Avertible catastrophe
LawrenceSolomon, Financial Post ·Saturday, Jun. 26, 2010
Someare attuned to the possibility of looming catastrophe and know how to head itoff. Others are unprepared for risk and even unable to get their prioritiesstraight when risk turns to reality.
TheDutch fall into the first group. Three days after the BP oil spill in the Gulfof Mexico began on April 20, the Netherlands offered the U.S. government shipsequipped to handle a major spill, one much larger than the BP spill that thenappeared to be underway. "Our system can handle 400 cubic metres perhour," Weird Koops, the chairman of Spill Response Group Holland, toldRadio Netherlands Worldwide, giving each Dutch ship more cleanup capacity thanall the ships that the U.S. was then employing in the Gulf to combat the spill.
Toprotect against the possibility that its equipment wouldn't capture all the oilgushing from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, the Dutch also offered toprepare for the U.S. a contingency plan to protect Louisiana's marshlands withsand barriers. One Dutch research institute specializing in deltas, coastalareas and rivers, in fact, developed a strategy to begin building 60-mile-longsand dikes within three weeks.
TheDutch know how to handle maritime emergencies. In the event of an oil spill,The Netherlands government, which owns its own ships and high-tech skimmers,gives an oil company 12 hours to demonstrate it has the spill in hand. If thecompany shows signs of unpreparedness, the government dispatches its own shipsat the oil company's expense. "If there's a country that's experiencedwith building dikes and managing water, it's the Netherlands," says GeertVisser, the Dutch consul general in Houston.
Insharp contrast to Dutch preparedness before the fact and the Dutch instinct todive into action once an emergency becomes apparent, witness the Americanreaction to the Dutch offer of help. The U.S. government responded with"Thanks but no thanks," remarked Visser, despite BP's desire to bringin the Dutch equipment and despite the no-lose nature of the Dutch offer --theDutch government offered the use of its equipment at no charge. Even after theU.S. refused, the Dutch kept their vessels on standby, hoping the Americanswould come round. By May 5, the U.S. had not come round. To the contrary, theU.S. had also turned down offers of help from 12 other governments, most ofthem with superior expertise and equipment --unlike the U.S., Europe has robustfleets of Oil Spill Response Vessels that sail circles around their make-shiftU.S. counterparts.
Whydoes neither the U.S. government nor U.S. energy companies have on hand thecleanup technology available in Europe? Ironically, the superior Europeantechnology runs afoul of U.S. environmental rules. The voracious Dutch vessels,for example, continuously suck up vast quantities of oily water, extract mostof the oil and then spit overboard vast quantities of nearly oil-free water.Nearly oil-free isn't good enough for the U.S. xregulators, who have a standardof 15 parts per million -- if water isn't at least 99.9985% pure, it may not bereturned to the Gulf of Mexico.
Whenships in U.S. waters take in oil-contaminated water, they are forced to storeit. As U.S. Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, the official in charge of theclean-up operation, explained in a press briefing on June 11, "We haveskimmed, to date, about 18 million gallons of oily water--the oil has to bedecanted from that [and] our yield is usually somewhere around 10% or 15% on that."In other words, U.S. ships have mostly been removing water from the Gulf,requiring them to make up to 10 times as many trips to storage facilities wherethey off-load their oil-water mixture, an approach Koops calls"crazy."
TheAmericans, overwhelmed by the catastrophic consequences of the BP spill,finally relented and took the Dutch up on their offer -- but only partly.Because the U.S. didn't want Dutch ships working the Gulf, the U.S. airliftedthe Dutch equipment to the Gulf and then retrofitted it to U.S. vessels. Andrather than have experienced Dutch crews immediately operate the oil-skimmingequipment, to appease labour unions the U.S. postponed the clean-up operationto allow U.S. crews to be trained.
Acatastrophe that could have been averted is now playing out. With oilincreasingly reaching the Gulf coast, the emergency construction of sand bernsto minimize the damage is imperative. Again, the U.S. government priority is onU.S. jobs, with the Dutch asked to train American workers rather than to buildthe berns. According to Floris Van Hovell, a spokesman for the Dutch embassy inWashington, Dutch dredging ships could complete the berms in Louisiana twice asfast as the U.S. companies awarded the work. "Given the fact that there isso much oil on a daily basis coming in, you do not have that much time toprotect the marshlands," he says, perplexed that the U.S. government couldbe so focussed on side issues with the entire Gulf Coast hanging in thebalance.
Thenagain, perhaps he should not be all that perplexed at the American tolerancefor turning an accident into a catastrophe. When the Exxon Valdez oil tankeraccident occurred off the coast of Alaska in 1989, a Dutch team with clean-upequipment flew in to Anchorage airport to offer their help. To their amazement,they were rebuffed and told to go home with their equipment. The Exxon Valdezbecame the biggest oil spill disaster in U.S. history--until the BP Gulf spill.
-Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and author of TheDeniers.
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