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Posted
I'm not disputing the fact that the Gulf coast will suffer major damage, but the big difference between the Alaska tragedy and the Gulf is the temperature. The muchhigher temps in the Gulf will aid tremendously in the evaporation of the oil.

The stuff on the surface appears to be the tip of the iceberg. There are large oil plumes deep in the ocean that may or may not surface.

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-06-08/toxic-undersea-oil-plumes-lurk-in-gulf-of-mexico-update2-.html

I'm sure we will be haunted by those for years to come.  Who knows where they will pop up.

  • 2 weeks later...
Posted

So when do individuals, companies and governments start giving BP their money back?  ;)

  • Super User
Posted

This disaster is a prime example of what happens when lawyers and bean counters run the show.

Posted

Good job Bp for having no plans for when this sort of disaster happens. Hopefully all that oil floating out at sea and ruining the environment teaches you something for the future.

  • Super User
Posted

Killed...

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/08/04/bp-says-static-kill-gulf-successful/

;D ;D ;D

Aug. 4 (Bloomberg) -- The “vast majority” of crude from BP Plc's damaged Gulf of Mexico well is gone and the rest is being broken down by waves and bacteria, reducing the threat of further toxic pollution from the largest maritime oil spill, White House energy adviser Carol Browner said.

     “The vast majority of the oil has been contained, it's been burned, it's been cleaned,” Browner said on CBS's “Early Show” today. The remaining oil “will weather, it will break down naturally. Mother Nature will do her part.”

     An estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil leaked from BP's Macondo well between April 20 and July 15, according to government scientists. BP was able to capture about 800,000 barrels of crude from the well before it entered the Gulf.

     Browner said the government will “continue to be vigilant” on cleaning up oil in the region. BP's successful effort to control pressure in the well yesterday by forcing drilling mud into it is “good news,” she said.

     About three-quarters of the 4.1 million barrels spilled directly into the Gulf by BP's well has evaporated, dispersed, been captured or otherwise removed from the environment, The New York Times reported, citing a government study it said will be released today.

     “I find it very hard to believe, impossible actually, that they have three-quarters of the oil accounted for,” Samantha Joye, a professor of marine sciences at the University of Georgia in Athens, said today in an e-mailed message. Joye was among scientists who discovered plumes of oil under the water's surface and has been continuing to survey and analyze the results.

                        ‘Invisible' Oil

     Some of the oil has probably dropped to the seafloor, “where it is also invisible to our eyes,” Joye wrote in her blog on Aug. 1. “The fact that this oil is ‘invisible' makes it no less of a danger to the Gulf's fragile ecosystems. Quite the contrary, the danger is real and the danger is much more difficult to quantify, track and assess.”

     Earlier today, London-based BP reported a “significant milestone” toward plugging the well permanently, as engineers carried out the “static kill” to inject drilling mud into the well over a period of eight hours yesterday.

     BP said it will consult with National Incident Commander Thad Allen on whether to pump more mud and whether to attempt to plug the well from the top with cement.

     BP fell 3.6 pence to 412 pence at 1:16 p.m. in London trading. The cost of insuring BP's debt for a year with credit- default swaps dropped below five-year premiums today for the first time in two months on speculation the bid to close the well will succeed.

     Browner said completion of a relief well, begun May 2 and now within about 100 feet (30.5 meters) of intercepting the damaged bore, is necessary to permanently plug the well.

     The relief well will be done in 10 days to 14 days, she said.

Posted

"Some marshland could be lost[from the oil], but the amount appears to be small compared with what the coast loses every year through human development."

that just means that we humans suck A$$. were more the problem than the oil spill. The spill has lasted less than a year, while humans have been destroying marshland significantly since the 30's. D@M^!!!!

  • Super User
Posted

Okay...New Orleans was built by the French below

sea level. The "best" solution is to reopen the Mississippi

River delta drainage system, relocate the population in

and around New Orleans and destroy the city. We might

still maintain an industrial presence for off-loading freight

and oil, but no one lives there.

Makes sense to me, but it's politically unfathomable.

::)

Posted

Mother nature is stronger than we realize. The effects of the knee jerk reaction from this administration can end up being the most damaging element of this whole deal. Makes no sense....

