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Barack Obama to visit scene of US oil spill

Posted on: Mon May 03, 2010

VENICE, Louisiana: US President Barack Obama heads to Louisiana on Sunday to rally faltering efforts to protect its vulnerable shores from a giant oil slick threatening environmental and economic catastrophe.    

Heavy winds and high seas forced skimming vessels on Saturday to abandon missions to corral the growing slick, which is more than 130 miles long. Planes that drop dispersant chemicals were also grounded.    

 Mother Nature has not exactly been friendly, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said. The weather conditions have impeded in situ burning... skimming also and some of the other operations that could be under way.     

Commandant Admiral Thad Allen of the US Coast Guard, appointed by Obama to spearhead the government response, said response teams were waiting for the right window of opportunity to carry out more controlled burns on the slick.    

A trial burn on a small patch of the oil was conducted last Wednesday but since then the wind has shifted to blow the slick and toxic smoke from any oil burns directly towards the Louisiana coast.    

The forecast for Sunday was for more cruel onshore winds and Allen has warned it is a matter of when, not if, the slick makes landfall. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal said the southern state s way of life is under threat as fishermen and coastal communities finally back on their feet after 2005 s Hurricane Katrina braced for more pain. I guess we re probably going to end up out of business, Al Sunseri said of his 134-year-old processing company, P&J Oyster in New Orleans historic French Quarter, as he considered the potential impact.    

Louisiana accounts for an estimated one-third of the country s total oyster output, and the Gulf of Mexico is prime spawning ground for fish, shrimp and crabs, as well as a major stop for migratory birds.    

The spill s first victim was discovered Saturday: a brown northern gannet, struggling for freedom as its long, neck was held firmly in a towel, unaware of how lucky it was to have been found swimming in a sea of oil offshore.

In neighbouring Mississippi, BP officials told local leaders that beaches along the state coastline probably cannot be protected from the spill and will have to be cleaned after it comes ashore.    

Cleaning the intricate marshlands along Louisiana s coast, a buffer zone for hurricanes that is already quickly eroding, is likely to be a daunting task. Environmentalists said it could take decades for the maze of marshes more than 40 per cent of America s ecologically fragile wetlands to recover if waves simply wash the oil over miles of boom set up to protect the coast.    

 There probably isn t enough boom in the world to protect what needs to be protected, said Mark Floegel, a researcher with Greenpeace.    

Engineers are racing against time to shut off the flow of oil from a ruptured well some 50 miles off the coast but are getting nowhere fast as some 210,000 gallons of crude spews into the sea each day.    

Obama was to arrive in Louisiana on Sunday afternoon to survey efforts for himself, and to try to stem accusations that his administration was slow to respond to the disaster.    

There has already been some political fallout with the White House putting on hold all new domestic offshore oil drilling until the disaster has been fully investigated.    

At the current estimated rate of leakage, it would take less than eight weeks for the current spill to surpass the 11 million gallons of oil that poured from the grounded Exxon Valdez tanker in Alaska in 1989. So far, the disaster has prompted Louisiana, Florida, Alabama and Mississippi to declare states of emergency. Louisiana closed shrimping grounds and oyster beds as the slick approached.    

BP has been working on three main fronts to try to stop the oil flow streaming from the wreckage of the Deepwater Horizon rig, which sank on April 22, two days after a massive explosion that killed 11 workers.    

It has six underwater submarines trying to activate a 450-tonne blowout preventer that could turn off the supply. It also began drilling a relief well that would divert the flow of oil.    

As the first method appears not to be working and the second could take up to three months, the third idea could be crucial building a giant dome containment structure that could cover the leaks and contain the spill.

Courtesy : The News