Debate rages over role oil-gas industry has in Katrina disaster

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What damaged delta?
Debate rages over role oil-gas industry has in Katrina disaster
The Associated Press

IN THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER DELTA - Service canals dug to tap oil and
natural gas dart everywhere through the black mangrove shrubs, bird
rushes and golden marsh. From the air, they look like a Pac-Man maze
superimposed on an estuarine landscape 10 times the size of Grand
Canyon National Park.

There are 10,000 miles of these oil canals. They fed America's thirst
for energy, but helped bring its biggest delta to the brink of
collapse. They also connect an overlooked set of dots in the Hurricane
Katrina aftermath: The role that some say the oil industry played in
the $135 billion disaster, the nation's costliest.

The delta, formed by the accumulation of the Mississippi River's
upstream mud over thousands of years, is a shadow of what it was 100
years ago. Since the 1930s, a fifth of the 10,000-square-mile delta
has turned into open water, decreasing the delta's economic and
ecologic value by as much as $15 billion a year, according to
Louisiana State University studies.
The rate of land loss, among the highest in the world, has exposed New
Orleans and hundreds of other communities to the danger of drowning.
Katrina made that painfully clear.

"I remember when I was a young boy we had a camp out in the marsh,"
said Don Griffin, a grocer and seafood dealer in the delta town of
Leeville, which became an oil-drilling center for decades. "The same
places you used to have to get around with a pirogue and a push pole
now you can go with a 25-foot outboard. There's no more marsh, which
is your first barrier of defense for hurricanes."

Oil industry new target of critcism
In Katrina's wake, the Army Corps of Engineers has gotten the brunt of
the criticism for the disaster. Besides building suspect levees, the
Corps' mission to control waterways with spillways, floodgates and
other measures has played havoc with nature by restricting the
Mississippi's sediment and fresh upriver water from replenishing the
delta's wetlands.

There are other reasons for the disastrous wetlands loss: Human
development, cypress logging, ill-advised farming on the coast,
hurricanes, slipping-and-sliding geologic faults and even a South
American semi-aquatic rodent called nutria imported to Louisiana in
the 1930s.

But many scientists say the oil industry's 10,000 miles of canals -
enough to stretch nearly halfway around the world - and the drilling
they supported played a decisive role. Some scientists say drilling
caused half of the land loss, or about 1,000 square miles.

"The whole thing was manifest destiny written large on a marshy
landscape," said John Day, an LSU professor emeritus who specializes
in delta ecologies.

The industry denies that and points to disagreement among scientists
over who or what caused damage, and how much.

"I've got duck leases out there and I remember when they were covered
in grass. They're all ponds now," said Don Briggs, president of the
Louisiana Oil & Gas Association. "It's not gone because of drilling.
It's because nutria ate all the grasses."

However, a substantial body of evidence points to oil's heavy toll.

Some want to hold industry accountable

The canals, most dug to access wells by bucket dredges between the
1930s and 1970s when restrictions and mitigation requirements were lax
to nonexistent, crisscross the marshy coast like a liquid maze.

In many places, they run perpendicular to the Gulf of Mexico
shoreline, allowing salt water to intrude far inland. One spot is
dubbed "The Wheel" because a series of canals looks like a wagon wheel
from the air.

The muddy slop dredged from the canals had to go somewhere. Oil
companies piled it where they found it, creating an estimated 13,000
miles of tide-blocking spoil banks.

R. Eugene Turner, an LSU oceanographer, has calculated that every
square mile of the delta is bounded on three sides by oil-canal
ridges. Turner has spent more than 30 years studying the oil
industry's footprint on the delta.

"If the water is blocked from going in, the wetlands on other side is
drier for a little longer and also stays flooded longer than it
otherwise would be," Turner said. "By drying it, the land oxidizes and
dries out; and if it's wetter, it's like leaving a lawn sprinkler on
and the plants are going to die."

The damage doesn't stop with the canals. For example, U.S. Geological
Survey scientists say the sucking out of the ground of so much oil and
gas likely caused the land in many places to sink by half an inch a
year. In oil's heyday 30 years ago, Louisiana's coastal wells pumped
360 million barrels a year, an eighth of what Saudi Arabia ships to
the market today.

Oil wells also discharged about a billion gallons daily of brine,
thick with naturally occurring subsurface chemicals like chlorides,
calcium and magnesium, as well as acids used in drilling.