Posted

Folks, Mother Nature will disperse this over time, but what is that(1 year, 5 years, 20 years, 50 years) we don't know.All the dispersants that BP put into our waters, allowed by our gov't. were to put the oil (out of sight out of mind) Where do you think all this oil and dispersant is? As far as reopening the Mississippi drainage and relocating the population, you would have to start north of Indiana, as there are levees way north of there. The French Quarter that was originally settled in New Orleans was not flooded in Katrina, they were smart enough to build on the high ground. Only the land below sea level was flooded. If you believe anything that BP and BP's bought and payed for Gov't tells you, then I've got some rapidly eroding marshland for sale, sounds like you may be interested. In the 40 yr's I've been a resident of this state the Gov't has ignored our plea's for help. All they have done is taken most of the oil revenues and destroyed our coastline, not mine(OUR COAST)-- capitalizing is shouting) I'm sorry for my tirade and ranting, but as a Sportsman of this country, I've heard enough and can only take so many lies. Thank You for reading this and if you have any comments please PM me or reply to this................... Michael Starling >:( >:( >:( >:( >:( >:( >:( >:(

  • Super User
Posted

I did not mean to insult you, the people of New Orleans or

Louisiana. Coastal erosion is a HUGE issue which no one in

government has addressed. The solution, from a purely

ecological standpoint, would be to restore the delta

hydraulics. Economically, that would destroy the region.

There is no simple solution.

This is a op-ed from Bloomberg News:

BP Spill's Gulf Threat May Fade as Farms Pollute, Wetlands Sink

By Peter Coy

     Aug. 13 (Bloomberg) -- Visit the Gulf of Mexico today and

you'd hardly recognize it as the scene of what President Barack

Obama called “the worst environmental disaster America has ever

faced.”

     It's as if scientists had conducted an insane experiment --

dumping about 4.9 million barrels of oil into the water -- and

discovered its effect was in certain ways negligible.

     Some 21 years after the Exxon Valdez disaster, globs of oil

can still be found in Alaska's Prince William Sound. Yet the

Gulf may be scrubbing itself from the BP Plc spill: Sunshine is

evaporating the oil, and bacteria are rapidly digesting it,

Bloomberg Businessweek reports in its Aug. 16 edition.

     Less crude has infiltrated vulnerable wetlands than was

predicted. Documented fish and bird kills have been small, and

most Gulf beaches remain pristine.

     While concerns remain about the spill's long-term impact on

coastal wetlands and deepwater creatures, the short-term trend

is positive: On Aug. 10 the National Oceanic and Atmospheric

Administration announced it was opening an additional 5,000

square miles of the Gulf to fishing, leaving 22 percent of

federal waters still closed.

     Harlon Pearce, who runs a wholesale seafood business in

Kenner, Louisiana, said that with more fish and shellfish

passing rigorous smell tests and chemical assays, “I really feel

good that we're going to be getting into large production this

September, October, and November.”

     Morgan Stanley said on Aug. 3 that while the spill is a

“significant shock to the regional economy,” there will be

“essentially no impact” on U.S. economic input this year or

next.

                       Not Biggest Threat

     That the Gulf is recovering doesn't mean all is well

because the disaster that transfixed the nation isn't the

biggest threat to the Gulf's health.

     Environmental scientists point to more serious and

persistent (albeit less telegenic) dangers, including the

continued loss of wetlands, the impact of global climate change,

and the supercharging of the Gulf with fertilizer that flows

down the Mississippi River from Midwestern farms.

     “The spill is minor compared to those threats,” said Larry

McKinney, director of the Harte Research Institute at the Corpus

Christi campus of Texas A&M University. It's as if a gunshot

victim recovered from a wound, then had to battle metastatic

cancer.

     The patient has a fighting chance. Thanks to favorable

winds and human intervention, little oil from the BP spill

reached the estuaries where it can do serious damage. The light,

sweet crude that stayed at sea is being disposed of rapidly by

bacteria that have evolved to feed off the oil and methane that

naturally seep from the seafloor.

