BP.
At one point, Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser and
others questioned why more equipment seemed to be sitting on docks
rather than in the water. But even Nungesser, who just last month
told a congressional panel, "I have spent more time fighting the
officials of BP and the Coast Guard than fighting the oil," says
the cleanup effort has improved.
"In the last two weeks we have made unbelievable progress,"
Nungesser says.
But the most significant step forward may be the 75-ton metal
cap now in place at the bottom of the ocean.
"It's somewhat a sense of relief knowing, hopefully, that every
bit of oil we pick up from here on out will be a little less that's
going to be out there, as opposed to picking up less than was being
spilled and losing ground on a daily basis," Nungesser says.
"It's a great feeling."