The Gulf Oil Spill, Redux
June 2, 2010
History does not repeat itself in the literal sense. But there is a predictability to human nature, and so in more general terms, the types of situations humans create do tend to reappear from time to time. Since collective memory tends to be short, however, we tend to see each new manifestation of a problem as something newer than it really is. And it’s hard to conclude that we really learn as much from what has gone on before as we could, and perhaps should.
Consider the year 1979, which is not exactly ancient times. Even though many of the problems from that year continue to exert some influence in the world today, we tend to not think much about them. But there was a lot going on back in 1979: The revolution in Iran swept the Ayatollah Khomeini into power; Saddam Hussein became president of Iraq; the Three-Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania had a partial meltdown; the USSR invaded Afghanistan. And, interstingly enough there was a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
On June 3, 1979, the Ixtoc I oil well blew out. The rig burned down and huge amounts of oil leaked into the open water. The incident was widely reported at the time. It was later one of the topics investigated during preparaton of the Oil Pollution act of 1990, which came as a response to the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989.
Over the duration of the Ixtoc spill, many approaches to solving the problem were tried. But it took months before the leak was capped. The total result was that about 475,000 metric tons [emphasis added] of oil spilled into the Gulf, according to “Ixtoc I: A Case Study of the World’s Largest Oil Spill” (a paper published by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences; find it here). The authors of this paper conclude that of this amount, “approximately 24,000 metric tons of oil landed on Mexican beaches, about 4000 metric tons landed on Texas beaches.”
Apparently, there are more than a few similarities between the 1979 incident and the problem in the Gulf today. But so far, other than a mention on Rachel Maddow’s show on MSNBC and a few other sources, there seems to be little awareness of the Ixtoc incident, or of other major oil spills. The way government officials speak about the BP spill of 2010, moreover, makes it unclear whether they are even aware of the past history of this type of incident. Surely, one cannot learn from something if one is unaware of it or if one has only a passing familiarity with it.
The entire history of major oil spills prompts many questions that could help us understand better how these sorts of situations develop an how best to prevent them. The whole business certainly makes a person wonder about a lot of things.