                        ‘Drainage Ditch'

     “In a year or two we can forget this ever happened,” said

Roger Sassen, an adjunct professor of geology and geophysics at

Texas A&M. “The fact that the Mississippi is the drainage ditch

for the fertilizers and nasty agricultural chemicals of the

entire central U.S. is much worse than this transient spill.”

     Even experts who are less sanguine see the oil spill as an

added burden rather than a knockout blow. Jane Lubchenco, the

marine ecologist who heads NOAA, said the Gulf's waters and

coasts “have been undergoing a series of changes over the years

that have progressively compromised the health of more and more

of the system.

     Speaking to reporters by phone on Aug. 10 while traveling

in the region, she said, “Each of these changes doesn't happen

in isolation. This spill interacts with, and is on top of, the

other changes in the Gulf.”

                   Iowa Corn Farmer

     The Gulf's long-term nemeses can't be capped like a runaway

oil well. Although slower-acting, they will have profound

economic as well as environmental impacts, and responsibility

for them can't be easily assigned. The Iowa corn farmer whose

excessive use of fertilizer contributes to choking off oxygen in

the Gulf is harder to blame than, say, Tony Hayward, BP's

outgoing chief executive officer.

     The spill could do its worst damage by exacerbating

existing threats.

     Harm to the bluefin tuna, prized both as a gamefish and as

a culinary delicacy retailing for $100 a pound, is the premier

example. It ranges the Atlantic Ocean but spawns just once a

year -- precisely where and when the BP spill occurred. The

floating beds of brown seaweed that shelter bluefin larvae and

fingerlings soak up oil like a sponge. Ocean biologists worry

that the spill might have wiped out most of the 2010 generation

of Gulf bluefins.

                      Overfishing Bluefins

     Ordinarily, the loss of a year's worth of fish might be

tolerable. The problem: Severe overfishing in international

waters of the Atlantic has already endangered the Gulf-spawning

population of bluefins, down by 80 percent since 1970.

     U.S. fishermen landed a little less than 800 tons of

bluefins in the West Atlantic in 2008, while other nations'

fleets landed about 1,200 tons, according to the International

Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas.

     The spill could push the bluefin population into outright

collapse, said Robert L. Shipp, chairman of the Gulf of Mexico

Fishery Management Council as well as the marine sciences

department at the University of South Alabama in Mobile. The

only other population of the species, which spawns in the

Mediterranean Sea, is also threatened.

     The single biggest challenge to the Gulf's ecosystem may be

the ongoing loss of wetlands, estimated at 25 to 30 square

miles' worth per year. Estuaries and marshes provide shelter for

commercially important crabs and shrimp. They also buffer humans

from the impact of hurricanes and soak up the nitrogenous

compounds from fertilizer and manure runoff that are borne down

the Mississippi.

                      Seasonal ‘Dead Zone'

     Nitrogen that the wetlands don't capture feeds algal

blooms. Bacteria that feed on the algae use up oxygen in the

depths of the Gulf, creating a seasonal “dead zone” that's

hospitable only to jellyfish, bacteria, and some worms. This

month the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium said the low-

oxygen zone extended for 7,722 square miles, the fifth-biggest

on record.

     What's unknown is whether oil from the spill will

significantly accelerate the destruction of the wetlands. The

wetlands are sinking because levees along the Mississippi's ship

channel prevent silt from replenishing them. Pipeline channels

have diced up the wetlands, further weakening them.

     When an area of wetlands finally sinks beneath the waves,

it exposes an adjoining area to the waves' action, speeding up

losses. “If the rate of loss accelerates to 35 or 40 square

miles a year, it will give us less time to come up with a

restoration plan,” McKinney said.

                         Global Warming

     Global warming subtly worsens many of the Gulf's problems.

Warmer Gulf waters are conducive to the spread of the voracious

lionfish, a tropical Pacific fish with poisonous spokes that

displaces native species, and the equally aggressive Chinese

tallow tree, which has infested Gulf marshes.

     Plus, the shores of the Gulf lie so low that a sea level

rise of just inches can inundate huge swaths of fertile

coastline. Seas have risen 8 inches in the past century, NOAA

says. The BP spill could give more of a toehold to invasive

species by weakening native ones, McKinney said.

