VENICE, La. — Hurricane season officially starts Tuesday, and the real worry is that a storm might turn the millions of gallons of floating crude from the Gulf of Mexico spill into a crashing black surf.
The Gulf is a superhighway for hurricanes that form or explode over pools of hot water, then usually move north or west toward the coast.
Some fear a combination of damaging winds and large waves pushing oil deeper into estuaries and wetlands and coating miles of debris-littered coastline in a pungent, sticky mess.
And the worst effects of an oil-soaked storm surge might not be felt for years: If oil is pushed deep into coastal marshes that act as a natural speed bump for storm surges, areas including New Orleans could be more vulnerable to bad storms for a long time.
Joe Bastardi, chief long-range hurricane forecaster with AccuWeather.com, offered some optimism.
“I’m sure a hurricane would do a great deal of diluting the oil, spreading it out where the concentrations would be much less damaging.”
Experts are predicting a busy hurricane season with powerful storms. Bastardi predicts seven named storms, five hurricanes and two or three major hurricanes will have an effect on land this year. Colorado State University researchers Philip Klotzbach and William Gray predict a 69 percent chance that at least one major hurricane will make landfall on the U.S. and a 44 percent chance that a major hurricane will hit the Gulf Coast.
Hurricane season begins June 1 and runs through November. Early season storms are uncommon; the busy part of the season is in August through October. Stronger storms typically form during this time.
BP has been scrambling for a way to stem the flow of oil. The most promising solution — but still without any guarantees — is the drilling of a relief well that has been ongoing. But that won’t be completed until at least two months.
By Aug. 1, even under the best-case scenario offered by federal scientists, there could be about 51 million gallons of oil spilled into the Gulf.
There is a chance that a hurricane or tropical storm could offer wetlands a reprieve from the oil, at the expense of areas farther inland. A storm surge of several feet, even if it is carrying oil, would pass over the top of the outer, low-lying marshes and disperse the mess in less toxic amounts, Suhayda said.
But such a storm could also push oil into freshwater marshes where ducks and geese thrive, said David White, a biological sciences professor at Loyola University New Orleans.
“It wouldn’t take a hurricane to create a mess, even a tropical storm could cause problems,” said William Hawkins, director of the University of Southern Mississippi’s Gulf Coast research laboratory.
A hurricane could also push the oil in a new direction.
“I think what worries us most is the hurricane taking oil to areas that probably wouldn’t be hit hard otherwise, like the Florida Panhandle and Texas,” said Gregory Stone, director of the Coastal Studies Institute at LSU.
Even though the oil has yet to reach Florida, state Attorney General Bill McCollum recently sent a letter to BP asking the company to assure him it would pay up if a tropical storm or hurricane pushes oil ashore, which he believes “will capture the oil in its path and deposit it much further inland.”
Bastardi said that in the near term at least, the storms themselves remain the chief threat.
“If a Category 3 hurricane is headed to the Texas Gulf Coast — and this is simply theoretical — I wouldn’t be worried as much about damage from the oil, as the damage from the hurricane,” Bastardi said.
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