Tar Balls

It is summer and time for visiting, so I was on the West Coast near Los Angeles this past weekend.

Standing above Laguna Beach, watching the beauty of the surf play against the palms, warm sun on my face, I looked down; three little tar balls, stuck to the bottom of my flip-flop, stinky, and full of sand and dead grass and little rocks. The far off storm that was kicking up the surf had also brought them ashore.

Appropriate, I thought, as there is an oil spill in the Gulf.

During the first helpless days and weeks of the now-dubbed national disaster, it was impossible for me not to look back at the nation’s previous experience with major, high-profile oil spills. Specifically, the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989, in which a tanker ship ran aground in Prince William Sound, Alaska, releasing somewhere in the neighborhood of 250,000 barrels (10.8 million U.S. gallons) of crude oil into the bay. That is a number that’s hard to wrap your head around. So are the numbers coming out of the Gulf.

Of course, while the Exxon Valdez spill had an upper limit on the amount of oil that could be released, the oil and gas spilling into the Gulf is theoretically boundless, at least until the flow is stopped. Which is why, all told, the Gulf disaster could be the largest oil spill ever.

I was in the neighborhood of 5 years old at the time of the Exxon Valdez disaster. Suffice it to say I don’t remember much about the response at the time, public, political or otherwise. Given that, I feel safe in assuming that those younger than myself, and some number of years older, are similarly afflicted with this lack of personal historical experience.

For my generation, this is our first major oil spill.

So, how have we been responding? That’s hard to say because the response seems to have been muted. Perhaps there’s a feeling of helplessness, perhaps apathy or distance, maybe even ignorance. Whatever it is, it’s safe to say that the spill occurred at the worst possible time, on the academic calendar anyway. College campuses have been busy with finals and graduation and summer.

Sure, I had my pangs of guilt getting in the car this past month, especially when the radio was tuned to a spill-related NPR program. But, in addition to fighting an onslaught of other world crises including the debt crisis in Greece and unrest in the financial markets, the spill has been visually uninteresting for all but the last week or so, when video of the oil gushing into the gulf was released and the first images of shoreline impacts started to really surface.

Maybe that’s just it—this isn’t like any other oil spill where oil has spilled on the surface of the ocean. From the sea floor, the crude from the Deepwater Horizon wellhead has to travel 5,000 feet to the ocean surface and then several hundred miles to shore. At first, the only pictures were of fish markets that were about to close, not of any oil. After all, what’s a cloudy picture of the ocean to demonstrate the extent of impending doom?

Like an iceberg lurking below the surface, the depth of the water column coupled with the use of chemical dispersants—whether they will prove to have a positive effect or not—was delaying the visual impact of the disaster. A mile of ocean is a lot of water; it’s also a deep ecosystem that is now holding and hiding much of the evidence of impact.

What does this all mean for Duke? Well, maybe nothing, at least not at first. (Sure, we have researchers that study things like oceans and wildlife and ecosystems. So, there might be an influx of work at the Duke Univeristy Marine Lab in Beaufort, N.C. if the oil that’s entered the loop current ends up on the East Coast.) But a national disaster of this magnitude should never be overlooked as an opportunity to reevaluate our priorities and practices, if only to reaffirm them. In terms of Duke’s operations and the Climate Action Plan, atmospheric carbon is likely to remain the priority. Time will tell if that priority may now be more expensive going forward, or if our course toward that goal will change.

Regardless, the remnants of my misplaced step still cling to my shoes, having resisted all efforts to disperse and dispel them. And, if those little tar balls from Laguna Beach are any indication—or the tar balls that still wash ashore in Alaska, for that matter—then I would have to predict the Gulf disaster is going to persist as a hazardous, stinky, sticky mess. I can only then imagine what the beauty of the Gulf coast is turning into, covered, like my shoe, in tar balls.