     Scientists studying the Gulf's health emphasize that all

damage assessments are strictly preliminary, so the bad news

might not be over. A female crab lays about 3 million eggs, and

a handful grow up to be crabs. Many of the rest are eaten by

fish and other crabs. So when oil droplets and chemical

dispersant showed up in the larvae of blue crabs, it was a

danger sign for the whole food chain.

     Judy Haner, marine program director for the Nature

Conservancy in Mobile, Alabama, said damage to fish populations

could take three to four years to manifest itself.

                       Menhaden, Sardines

     Another stubborn unknown is the impact of the spill on

small fish, such as menhaden, sardines, small jacks and

anchovies, that are food for creatures higher up the chain.

Anchovies and menhaden are filter feeders that swim with their

mouths agape, catching tiny food particles in their gill

filaments.

     The tiny oil droplets suspended in subsea clouds could kill

the fishes' food source, the near-microscopic crustaceans called

copepods. The droplets could also clog the fishes' gills. At the

same time, oil-eating bacteria could exhaust oxygen supplies in

deep waters.

     Next unknown: If fish in the plumes die, will others occupy

their niche as the pollution clears and oxygen increases? Shipp,

of the University of South Alabama, said he thinks the spill

should continue to be regarded as Public Enemy No. 1 for the

Gulf until such questions are answered.

                      $500 Million From BP

                               

     BP has agreed to set aside $500 million for environmental

study in the Gulf, many times the normal level of spending.

     “If BP has put the money aside like they say and they don't

renege on their promises and the government doesn't strip the

money for other purposes -- and those are big ifs -- there

should be money for studies of this spill,” said Edward Overton,

an environmental chemist and professor emeritus at Louisiana

State University.

     After that, the far greater challenge will be to apply the

newfound knowledge to helping the resilient Gulf survive its

many man-made wounds.

  • Super User
Posted
Folks, Mother Nature will disperse this over time, but what is that(1 year, 5 years, 20 years, 50 years) we don't know.All the dispersants that BP put into our waters, allowed by our gov't. were to put the oil (out of sight out of mind) Where do you think all this oil and dispersant is? As far as reopening the Mississippi drainage and relocating the population, you would have to start north of Indiana, as there are levees way north of there. The French Quarter that was originally settled in New Orleans was not flooded in Katrina, they were smart enough to build on the high ground. Only the land below sea level was flooded. If you believe anything that BP and BP's bought and payed for Gov't tells you, then I've got some rapidly eroding marshland for sale, sounds like you may be interested. In the 40 yr's I've been a resident of this state the Gov't has ignored our plea's for help. All they have done is taken most of the oil revenues and destroyed our coastline, not mine(OUR COAST)-- capitalizing is shouting) I'm sorry for my tirade and ranting, but as a Sportsman of this country, I've heard enough and can only take so many lies. Thank You for reading this and if you have any comments please PM me or reply to this................... Michael Starling >:( >:( >:( >:( >:( >:( >:( >:(

Thank you , the truth should be heard , instead the people in power cover everything up . It really is all about the money and they'll continue to rape ole mother earth as long as its resources hold out.

  • Super User
Posted
Folks, Mother Nature will disperse this over time, but what is that(1 year, 5 years, 20 years, 50 years) we don't know.All the dispersants that BP put into our waters, allowed by our gov't. were to put the oil (out of sight out of mind) Where do you think all this oil and dispersant is? As far as reopening the Mississippi drainage and relocating the population, you would have to start north of Indiana, as there are levees way north of there. The French Quarter that was originally settled in New Orleans was not flooded in Katrina, they were smart enough to build on the high ground. Only the land below sea level was flooded. If you believe anything that BP and BP's bought and payed for Gov't tells you, then I've got some rapidly eroding marshland for sale, sounds like you may be interested. In the 40 yr's I've been a resident of this state the Gov't has ignored our plea's for help. All they have done is taken most of the oil revenues and destroyed our coastline, not mine(OUR COAST)-- capitalizing is shouting) I'm sorry for my tirade and ranting, but as a Sportsman of this country, I've heard enough and can only take so many lies. Thank You for reading this and if you have any comments please PM me or reply to this................... Michael Starling >:( >:( >:( >:( >:( >:( >:( >:(

Thank you , the truth should be heard , instead the people in power cover everything up . It really is all about the money and they'll continue to rape ole mother earth as long as its resources hold out.

