The Slow Disaster

This is something new. The mess that is even now unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico is a very rare, very worrisome kind of trouble, the kind that end when the dust has settled. In a traditional disaster - and this includes both natural and man-made catastrophes - there are two stages: wreck and recovery.

What we face now is a slow disaster, the rarest and worst kind. This is not simply something we can react to - it is something we must get out ahead of. And, more than a week out, that hasn't happened yet.

When the Deepwater Horizon blew up on April 22, it looked like a typical tragedy - the kind that pass with such numbing speed across television screens across America. It seemed like nothing more than a different take on the mine collapse a few weeks earlier: a horrible human event, but nothing more.

That night, I was told by TV news that "they" didn't think that the platform would collapse. It occurred to me that they hadn't expected it to blow up, either. When it collapsed the next day, I wasn't surprised, although I find myself now a bit troubled by how nonplussed that seems. This was all overshadowed by the realization that oil was still coming out of the well far below. Oil that couldn't be stopped.

A month ago I read "Beyond Oil," an excellent book by ex-industry man Ken Deffeyes. Although most of the text was about a world that had already used up more than half of its allotted supply of oil, one interesting part covered the mechanics of how oil forms. One of the very interesting things about oil is that it's been trapped, hermetically, underground for many millions of years. Even the smallest of leaks would cause an oil field to drain out over the eons between the age of the dinosaurs and today. Oil fields, as a result, quite simply don't have these problems - any of the ones that did bled out long before the rise of humanity. The stuff we've been using has to be dug for.

And now we're in trouble. Real trouble.

This whole event has a tragic implausibility to it beyond even the assessed damage to lives, livelihoods and environment. This has simply never happened before - although the various components of the disaster are not unheard-of, this collection is new. If this were on land, it wouldn't be a problem (land oil rigs used to have a big problem in the way of fires, which were often managed though explosion. The act of blowing up a flaming well was enough to deprive it of oxygen and extinguish the blaze.) If this were in shallower water, known containment methods could be employed. But this is something altogether ghastly and new - something we have not yet seen the end of.