And, consider the 2002 sinking of the MV Prestige<\/em>. The tanker split in half off the coast of Spain, spilling more than 70 million liters of highly toxic bunker fuel that coated more than 600 beaches with oil. The catastrophe killed some 300,000 seabirds. Although response teams diligently cleaned thousands of animals, most of the birds died within a week. Only a few hundred ever made it back to the wild. In fact, said Gaus, studies indicate that, in general, the post-treatment survival rate of oil-soaked birds is less than one percent.<\/p>\n After the tanker MV Prestige<\/em> split in half, spilling more than 70 million liters of oil off the coast of Spain in 2002, it continued to leak oil from its resting place on the seabed. Thousands joined the cleanup effort, including these soldiers. Photo by age fotostock\/Alamy Stock Photo<\/p><\/div>\n Not all bird cleaning is futile. Rescuers saved thousands of penguins following the MV Treasure<\/em> spill off South Africa in 2000, for example. Success stories, however, are rare. In the Gulf of Mexico, the giant BP spill probably killed nearly a million birds. Gaus\u2019s comments highlighted two uncomfortable realities: cleaning oily birds is a risky business, and the marine oil spill cleanup can often do more harm than good.<\/p>\n In many respects, society\u2019s theatrical response to catastrophic oil spills resembles the way medical professionals respond to aggressive cancer in an elderly patient. Because surgery is available, it is often used. Surgery also creates the impression that the health care system is doing something even though it can\u2019t change or reverse the patient\u2019s ultimate condition. In an oil-based society, the cleanup delusion is also irresistible. Just as it is difficult for us to acknowledge the limits of medical intervention, society struggles to acknowledge the limits of technologies or the consequences of energy habits. And that\u2019s where the state of marine oil spill response sits today: it creates little more than an illusion of a cleanup. Scientists\u2014outside the oil industry\u2014call it \u201cprime-time theater\u201d or \u201cresponse theater.\u201d<\/p>\n An oil spill in Cape Town\u2019s Table Bay threatened 40 percent of an endangered species, the African penguin population that inhabits Robben and Dassen Islands. Photo by AfriPics.com\/Alamy Stock Photo<\/p><\/div>\n The hard scientific reality is this: a big spill is almost impossible to contain because it is physically impossible to mobilize the labor needed and current cleanup technologies in a timely fashion. When the city of Vancouver<\/a> released a study in 2015 on the effectiveness of responses to large tanker or pipeline spills along the southern coast of British Columbia, the conclusion was blunt: \u201ccollecting and removing oil from the sea surface is a challenging, time-sensitive, and often ineffective process,\u201d even in calm water.<\/p>\n Scientists have recognized this reality for a long time. During the 1970s when the oil industry was poised to invade the Beaufort Sea, the Canadian government employed more than 100 researchers to gauge the impacts of an oil spill on Arctic ice. The researchers doused sea ducks and ring seals with oil and set pools of oil on fire under a variety of ice conditions. They also created sizable oil spills (one was almost 60,000 liters, a medium-sized spill) in the Beaufort Sea and tried to contain them with booms and skimmers. They prodded polar bears into a man-made oil slick only to discover that bears, like birds, will lick oil off their matted fur and later die of kidney failure. In the end, the Beaufort Sea Project<\/a> concluded that \u201coil spill countermeasures, techniques, and equipment\u201d would have \u201climited effectiveness\u201d on ice-covered waters. The reports, however, failed to stop Arctic drilling.<\/p>\n Part of the illusion has been created by ineffective technologies adopted and billed by industry as \u201cworld class.\u201d Ever since the 1970s, the oil and gas industry has trotted out four basic ways to deal with ocean spills: booms to contain the oil; skimmers to remove the oil; fire to burn the oil; and chemical dispersants, such as Corexit, to break the oil into smaller pieces. For small spills these technologies can sometimes make a difference, but only in sheltered waters. None has ever been effective in containing large spills.<\/p>\n Conventional containment booms, for example, don\u2019t work in icy water, or where waves run amok. Burning oil merely transforms one grave problem\u2014water pollution\u2014into sooty greenhouse gases and creates air pollution. Dispersants only hide the oil by scattering small droplets into the water column, yet they often don\u2019t even do that since conditions have to be just right for dispersants to work. Darryl McMahon, a director of RESTCo, a firm pursuing more effective cleanup technologies, has written extensively about the problem, and his opinion<\/a> remains: \u201cSadly, even after over 40 years experience, the outcomes are not acceptable. In many cases, the strategy is still to ignore spills on open water, only addressing them when the slicks reach shore.\u201d<\/p>\n The issue partly boils down to scale, explains Jeffrey Short, a retired National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research chemist who studied the aftermath of the 2010 BP disaster as well as the Exxon Valdez<\/em> spill in Prince William Sound, which grew at the alarming rate of half a football field per second over two days. \u201cGo try and control something like that,\u201d says Short. Yet almost 30 years after the Exxon Valdez<\/em> contaminated much of Prince William Sound, the cleanup technology has changed little.<\/p>\n![](\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/soldiers-oil-spill-mythology.jpg\")
<\/a>A Theatrical Response<\/h2>\n
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<\/a>Truth Bombs<\/h2>\n
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