fogtender
Now a Published Author
Started working oil spills almost forty years ago, not much has changed. Can't even tell you how many of them I have worked on starting when I was in the Coast Guard to it appears the Gulf Spill in a few weeks.
The most famous was the EXXON Valdez, and to the lessor the M/V Selendan Ayu freighter that hit the rocks and split in half about sixty miles West of Dutch Harbor in Scan Bay. Spilling about 400,000+ gallons of Bunker C crude along about forty miles of Coast line.
Selendang Ayu after breaking in half in 2005
In spite of the hand wringing of the spill in the Gulf, the oil that is hitting the beach has been weathered for almost a month and most of the volatiles that make it a solvent are gone, mostly evaporated in the warm waters of the Gulf. The brown yucky stuff you see hitting the beach in the news is what is called "Mousse" (moose) and is about 80% water, when it dries it will be the consistency of a taco shell and can be picked up off the beach like trash.
Been though this when I was cleaning the EXXON Valdez spill, the oil that was thirty days out had no viscosity to sink into the ground by the time it got to Halo Bay where I worked the spill. It just laid on the beach and dried out or had sand pull over it, in either event, it was inert for the most part, looked pretty ugly though. There were thousands of birds that died, we had feathers all over the tide-lines long after the oil was getting hard to find to send the cleanup crews to work them.
The point of impact where the first oil from the EXXON Valdez hit the beach was a mess, it was still like a solvent or a heavy diesel fuel for those that haven't seen Alaskan Crude Oil, it sank into the beach and down into the water table where there is some still remaining, but as you travel out from Knight Island where the spill first made landfall, it made less and less of an impact as it floated in the water and much of it evaporated.
Katmai National Park is about 400 miles to the West of the Prince William Sound where the EXXON Valdez hit the reef. It took about thirty days for that oil to get there. When it hit the beaches it was like a chocolate pudding, it had no viscosity to it, it was like a pudding and just laid on the sand, rocks or whatever, it didn't sink in.
This is what that oil looked like as it hit landfall after thirty days at sea from the EXXON Valdez spill at Halo Bay in the Katmai National Park. If you look, the oil is not sinking into the sand at this stage of it's making landfall after a month or so. Looks bad, but just sits there.
This is where the oil "Mousse" hit the beach and the twenty foot tides pulled sand down over it, we had to dig down to it, but it again wasn't sinking into the sand, it was more like a pudding that just sat there. It was all the way up under the grass, which was doing just fine.
This image has been resized. Click this bar to view the full image. The original image is sized 912x608 and weights 91KB.
This oil had sat on the beach for about a week before we could get the cleanup crews to start shoving it into bags for removal. It is starting to dry out and shortly would dry to about a taco shell consistency, just black and not edible.
This image has been resized. Click this bar to view the full image. The original image is sized 1275x1725 and weights 249KB.
During the M/V Selendang Ayu spill, it was a Bunker C crude, it is a bit thicker than crude oil because some of the lighter's have been removed at a refinery, but still made a mess after it hit landfall. This was about a week after the spill hit Scan Bay.
This image has been resized. Click this bar to view the full image. The original image is sized 1279x959 and weights 182KB.
After winter storms subsided in the Bering Sea, we were able to get cleanup crews on the beaches to start the removal of the oil from the tide-line. Note where the cleanup crews are at in this April photo, the grass is only green where the oil is at.
As the cleanup progressed the oil was all over the vegetation and was the grasses were growing up though it, was hard to clean up the oil without cutting the grass as well. Later on, where we had removed the grass, it was almost twice as tall where it all grew back and did very well. We had to cut up the sections of oil like cutting a piece of cake and put it into bags.
Oil is 100% biodegradable, in spite of all those that scream it isn't, it is natural vegetation, fertilizer is made from it because it is organic and there is bacteria that naturally eat it when it can. The fact that it has sat underground for millions of years is what made it oil, and yeah I know, it is carbon based, so is most life forms.
I get all sort of people telling me that oil isn't biodegradable and they quote all sorts of science that says it don't... But now we have the Gulf disaster and they are worried that the Bacteria that naturally eats the oil is doing so under the water and may deplete the oxygen.... The fact that science seems to only apply when it is a disaster to the folks that claim the sky is falling is sad, to say the least.
Well for what "Little" science that I know of, when an animal breaths in Oxygen and puts out Carbon Dioxide, the plants speed up growth and they turn it back into Oxygen, so I would say I wouldn't panic yet on that issue, nobody really knows.
What I do know and is the jest of my writing this, is that the oil in the Gulf is making landfall after a month, and it appears most of the oil that does will be sitting in warm water that allows it to breakup and allows the solvents to evaporate. What is left is the same stuff that I have dealt with many times over the years, a "Mousse". When it hits the beaches, it won't sink into the sand, it will just rest on top and look bad. The summer heat there will cause the water to evaporate out of the "Mousse" and cause it to shrink to a shell that can be picked up and put in a bag.
