From The Sacto Bee:
The environment in the Gulf of Mexico is used to coping with petroleum,” says Tunnell. “The seabed is crisscrossed with petroleum reservoirs, and the equivalent of one to two supertankers full of oil leaks into the Gulf every year. The outcome of that is a huge population of bacteria that feed on oil and live along the shoreline.”
The bacteria as well as other marine life forms along the shoreline got a boost from a strategy employed by both the United States and Mexico: to more or less give up on stopping the oil spill from reaching beaches while concentrating on keeping it out of estuaries and wetlands.
“Texas just made a superhuman effort to keep the oil away from rivers, with two or three or four layers of booms to skim it away,” said Thomas C. Shirley, a biodiversity specialist at Texas A&M-Corpus Christi. “We know how to clean up beaches, and it’s simple. It’s just sand.”
“But you get up into wetlands, where you’re cleaning up shrubs and sea grasses, and it’s far more difficult. Everything you’re cleaning is alive, and you have to be careful not to do more harm than good.”
By keeping oil out of rivers and lagoons, authorities ensured a steady stream of nutrients back into the coastal areas. And as the spill diminished, marine life had a baby boom.
“A lot of the fishermen around here will tell you that the fish never came back,” says Vega Morales. “They’ll say, ‘Oh, in the old days, you could catch fish with your hat, it was so easy.’ That’s how we are, always talking about the one that got away. But the truth is, after maybe nine months or so, it was back to normal.”
Ironically, it was hurricane season that helped to clean the Gulf out in 1979, at least on the U.S. side. Mexico didn’t have the effects of that “flushing effect” from Mother Nature. And Ixtoc was, of course, far larger than the Deepwater Horizon accident. Plus, Pemex refused to pay for damages to public or private entities in the U.S., which BP is not doing.
I still think that this one will take years to get cleaned up. And the problem is that 1) the economy was already bad in the U.S. Also, 2) the Administration’s moratorium on drilling in the Gulf is going to increase the economic devastation—it’s not as if fishing and tourism can carry the load right now.
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