Hurricane season and Gulf of Mexico oil spill not a good mix

Hurricane season in the Atlantic begins Tuesday and that's significant from an environmental standpoint because if a hurricane enters the Gulf of Mexico before the gigantic mess is contained it could hamper cleanup and containment efforts and significantly widen the scope of an already devastating disaster.

A strong storm could actually lift droplets of oil and rain them down upon the land. Meteorologist Jim Rouiller, in a recent Bloomberg News story,  said that if a storm churned into the spill area it'd represent "an unthinkable bio-environmental disaster."

UC San Diego scientist Peter Niiler, in a Discovery News story, said oil "will be everywhere in the Gulf and East Coast of the U.S." if a hurricane enters the Gulf with a large slick still present.

Some are referring the Deepwater Horizon spill, now five weeks old, as Obama's Katrina, in reference to a Category 3 hurricane that killed nearly 2,000 people and caused widespread destruction in New Orleans and much of the Gulf Coast region in 2005, and to the slow response by the Bush administration.

So what if another Katrina-like storm, with its ferocious winds, slams the Gulf shore with a giant slick still present? It could not only breach levees but shove oil into the the Mississippi River, stifling commercial navigation.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has used this scenario in drills, so at least there will be some preparedness. The Corps also supports a project to erect sand barriers along the Gulf Coast in places that currently do not seem to be in jeopardy of becoming oiled.

It's wise to plan ahead. Last year only nine tropical storms developed during the Atlantic hurricane season. Experts at Colorado State University are predicting a significantly more active 2010 season, with 15 named storms and eight hurricanes.

The probability of a major hurricane (Category 3-5) making landfall along the Gulf Coast from the Florida Panhandle to Brownsville, Texas, is 44%. That's well above the 30% average over past seasons.

There are no storms brewing yet, however, except for that which centers over how the cleanup of this latest spill has been handled.

-- Pete Thomas

Photo: Hurricane Katrina spins along the Gulf Coast in 2005

Comments

[Ben Cazto]

We need to stop offshore oil drilling

[sharmawebsolution]

Oil seeps up from the bottom of the gulf all the time. The salt water breaks it down. What most are not taught is that oil is a very natural product that is produced by the earth. It's great that we find so many uses for such a product, like making computers and TV's and roads and just about everything we see around us. So nature will absorb the oil, as it always does. Most of it is already gone and they haven't even tapped it off completely. Nothing to be scared about. Don't listen to the hysterical biased media. They want you scared and upset. We should be very angry at the environmentalists who force them to drill in such deep water when it would be much easier and safer to get all the oil closer to shore, or even on shore where it seeps up from the ground.