The plants that it is getting into, some may die, but in most cases it will still be alive and start really growing. There will be however many dead birds and animals that are involved with the Mousse as it comes ashore. Too much of anything is toxic, drop a thousand pounds of whipped cream on someone and they will suffocate.
At this point I will get all sorts of people claiming I don't know what I am talking about, point is, this is what I have been doing for years and those same folks have more than likely never seen crude oil outside of at TV Special.
So having said that, I will tell you that after the leak is stopped and cleanup is in full swing, after about four months (or a hurricane) there will be a lot of people looking for something that won't be there.
This is a video done by the WWF about the EXXON Valdez spill to make you think that oil is all over the place. Before you watch it, remember you can't smell what they claim and they show no oil as they dig, they only show clear water under the rocks, they didn't find any and they claimed oil was everywhere, but they do show shots of oil from twenty years earlier, and a shovel in the water that appears to have had someone put motor oil on it and dip it in the water. Not very honest, more of an attempt to get you to send money verses what really happened. There is places where oil is under the beach, but doesn't have sheens or smell all over unless you dig them up, but in time they too will be eaten by the natural bacteria.
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbjC9SMKClE"]YouTube - The Exxon Valdez Disaster: 20 Years Later[/ame]
Within a year, the Gulf oil will have become a memory that affected a lot of people negatively from job losses in the fishing industry, but will rebound. Others will put their fishing boats to work and make good money out of a bad deal. They never told anyone that after the EXXON Valdez spill, record amounts of Salmon returned to the point the prices where driven down... The oil didn't wipe them out as claimed. I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years as the bacteria grows that eats the oil, there will be a major increase of other critters feeding on them all the way up the food chain and the shrimp will return in even greater numbers.
The Gulf will recover, more damage will be caused by the current administrations shutting down all oil production in the Gulf and Alaska. You think the fisherman had it bad, they don't put nearly as much money into the Gulf economies as the oil companies do and times will really be hitting the skids as everything hits bottom.
But the world isn't coming to an end, in time all will return to normal, the people that side with the lawyers like the fishermen did in Alaska, won't get paid for twenty years and the Lawyers will make all the money as they did from EXXON. The people that settle up front, will make as much money, pay their bills and get on with their lives.
There is nothing nice about any oil spill, there is great loss of wildlife, people's lives are turned on end, but things will recover.
Don't have any magic wand to make things better, but this is an attempt to give some insight to who will listen that there is a light at the end of the tunnel, and it isn't the Train, but once in a while it seems like it is!
For those that feel the world is doomed, they may be right, but it will be from some folks from the Mideast setting a nuke off in a place like NY, then the oil spill won't even be an issue instantly.
I am pro oil exploration, as well as pro regulation to ensure it is done cleanly, we are going to have accidents in the future as we have had in the past, what we can do is learn from them and do it better next time.
The most famous was the EXXON Valdez, and to the lessor the M/V Selendan Ayu freighter that hit the rocks and split in half about sixty miles West of Dutch Harbor in Scan Bay. Spilling about 400,000+ gallons of Bunker C crude along about forty miles of Coast line.
Selendang Ayu after breaking in half in 2005
In spite of the hand wringing of the spill in the Gulf, the oil that is hitting the beach has been weathered for almost a month and most of the volatiles that make it a solvent are gone, mostly evaporated in the warm waters of the Gulf. The brown yucky stuff you see hitting the beach in the news is what is called "Mousse" (moose) and is about 80% water, when it dries it will be the consistency of a taco shell and can be picked up off the beach like trash.
Been though this when I was cleaning the EXXON Valdez spill, the oil that was thirty days out had no viscosity to sink into the ground by the time it got to Halo Bay where I worked the spill. It just laid on the beach and dried out or had sand pull over it, in either event, it was inert for the most part, looked pretty ugly though. There were thousands of birds that died, we had feathers all over the tide-lines long after the oil was getting hard to find to send the cleanup crews to work them.
The point of impact where the first oil from the EXXON Valdez hit the beach was a mess, it was still like a solvent or a heavy diesel fuel for those that haven't seen Alaskan Crude Oil, it sank into the beach and down into the water table where there is some still remaining, but as you travel out from Knight Island where the spill first made landfall, it made less and less of an impact as it floated in the water and much of it evaporated.
Katmai National Park is about 400 miles to the West of the Prince William Sound where the EXXON Valdez hit the reef. It took about thirty days for that oil to get there. When it hit the beaches it was like a chocolate pudding, it had no viscosity to it, it was like a pudding and just laid on the sand, rocks or whatever, it didn't sink in.
This is what that oil looked like as it hit landfall after thirty days at sea from the EXXON Valdez spill at Halo Bay in the Katmai National Park. If you look, the oil is not sinking into the sand at this stage of it's making landfall after a month or so. Looks bad, but just sits there.
This is where the oil "Mousse" hit the beach and the twenty foot tides pulled sand down over it, we had to dig down to it, but it again wasn't sinking into the sand, it was more like a pudding that just sat there. It was all the way up under the grass, which was doing just fine.
