FloridaToday.com
Brevard emergency officials focus on oil spill
BY JIM WAYMER * FLORIDA TODAY * APRIL 30, 2010
Brevard County emergency management and environmental officials will keep close watch into next week, should the Space Coast have to brace for globs of oil or tar that might lap ashore, kill sea turtles and foul new multi-million-dollar beaches.
As the 4,700-square-mile oil slick spread toward Louisiana, experts wondered if a shift in winds or currents might send it to Florida next.
“There’s wild trajectory at this point, because you don’t know,” said Ernie Brown, director of the Natural Resources Management Office.
He met Wednesday with Brevard Emergency Management Director Bob Lay to talk over potential scenarios and impacts.
The slick drifted about 90 miles south of Pensacola Bay Thursday, but only 30 miles north of its potential conveyor belt to the Space Coast: the Gulf of Mexico Loop Current.
The current can surge northward by several hundred miles. And if oil entrains into the current, it could sweep into the Keys, around Florida and be offshore of Brevard within a week. Then it would be up to which way the wind blows.
“For Florida, it’s not good news,” said Yonggang Liu, an oceanographer at the University of Florida who’s using numerical models and satellite imagery to forecast the slick’s trajectory. “Once it gets close to shore, it’s more driven by the winds.”
His forecast through May 2 shows the slick stretching out into three main large fingers. Two swing toward the Mississippi Delta, but a third lingered along the Panhandle as the Loop Current swells ever closer to the spill zone.
If the two meet and the oil swings around Florida, eddies that spin off the Gulf Stream could carry emulsified oil and soft tar balls, the same way red tide that originates in the Gulf gets delivered to Brevard and the Indian River Lagoon.
“We anticipate it going into the Loop Current in a few days, then it will be headed to the Florida Keys and the East Coast of Florida,” said Mitchell Roffer of Roffer’s Ocean Fishing Forecasting Service in West Melbourne. “Very scary. Very scary.”
His forecast, which also taps satellite imagery, put the edge of the sheen about 30 miles north of the northern edge of the Loop Current.
“Not all the ocean is controlled by winds,” Roffer added. “It’s certainly going to be pushed back toward the northwest, but you’re not going to stop the flow of that water with the short-term wind.”
The spill threatens peak spawning season for Atlantic bluefin tuna, a threatened species, his forecast said.
“This whole zone is a highly populated area with such fish as tuna, dolphin, wahoo, marlin, snapper, grouper and sharks, as well as turtles and birds,” Roffer said in his forecast.
Sea turtles could get hit the worst as they enter their nesting season, which officially begins May 1 for most species.
State biologists already find tar and plastic in the guts of about 90 percent of the baby turtles captured along seaweed lines in the Gulf Stream. Either their mouths get sealed shut with tar, or their guts are lined with plastic.
The tar and oil also could threaten to foul a just-completed $12.4 million dredging project that pumped sand onto beaches in Indialantic and Melbourne Beach, as well a $7.8 million project that bypassed sand from Port Canaveral onto more than a mile of Cape Canaveral shoreline.
County officials expect a less toxic brew, should the slick reach here.
“By that point in time, you’d have extremely weathered, emulsified petroleum product,” Brown said. “If that happened, we would be moving very quickly to remove it from the beach.”
Oil emulsifies within about three days, said John Trefry, a geochemist at Florida Tech.
About 10 to 20 percent would vaporize.
“The rest is just going to either decompose, mainly with sunlight or bacteria over time or end up on the beach,” Trefry said.
The drilling rig, Deep Horizon, sank on Earth Day, April 22, about 130 miles southeast of New Orleans, after an explosion two days earlier. The rig blew up after a high-pressure surge during drilling. Eleven mission crew members were never recovered.
Officials this week increased their earlier estimate of the well’s leak rate from 1,000 barrels of oil per day to 5,000 barrels, or 210,000 gallons. Efforts to shut off the well have failed.
Scientists said the rarity of such large-scale spills in the gulf and a lack of observation instruments make it difficult to predict what the oil slick might do.
On April 9, a British consultant released a 177-page report that found only a 1 percent chance per year or less of a blowout and oil spill from offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. They called the risks “serious but manageable” and dwarfed by risks from hurricanes and shipping but stressed the uncertainty.
So does Trefry.
“It’s hard to know,” he said of the slick reaching here. “It depends on how much it keeps on coming. It’s such an unknown right now. Certainly this is the fear of everyone. This is the worst of all scenarios. Nobody wants that. If none of this gets beached, we’ll be O.K.”
Contact Waymer at 242-3663 or jwaymer@floridatoday.com. Special thanks to Richard Charter