"It was poured into the marshes," said Virginia Burkett, a longtime
researcher of the Louisiana wetlands and the chief scientist for
climate change at USGS. It contaminated soils and killed plants and
animals, she said, before brine dumping was finally regulated in
coastal marshes in 1985.

Still, when politicians in Washington or Louisiana talk about Katrina
guilt they blame the Corps of Engineers, global warming and the French
for building a city in low-lying swamps nearly 300 years ago - but not
the oil industry.

"It's the elephant at the dinner table and nobody wants to say there's
an elephant there," said Luke Fontana, a New Orleans lawyer for Save
Our Wetlands, one of the state's oldest grassroots environmental
groups that has fought the draining of swamps and oil company activity
since the 1970s.

But the industry's legacy is getting new attention. Some contrast
record petroleum profits with staggering cost estimates - up to $60
billion - to save New Orleans and restore the delta. In 2006, major
U.S. oil companies, some of which moved offices from New Orleans to
Houston, earned about $162 billion.

Meanwhile, locals increasingly ask why oil shouldn't be made to clean
up its profitable mess the same as mining operations had to do in
Appalachia.

Delta folks like Griffin, the grocer in Leeville, wonder why Shell,
ExxonMobil and other oil behemoths aren't paying for the disappearance
of his boyhood duck ponds and dune-lined islands.

"It seems that the government should hold them accountable for some of
the problem," Griffin said from behind his cash register.

Industry denies drilling cause of damage

At mid-20th century, marsh-borne oil derricks towered over Leeville's
shacks as far as the eye could see, replacing fields of cotton. Today,
those same places, chopped up by bucket dredges, are open water. A
town cemetery lies in the water, its tombs barely visible. And as
Leeville goes under, New Orleans, 50 miles to the northeast, becomes
that much more exposed.

The oil industry has not gone entirely unchallenged.

As far back as the 1970s, landowners and environmental groups were
able to stop specific projects or force companies to clean up isolated
sites. But no lawsuit or state law has compelled the industry to fill
the canals or dismantle old spoil banks.

After Katrina, a class-action lawsuit blamed oil and pipeline
companies for "depriving ... New Orleans from its natural protection
against hurricane winds and storm surges." The suit was dismissed last
October.

In the early 1980s, then-Gov. David Treen proposed a coast-and-levee
tax by slapping a levy of 36 cents on every barrel of oil and 6 cents
on every 1,000 cubic feet of gas that crossed the coastal plain; but
the measure didn't muster the two-thirds majority needed in the state
Legislature.

"Today, I would recommend going to two bucks a barrel," Treen said.
"That would give us about $1 billion a year. I just feel like they
ought to pay for some of the cost we incur."

Eventually, petrodollars may provide relief. In 2006, Congress
approved a plan to give Louisiana and other Gulf states a large
portion of offshore royalties the industry now pays to the federal
Treasury. By 2017, Louisiana hopes to get as much as $650 million a
year.

Meanwhile, the anything-goes days for oil are over. Regulators demand
the use of less-damaging techniques - directional drilling, rerouting
of pipelines, wetlands mitigation. Private landowners often ask oil
companies to clean up after themselves.

"My job is to make sure they stay on their right of ways, that they
don't traverse onto vegetative areas or use machinery that is
harmful," said Forrest Travirca III, a land warden for a swath of
wetlands near Leeville held by a public trust.

"It's like strip mining. A good strip miner will repair the land."

Cruising in his bay boat through mangrove brakes and past tugboats and
crew vessels docked at the offshore-drilling port of Port Fourchon,
Travirca pointed out places where oil companies have patched up the
land.

For its part, the industry balks at talk of paying for the damage.

"Worldwide, there's this notion that they want the oil industry to pay
for everything," John Felmy, chief economist of the American Petroleum
Institute, said during the organization's recent meeting in New
Orleans. "It's like the world considers the industry a cookie jar."

The industry denies that drilling damaged the delta that much.

"The real question is, what damage did occur?" said Jim Porter,
president of Louisiana's chief oil lobby, the Louisiana Mid-Continent
Oil and Gas Association. "There's no clear-cut answer on it. But there
is no doubt there are many, many causes for wetlands loss and access
to oil and gas operations is rather insignificant."

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