The BP Oil Spill Cleanup Isn’t a Disaster

In early March a 30,000-pound mat of oily gunk washed up on East Grand Terre, a barrier island in the mouth of Louisiana’s Barataria Bay. It was an ugly reminder of the blowout at BP’s Macondo well, a disaster that spewed millions of barrels of crude into the Gulf of Mexico starting on April 20, 2010. As BP crews collected the muck, the company issued a five-year report, Environmental Recovery and Restoration, stressing that the spill didn’t do lasting damage to the ecosystem. The 40-page report described the deleterious effects as “limited in space and time, mostly in the area very close to the wellhead.” BP’s U.S. spokesman, Geoff Morrell, told reporters that the state exacerbated contamination on East Grand Terre with a 2010 beach-replenishment initiative that wound up “burying the oil under layers of sand.”

Louisiana officials saw it otherwise. “Oh, yeah, this is absolutely our fault,” Kyle Graham, executive director of the state Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, responded sarcastically during a March 19 interview with WWLTV in New Orleans. “And the dead baby dolphin y’all saw out there was the dolphin’s fault.” Graham went on to give voice to the pessimism of politicians and environmentalists who found BP’s report incredible: “They actually believe that the Gulf, that the actions they’ve done in response, have healed the Gulf, and that all of the decades’ worth of knowledge about the effects of oil on these natural environments—the likelihood that these effects will last for generations—isn’t true.”