Coastal stars, passed over by the ‘Louisiana Luddites,’ drafted by the ‘BP Blowouts.’

in People Issues by Admin — July 18, 2010 at 9:00 am | 4 comments

by Len Bahr, PhD

Misbegotten war games against oil in the Mississippi River delta

In the July 18 cover story in The Times-Picayune Jan Moller describes Governor Jindal’s daily press conferences and coastal flyovers in Blackhawk helicopters, each carefully staged to showcase his heroic response to the BP blowout. The governor has adopted a martial metaphor, declaring an all out war against the invading hordes of oil slicks.*

This hawkish rhetoric may be popular but it rings hollow because it isn’t backed up by a ‘war room’ of prominent geoscientists and oceanographers, for example from the Coastal Studies Institute or the School of the Coast and Environment at the Ol’ War Skule. In other words, if Bobby Jindal were really serious about mounting a war to save the coast from encroaching oil he would solicit help from battle-seasoned experts, rather than mouthing warlike platitudes from parish presidents and preppy staffers.

As Moller pointed out in his article, the purely defensive centerpiece of Jindal’s game plan in the ‘oily war games’ is a Maginot Line of sand and rock barriers. This concept is the brainchild of Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser, defensive coordinator of a team so lacking scientific insight that it should be called the ‘Louisiana Luddites.’

Nature abhors a vacuum, as we know. This is basically why the Jindal-Nungesser barriers cannot keep floating oil out of coastal marshes. Tidal currents carrying oil will inexorably find a way around rocks and sand berms. By the same token, despite the anti-science policy of state officials, coastal researchers will inevitably find a way to get involved in studying the BP blowout and its consequences. First a little history is in order.

Pre-BP delta war

The Mississippi River delta, like all the great deltas of the world, is the subaerial (visible) expression of a seven thousand year delta war, an ongoing struggle between riverine and marine forces, mediated by living organisms. For about seven millennia the Big Muddy dumped suspended clays, silts and sands at the gulf coast; marine tides and storms reworked these sediments; and plants and shell-building animals contributed organic carbon and mineral carbonates to stabilize and elevate the surface veneer that people now occupy.

For roughly the first 6,900 years the river maintained a slight advantage over ocean forces. Delta plants and reef-building critters helped what was to become south Louisiana expand progressively southward into the sea, accreting slightly faster than it dissipated. Then, about a century ago, humans intervened in nature’s deltaic war by harnessing the river’s course with dikes and channels. This tipped the balance of power toward the gulf, enhancing the influence of tides, storms and salty water. As a result, Louisiana’s geographic footprint soon began to sink and shrink.

During the last fifty years, coastal oil and gas production, new navigation channels, reef shell dredging, etc., dealt additional blows to the deltaic landscape, priming the pump for an oily BP coup de grace.

This sad and sordid history reminds me of the misguided twentieth century French and American meddling in the Mekong delta, first in a colonial war and later a civil war. We’ve been losing the Mississippi delta to nature, just as we lost the Mekong delta to Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Cong.

The geographic outcome of Mississippi meddling has been the loss of roughly 2,300 square miles of incredibly productive deltaic wetlands. The remaining landscape is increasingly vulnerable to human caused climate change, with rising sea level, stronger hurricanes, more extreme flood-drought events and increasingly acidic ocean water. All these changes have abetted the BP oil invasion.

What a revolting development this turned out to be!

The few LaCoastPost readers old enough to remember the 1950s situation comedy The Life of Riley may also remember that the star, the late William Bendix, began each show with the above exclamation, This expression pretty well captures our current situation.

The BP blowout is the worst (short term) human-caused insult ever foisted on the Gulf of Mexico. This event is seen by many coastal scientists as an enormous accidental experiment, rife with career-making research opportunities, the chance of a lifetime to work on an applied issue with enormous global implications.

The BP catastrophe is like a candle flame to these coastal ‘techno-moths’ whose chief professional motivation is to observe, to measure, to explain, to make predictions and to draw generic lessons from what humans are doing to Mother Nature.

BP buys up gulf experts

Coastal experts are now being courted by BP – but for the wrong reasons.

Researchers are being drafted as members of a team that could be called the BP Blowouts. Corporate attorneys, no doubt far more cautious than BP’s drilling managers, are busily filling their team roster, gearing up for a litigation contest that will likely last for years. Unfortunately, BP’s oil war games will not be fought over how best to mitigate the oil impacts but rather how to minimize BP’s liability.

On July 16, Jason Linkins posted an article in HuffingtonPost titled Oil spill lawsuits: BP spending big to acquire an army of expert witnesses. The post describes the fact that BP is drafting coastal scientists, not as researchers but as expert witnesses to help defend the company. Coastal geologist Ivor van Heerden, recently fired by LSU, has appeared in a BP video, providing an example of this recruitment effort. BP obviously respects Dr. van Heerden’s expertise more than does the state.

Robert S. Young is another coastal geologist who has become known in Louisiana as an outspoken critic of Governor Jindal’s sand berm concept. Dr. Young is an earth science professor at Western Carolina University and he told me of having been approached by BP with an enticing offer to carry out research on oil impacts but he declined when he was told that he would not own the data he collected.

The state should hire the coastal experts – and BP should pay!

A team of top coastal scientists should be recruited by the State of Louisiana as aggressively as Lebron James was courted by Miami. This team should be authorized to direct a war against the most challenging environmental accident in the history of the gulf. Given the economic downturn and ongoing university budget cuts, filling the team roster should be far easier – and less expensive – than getting Lebron’s John Hancock.

BP should bankroll this science team but Governor Jindal should sign the checks. Given the governor’s cold shoulder to coastal science I won’t hold my breath.

*Some cynics think that the oily war games are motivated by a campaign against the Obama administration, but that’s another issue.