They're all liars, each and every one of them. Never, EVER believe a word any of them say, as it's all scripted BS. That goes for government officials and the corporate crowd.

Our founding fathers have likely reached China by now from spinning in their graves so quickly. >:(

  • Super User
Posted

Collapsing Marsh Dwarfs BP Oil Blowout as Ecological Disaster

By Ken Wells

     Aug. 18 (Bloomberg) -- Claude Luke throttles down his 21- foot aluminum work boat. Off to the left, the snout of an alligator disappears near the mouth of a watery gash in the Louisiana marshland.

     The 51-year-old Cajun crab fishermen is touring the epicenter of an unfolding environmental disaster that dwarfs the BP Plc spill and predates it by decades, according to state scientists and environmentalists. If unchecked, the destruction threatens to undermine the world's seventh largest estuary and one of the most important U.S. energy corridors.

     His boat idles near a canal dredged more than two decades ago for a petroleum pipeline. Back then it was about 15 feet (4

1/2 meters) wide. Now it sprawls 100 feet wide, opening this once-protected upland marsh to toxic salt water. Not far away, Luke nods toward a water tower visible across about 2 miles (3

kilometers) of almost open water.

     “You used to be able to walk there from here,” says Luke, who moonlights as a warden on the private Harry Bourg Corp.

preserve deep in Louisiana's delta. “Before the oil companies came, this was good, solid marsh.”

     More than half the 17,000 acres (6,600 hectares) of marshland purchased about 80 years ago by Bourg, a barely literate muskrat trapper, have been lost to erosion and subsidence, according to engineering surveys. The inheritance of Bourg's descendants is vanishing under a profusion of these runaway canals. They were dug to lay pipelines or float in equipment for the drilling of 90 oil and gas wells that made Bourg one of the wealthiest men in South Louisiana before he died in 1963.

                         Coastal Crisis

     Long before BP's blowout menaced the Gulf of Mexico, an oil industry-related coastal crisis of another kind began unfolding all over the Mississippi River coastal delta. Dredging for navigation, oil and gas drilling and pipeline construction has ripped apart the estuary's fragile system of fresh and saltwater marshes.

     Between 1901, when drilling began in Louisiana, and the 1980s, the oil and gas industry laid tens of thousands of miles of pipelines and dredged 9,300 miles of canals in an industrial invasion of a wetland that once covered 3.2 million acres. Since the 1930s, more than a third of it has vanished, an area the size of Delaware. Each year, 15,300 acres more disappear, according to Louisiana's Comprehensive Master Plan for a Sustainable Coast.

                        Seafood Industry

     Not all this can be laid to oil and gas drilling; the industry rejects the notion that it is chiefly responsible.

Whatever the case, the destruction of marshland reverberates far beyond Louisiana. The state's waters and wetlands underpin a commercial seafood industry that generates about $2.4 billion a year in wages and sales and provides almost a quarter of the catch in the contiguous U.S., according to the Louisiana Seafood Marketing Board. They serve as wildlife breeding grounds, sheltering and feeding 5 million migratory birds a year, according to state data.

     The wetlands also absorb and filter out pollutants and help slow storm surges. Marsh losses in the past 40 years alone could raise the height of a Category 3 storm surge by as much as 10 feet under certain conditions; marsh loss and the presence of a badly eroded navigation channel called the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet may have magnified Hurricane Katrina's surge in 2005 and helped turn the storm into a $150 billion catastrophe for the New Orleans region, according to computer modeling by Louisiana State University scientists.

                      ‘Calamity Unequaled'

                               

     Coastal Louisiana accounts for 27 percent of U.S. energy production while an 83,000-mile infrastructure of pipelines and transfer stations transports 40 percent of its energy needs, counting petroleum from imports and offshore wells, according to data from the state's Department of Natural Resources and the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil & Gas Association.

