NPR's Guy Raz talks with reporter Elizabeth Shogren who's on the Louisiana coast, monitoring the effects of the spill even as news emerges that the spill has been much,much worse than admitted.
ELIZABETH SHOGREN: I'm in Port Fourchon, which is a beach and a port area right in the Gulf of Mexico. And right now, I'm standing on the beach area, lots of big sandbags that are here to protect the shore. And the water is very choppy. Right out in the water, I can see many dozens of production rigs and oil rigs that show that this is just the hub of the offshore oil industry in America. Ninety percent of the rigs that are in the Gulf of Mexico are actually serviced from Port Fourchon. And somewhere between 15 and 20 percent of the oil that America uses comes through this area.
RAZ: And what are you seeing? Are you seeing any visible signs of the spill?
SHOGREN: Well, this beach right in front of me, it's about a 12-mile-long beach. And a couple of days ago, it was covered with lots of globs of oil. It's what they call the tar balls. It's what's left over when a lot of the oil basically evaporates into the air. And we saw some of those tar balls at a laboratory that they had collected from here just a couple of days and they are just sticky, brown, goo balls.
RAZ: Elizabeth, are you hearing whether any parts of the spill have reached other parts of Louisiana's coast?
SHOGREN: We were on another beach called Grand Isle just a couple minutes ago and there were also tar balls coming onshore there. Another island called Elmer Island, and they have some tar balls elsewhere not just on Louisiana's coast, but some of the other states' coasts as well.
RAZ: Elizabeth, we're hearing some reports, and it's hard to know how accurate they are, that some people in New Orleans and along the coast can actually smell chemicals in the air. Have you noticed any of that?
SHOGREN: We haven't smelled chemicals, but I have spoken with both researchers and people who smelled these smells. And some of them - the smells are coming from the oil and from the sheen on top of the water. And the winds right now are very strong. They're bringing the sea air in towards us. We don't happen to smell them, but other people do. And people can become nauseous from the smells and they report headaches. And so far, the Environmental Protection Agency says that they have not reached levels that are harmful to people's health.
Raz's next interview was with Dr. James Cowan, professor of oceanography and coastal sciences at Louisiana State University. Cowan's voice was controlled but somehow it betrayed a good deal of emotion. Hardly surprising for scientists who are familiar with undersea life -- something most Americans are less knowledgeable about than they are about the surface of the moon, according to one critic overheard during the past few days.
RAZ: Describe what happens to oil on its journey as it sort of begins to rise to the top of the ocean.
Dr. COWAN: Well, first of all, when it's (unintelligible) pressure, obviously it's compressed, and so it's a little bit more dense. So it floats relatively slowly at first. And then as it rises in the water column, it expands and actually begins to rise to the surface more quickly. But even though we're about 1,000-foot journey, it does have a lot of time to start weathering and breaking down. That mostly occurs when it reaches the surface.
RAZ: What do you think it looks like deep inside the ocean where the leak has spread?
Dr. COWAN: Well, what I suspect is happening is that a relatively small fraction of the oil is actually reaching the surface mainly because of the decision, which I think is a misguided one to use dispersants at the wellhead. You know, I understand that most of the focus has been on the coast, but the fact that the dispersants are being used at the wellhead means that the oil is breaking up; to some degree, it's emulsifying as it rises. And it's settling out at different layers in the sea. And some of the heavier fractions are probably staying on the seafloor. So, certainly, there's potential for it to impact not just the coast, but communities and fishes and invertebrates on the continental shelf.
RAZ: Could it literally strangle sea life below? I mean, (unintelligible) of...
Dr. COWAN: Yeah, I mean, particularly some of the things like soft corals and sponges that are actually - you know, sponges are filter feeders and corals have very small polyps, and the polyps can easily get smothered by the oil and die. And one of the really important factors that we don't know very much about at all is the toxicity of the oil dispersant mixture. The dispersants are breakdown when they're at the surface and the toxicity of them is known relatively well. But the toxicity of those dispersants in combination with the oil is essentially unknown at depth.
RAZ: We do not know how...
Dr. COWAN: We do not know.
RAZ: We do not know how these dispersants might also damage ecosystems (unintelligible). Dr.
COWAN: Right. I mean, there are some preliminary evidence that the dispersants themselves may be more toxic than the oil at depth.
RAZ: I've read the sort of parts of the underwater ecosystem has been described as kind of standing forests of trees made up of coral. Can you describe what it looks like down there?
Dr. COWAN: What I would more describe it as a series of closely spaced flattop mountains that rise up from the seabed tens to hundreds of meters. And the sides and tops of these things are covered with a very, very diverse community of sponges and sea fans and soft corals and some hard corals. And so, it essentially doesn't look dissimilar from a normal coral reef, except that the features themselves are geologic rather than are built by the animals. But if you can picture what a coral reef looks like in your mind, then you can kind of get a sense of what these shelf-edge banks look like.
RAZ: It's hard for many of us to kind of imagine and to sort of get a sense of how huge this catastrophe is. Obviously, in 1989 with the Exxon Valdez, we could see seagulls, we could see animals on the coast covered in oil. We know that some clam and mussel beds are still contaminated in Prince William Sound in Alaska. What do we know about the lasting impact of this?
Dr. COWAN: Well, keep in mind that one thing that we do have working for us in the Gulf that is different than the Alaskan area is that the warm waters of the Gulf caused the biological breakdown of oil to occur more rapidly. So, it could take years, but maybe not as many years as the Exxon Valdez because things happen much more slowly in colder climates.
RAZ: I suppose what's most disturbing about all of this is that the best scientists in the world, including you, simply don't know, they just don't know what will happen.
Dr. COWAN: No, we don't. This is - it is unprecedented. The depth of the spill is unprecedented. And the complexity - there's probably not a more complex place in the Gulf of Mexico with respect to currents than right at the mouth of Mississippi. This stuff could actually go anywhere.