This oil had sat on the beach for about a week before we could get the cleanup crews to start shoving it into bags for removal. It is starting to dry out and shortly would dry to about a taco shell consistency, just black and not edible.
During the M/V Selendang Ayu spill, it was a Bunker C crude, it is a bit thicker than crude oil because some of the lighter's have been removed at a refinery, but still made a mess after it hit landfall. This was about a week after the spill hit Scan Bay.
After winter storms subsided in the Bering Sea, we were able to get cleanup crews on the beaches to start the removal of the oil from the tide-line. Note where the cleanup crews are at in this April photo, the grass is only green where the oil is at.
As the cleanup progressed the oil was all over the vegetation and was the grasses were growing up though it, was hard to clean up the oil without cutting the grass as well. Later on, where we had removed the grass, it was almost twice as tall where it all grew back and did very well. We had to cut up the sections of oil like cutting a piece of cake and put it into bags.
Oil is 100% biodegradable, in spite of all those that scream it isn't, it is natural vegetation, fertilizer is made from it because it is organic and there is bacteria that naturally eat it when it can. The fact that it has sat underground for millions of years is what made it oil, and yeah I know, it is carbon based, so is most life forms.
I get all sort of people telling me that oil isn't biodegradable and they quote all sorts of science that says it don't... But now we have the Gulf disaster and they are worried that the Bacteria that naturally eats the oil is doing so under the water and may deplete the oxygen.... The fact that science seems to only apply when it is a disaster to the folks that claim the sky is falling is sad, to say the least.
Well for what "Little" science that I know of, when an animal breaths in Oxygen and puts out Carbon Dioxide, the plants speed up growth and they turn it back into Oxygen, so I would say I wouldn't panic yet on that issue, nobody really knows.
What I do know and is the jest of my writing this, is that the oil in the Gulf is making landfall after a month, and it appears most of the oil that does will be sitting in warm water that allows it to breakup and allows the solvents to evaporate. What is left is the same stuff that I have dealt with many times over the years, a "Mousse". When it hits the beaches, it won't sink into the sand, it will just rest on top and look bad. The summer heat there will cause the water to evaporate out of the "Mousse" and cause it to shrink to a shell that can be picked up and put in a bag.
The plants that it is getting into, some may die, but in most cases it will still be alive and start really growing. There will be however many dead birds and animals that are involved with the Mousse as it comes ashore. Too much of anything is toxic, drop a thousand pounds of whipped cream on someone and they will suffocate.
At this point I will get all sorts of people claiming I don't know what I am talking about, point is, this is what I have been doing for years and those same folks have more than likely never seen crude oil outside of at TV Special.
So having said that, I will tell you that after the leak is stopped and cleanup is in full swing, after about four months (or a hurricane) there will be a lot of people looking for something that won't be there.
This is a video done by the WWF about the EXXON Valdez spill to make you think that oil is all over the place. Before you watch it, remember you can't smell what they claim and they show no oil as they dig, they only show clear water under the rocks, they didn't find any and they claimed oil was everywhere, but they do show shots of oil from twenty years earlier, and a shovel in the water that appears to have had someone put motor oil on it and dip it in the water. Not very honest, more of an attempt to get you to send money verses what really happened. There is places where oil is under the beach, but doesn't have sheens or smell all over unless you dig them up, but in time they too will be eaten by the natural bacteria.
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbjC9SMKClE"]YouTube - The Exxon Valdez Disaster: 20 Years Later[/ame]
Within a year, the Gulf oil will have become a memory that affected a lot of people negatively from job losses in the fishing industry, but will rebound. Others will put their fishing boats to work and make good money out of a bad deal. They never told anyone that after the EXXON Valdez spill, record amounts of Salmon returned to the point the prices where driven down... The oil didn't wipe them out as claimed. I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years as the bacteria grows that eats the oil, there will be a major increase of other critters feeding on them all the way up the food chain and the shrimp will return in even greater numbers.
The Gulf will recover, more damage will be caused by the current administrations shutting down all oil production in the Gulf and Alaska. You think the fisherman had it bad, they don't put nearly as much money into the Gulf economies as the oil companies do and times will really be hitting the skids as everything hits bottom.
But the world isn't coming to an end, in time all will return to normal, the people that side with the lawyers like the fishermen did in Alaska, won't get paid for twenty years and the Lawyers will make all the money as they did from EXXON. The people that settle up front, will make as much money, pay their bills and get on with their lives.
There is nothing nice about any oil spill, there is great loss of wildlife, people's lives are turned on end, but things will recover.
Don't have any magic wand to make things better, but this is an attempt to give some insight to who will listen that there is a light at the end of the tunnel, and it isn't the Train, but once in a while it seems like it is!
For those that feel the world is doomed, they may be right, but it will be from some folks from the Mideast setting a nuke off in a place like NY, then the oil spill won't even be an issue instantly.
I am pro oil exploration, as well as pro regulation to ensure it is done cleanly, we are going to have accidents in the future as we have had in the past, what we can do is learn from them and do it better next time.
Last edited:
Not much , but a bunch of excuses and finger pointing .........