     The collapse of Louisiana's coastal marshes is “an international economic and ecological calamity unequaled in history,” jeopardizing more than “$100 billion in energy infrastructure,” said America's Wetland Foundation, a Louisiana coastal preservation group partly underwritten by the oil industry, in a 2008 report. Much of the pipeline network is buried beneath marshes. Erosion has already exposed high- pressure pipelines to storms and marine traffic, causing oil spills and accidents.

                    Mechanism of Destruction

                               

     Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 damaged 457 pipelines, destroyed 113 oil and gas platforms and caused more than 44 spills totaling 9 million gallons of oil, according to post- Katrina reports by the Coast Guard and the federal Minerals Management Service. The 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska amounted to 11 million gallons.

     The state has floated an ambitious marsh and barrier-island rebuilding program that since Katrina it has tied to hurricane protection. The cost may come to $50 billion over time, according to the plan. To compensate victims for its spill, BP set up a $20 billion escrow fund.

      Several factors are at play in the state's coastal decimation. Coastal deltas naturally expand and contract over time. Since the U.S. built levees along the Mississippi following devastating floods in 1927, silt that once built land as the river meandered through the marshes has been falling into the deep waters of the Gulf. Starved of sediment, wetlands become waterlogged, sink and die. This is compounded by rising seas and the natural settling of subsea geological structures, scientists say.

                      Oil Industry's Share

                               

     That doesn't fully explain why a delta built over eight to 10 millennia has shrunk so much in the past eight decades, the scientists say. Dredging to locate drilling rigs and construction of navigation channels have disrupted the delicate interface between upland marshes and saltwater wetlands, says Kerry St. Pe, director of the Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary Program, a marsh-preservation group headquartered in Thibodaux, Louisiana. Salt water poisons freshwater marshes and swamps, he says. Currents, tides, boats and storms hasten the erosion, especially along the unstable banks of dredged canals.

     St. Pe also points to the billions of barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of gas that have been sucked from beneath the state's coastal zone by oil and gas development.

“We're not just eroding, we're sinking,” he says. “The oil and gas extraction has set off a collapse in our coast.”

                        Economic Benefits

                               

     A consensus of coastal scientists puts wetland losses attributable to oil and gas activities at 36 percent, says Douglas Meffert, a deputy director of Tulane University's Center of Bioenvironmental Research. The Gulf Restoration Network estimates the share as high as 60 percent, says Aaron Viles, the group's campaign director.

     “The idea that we're mostly to blame is crap,” says Don Briggs, president of the Louisiana Oil & Gas Association, a 1,100-member trade group based in Baton Rouge. He cites a U.S.

Department of Energy estimate that the industry accounted for no more than 15 percent of coastal loss.

     Economic gains to the state from oil and gas -- in jobs, taxes and growth over the decades -- far outweigh the damage, according to the association. Oil and gas extraction and refining contribute about $70 billion annually to Louisiana's economy and supports 320,000 jobs. State oil and gas taxes last year topped $570 million.

                    Paradoxical Relationship

                               

     The state's view is that much of the damage from dredging is attributable to canals dug before 1980, when the state created its Coastal Resources Program and began to clamp down on oil and gas access canals, says Karl Morgan, administrator of the Permits and Mitigation Division for Louisiana's Office of Coastal Management. Between 1980 and 1989, the lengths of permitted access canals shrank from 1,300 feet on average to just over 400 feet, he says.

     These days, permits are seldom granted except to deepen existing canals, Morgan says. Backfilling is rare because many access canals still serve active wells or production units. The exceptions are canals or trenches dredged for laying pipelines.

Before 1980, these canals “were not backfilled in many cases,”

says Morgan. Since the advent of the Coastal Resources Program, the state “has always required backfilling,” he says.

     In the history of Harry Bourg's muskrat marsh, about 75 miles southwest of New Orleans, lies a parable of Louisiana's paradoxical relationship with the oil industry. Bourg and four generations of descendants have reaped untold millions of dollars in royalties over more than seven decades. In 1938, the year oil was discovered under his marshes, Bourg was raking in as much as $100,000 a month in royalties, according to a newspaper report at the time.

