Oil spill on South Padre calls for a slick response

Last week, an oil spill showed up as thick gelatinous beach ball-sized blobs of sticky crude oil on Texas’ South Padre Island beaches and Boca Chica Beach in the height of the summer beach season. The current nightmare — beach closings, expensive clean-up processes, and a hit on the tourist area’s reputation — is the bad dream that haunts tourist-based coastal economies around the US and the world. It is also a reason why the “drill here, drill now” crowd have a hard time convincing congressmen from Florida and California, for instance, to agree to allowing offshore drilling within reach of their states’ sandy beaches.

Fear of an oilfield well disaster are exaggerated, with today’s safer, more technologically advanced rigs, but shipping disasters, the primary cause of oil spills, are more commonplace, despite the push to build double-hulled oil tankers in the wake of the Mother of Oil Spills (at least in the mind of the US public) the ExxonValdez disaster. Exxon Mobil’s biggest environmental black eye began when oil tanker ExxonValdez spilled some 11 million gallons of oil into Alaska’s Prince William Sound in 1989, polluting the Sound and killing at least 250,000 seabirds and a host of other animals. Exxon Mobil spent billions on the cleanup and decades in litigating damages in the federal courts.

In 2009 maritime oil spills have already generated consternation through a number of incidents and alerts. In February near Cork, Ireland, a refueling accident involving a number of Russian military vessels resulted in an oil slick that at one time threatened the Irish and Welsh coasts before breaking up at sea. In March, in Australia, a container ship’s fuel tank was damaged in rough seas and 30 tonnes of oil spilled into Morton Bay. There have been several smaller incidents in US territorial waters. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (the aptly acronymed NOAA) even has a web site hosted by its National Ocean Service division that monitors them and posts them on Incident News.

Back to the South Padre oil spill. Unlike the blob that nearly ate Alaska, the slick that came onshore in South Padre was not an organic mass of relative harmless algae; this was the real tarry stuff. Within a day or two of the oil coming ashore last week, some seven 55-million gallon drums of the oil had been removed from the beach, which was closed to the public.

Here’s the good news. The spill was relatively small. Chemical testing of the oil will trace the release to the likely culprit who, if proven guilty, will be fined.

Here’s the really good news — no more oil is coming on shore, the beaches are reopening, and only one bird has been reported to have been killed by the oil. (OK, not so much good news for that bird.)

The slick response to the (fortunately) minor spill minimized the disruption of the normal beach life of both humans and animals.

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Photo by obbino, used under a Creative Commons license.