                      Unlikely Millionaire

                               

     Yet his heirs have also had “the heartbreak of watching the beautiful marshland that Harry truly loved be damaged perhaps beyond repair,” says James M. Funderburk, the Harry Bourg Corp. attorney.

     “If my grandpa knew what was coming,” says Bourg's grandson, Cyrus Theriot Jr., 68, one of 50 shareholders in the family run corporation and its president, “I think he would have done things differently.”

     A portrait of Bourg emerges from a 1938 article in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, a short biography by Bourg's former accountant and interviews with Bourg relatives and Funderburk.

     Bourg was an unlikely candidate to become a multimillionaire. He was born in 1888 in the hamlet of Dulac, Louisiana, one of eight children in a farming and fishing family. Harry's people descended from the French Canadians who were kicked off their lands in Canada's Acadian provinces by the British in 1755.

                        35-Cent Fortune

                               

     The survivors became known as Cajuns and eventually settled up and down the Louisiana coast and wove themselves into it, fishing, hunting, trapping and farming the high ground, leaving only a small footprint. Education was sparse, family was central, food was the second religion behind Catholicism. Their cooking, music and joie de vivre took roots from this land.

     Harry grew up with a fitful grade-school education. When he married at age 20, his entire fortune was the 35 cents in his pocket, a small house he'd built with his own hands and the shrimp boat his father, a fisherman and farmer, had given him.

His wife had to teach him how to speak English, not to mention how to add, subtract, multiply and divide.

                        Pennies an Acre

                               

     Bourg did have a prodigious work ethic, a knack for invention and, despite his lack of formal education, a keen eye for business. Most shrimpers pulled seines by hand or dragged trawls with sail-powered boats. Harry adapted a new-fangled invention, the gasoline-powered outboard motor, and crafted special rigging to go with it.

     The shrimp piled up in his nets. In 1908, his first season as a commercial fishermen, he made $300 -- equivalent to about $31,000 in wages today.

     In 1929, Bourg embarked on a mystifying real estate journey. He began buying up marshland at estate sales and tax auctions, amassing his 17,000 acres by 1933.

     Though he sometimes paid just pennies an acre, people thought Harry was crazy. Conventional wisdom said marshland was valuable only if you could drain it to farm or build on. The marsh grew two things in profusion -- mosquitoes and muskrats.

Mosquitoes gave you malaria.

     Muskrats were valuable for their pelts, but trapping a few hundred every season was backbreaking work in the boggy marsh.

Undaunted, Bourg gave up shrimping for muskrat trapping. He became an entrepreneur, bringing in a dozen or so other trappers each winter. They'd live in his cabins, trap his lands and hand him a share of their profits.

                      ‘Gasoline Distillate'

                               

     According to one family story, Bourg hired a surveyor and over time walked all 17,000 of his acres. One day he carried the surveyor on his back when the exhausted man couldn't manage the boggy terrain. Bourg invented a small dredging contraption and ringed the entire boundary with a channel -- called a “trainasse” in Cajun -- just wide enough to accommodate a trapper in a pirogue, the Cajun equivalent of a canoe.

     In 1938, Big Oil came calling. Representatives of Standard Oil Co. of California, a Texas oil baron named J.P. Fohs and a New Orleans investor, O.P. Montagnet, stood at Bourg's farmhouse door. Pools of oil and gas were being discovered up and down the Gulf Coast. The oil men said they had a hunch about his land.

     He signed a mineral lease and struck a mother lode of crude. It was so light and sweet the wildcatters called it “gasoline distillate.”

                    Uncashed Royalty Checks

                               

     Sudden wealth didn't change the way he lived, dressed and carried on. Harry still liked his trapper's boots, his dungarees, his floppy hats. He spoke English with a Cajun accent so thick some uplanders found it incomprehensible. He stayed in his small farm house on the banks of Bayou Grand Caillou in Dulac, trading up later to a modest brick ranch house.

     Although Bourg helped start a bank in Houma, he mistrusted money men. His oil royalty checks often sat uncashed in a desk drawer in the office where he ran his muskrat trading business.

Unconvinced that the oil men had calculated his royalties properly, he would summon them to his office and demand that they show him the math amid the stink of drying muskrat hides.

      Bourg's first oil strike, the Standard Oil well, was a technological marvel at the time, says Funderburk. The oil men brought in a dredge and dug a six-mile-long canal through Bourg's marsh just wide enough to float in a rig on a barge.

     “This is a well smack in the middle of Harry's marsh,”

says Funderburk. “How they figured the location, given the technology back then, is mystifying.”

                          Under Water

     At a depth of 13,300 feet, the well was also the deepest in the U.S. at the time.

     “That was the beginning,” says Funderburk. “More leases, and more canals, more laterals off of those canals. I'm sure Harry had no idea at the beginning what they were going to do to him over time.”

     Today, where the marsh remains intact, egrets still fly, bull alligators still prowl, and redfish and shrimp still school in a tableau as old as the marsh itself. In other sectors, 80 percent of Bourg's marshes have turned to open water, according to an engineering survey commissioned by the Bourg estate. About

55 percent of the entire 17,000-acre tract is under water, the survey found.

     “We're just trying to hold on to what we have left,” says Theriot, the grandson.

                        Chronic Erosion

                               

     By the time he died, Bourg was no longer ignorant of the effects of all the dredging. In the late 1950s, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers pushed for construction of a 36.5-mile channel called the Houma Navigation Canal. Its sole purpose was to speed workers and equipment from the nearby port of Houma to rigs multiplying offshore in the Gulf.

     The proposed channel boundary brushed Bourg's property.

Bourg fought it at public hearings and was the last holdout to grant a right-of-way. He predicted -- correctly it turned out -- that the channel would become a salt water siphon and poison upland marshes, including his.

     Since the channel opened in 1962, its banks have been plagued by chronic erosion. Plans are afoot to build a lock as part of program to prevent saltwater flooding in Houma during storms. The Corps itself said in a report last year that saltwater intrusion from the canal threatens to destroy the 7,400-acre Falgout Canal Marsh Management Area, popular for fishing and hunting, unless rock dikes are placed along the channel's banks.

                          One Well Left

                               

     These days only one of the 90 wells on the Harry Bourg property is pumping oil, Theriot says. The corporation supplements its income by selling fishing and hunting permits to local sportsmen. It still has a large alligator population that generates revenue from an annual hunt.

     In 2004 the Bourg Corp. settled a lawsuit it filed against Exxon Mobil Corp. and several other oil companies to clean up pits full of toxic chemicals and residues. Theriot will say only that the property was restored at oil-company expense. Exxon Mobil declined to comment.

     As for suing oil companies to redress damage from the runaway canals, the state supreme court erected a barrier in 2005, says Funderburk, the corporation's lawyer. In a 4-3 decision in case known as Terrebonne Parish School Board vs.

Castex Energy, the court found that companies can't be required to refill eroded canals or pay damages unless a mineral lease specifically contains language compelling them to do so.

                          Who Will Pay

                               

     Who will pay to rebuild Louisiana's wetlands has been under debate for years. Environmental scientists and lawyers argue that the oil industry should help foot the bill. The state says the federal government should pay because its flood-control projects helped cut off the river's delta-building and its navigation channels fueled erosion.

     “I don't think anyone in the state is denying that oil and gas plays a role, but the overwhelming majority of our problems come from the federal interference in the natural waterways,”

says Chris Macaluso, a spokesman for the state's Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority.

     “The industry, in a way, is already paying,” Macaluso says, as Louisiana spends some of its oil and gas royalties on restoration projects. The state is also pinning some of its plans on an additional $500 million a year in shared federal royalties from offshore drilling starting in 2017, he says.

     “The oil industry damage to the Louisiana coast via oil and gas exploration over the past 80 years dwarfs the BP spill and all other spills past, present and future,” says Oliver Houck, director of Tulane University's environmental law program in New Orleans. “The exploration has torn us to shreds, and for this damage the industry has yet to pay a penny.

  • Super User
Posted

The rabbit is finally out of the hat. Actually, it's been out a long time. Just been shoved under the carpet.

Time to pay up and way past time to repair the damage done. The Louisiana coast has been raped for years, the oil companies, crooked politicians, and all their greedy friends know it. They won't pay; well they might, but we will bear the cost.

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