Small Comfort for Victims of the Gulf Oil Spill

From the outbox of Meyer’s inbox:

The pictures coming out of the Gulf of Mexico are not pretty and not getting any better. As oil contiunes to spew from the wreckage of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion, a small (very small) measure of comfort can be found by taking a look back in history at the world’s worst oil spill. Thankfully, the Deepwater Horizon tragedy hasn’t approached the spill numbers from the Persian Gulf spill that happened during the Gulf War of 1991. A massive clean-up operation was launched and surprisingly that region found signs of recovery within three years. That’s a long time to wait for the folks suffering through this mess but it could mean we might get our own Gulf back to the way it was. Let’s hope and pray…

LESSONS LEARN FROM THE LARGEST OIL SPILL IN HISTORY

CNN — As oil continues to pour into the Gulf of Mexico following the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion, comfort may come from an unusual direction: the largest oil spill in history. Between five and 10 million barrels of oil poured into the Persian Gulf in 1991 when Iraqi troops, retreating from their occupation of Kuwait, set fire to desert oil wells and opened the valves on oil rigs and pipelines.

The spill — at least five times the most recent estimate of that spilled in the Gulf of Mexico — devastated marine wildlife and coastal habitats in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Yet, against all the odds, the Persian Gulf appears to have shown amazing resilience in response to the ecological disaster.

Nicolas Pilcher is a marine specialist with the International Union for Conservation of Nature. He was in neighboring Saudi Arabia as oil began washing ashore on the beaches. It had flowed south along the coast from Kuwait.

“It was huge,” Pilcher told CNN. “It’s hard to describe for people who weren’t there but it was basically a coast of black.”

By the time Saudi authorities and international contractors initiated clean-up efforts, pumping oil from the sea into holding areas, much of the oil had sunk, evaporated or washed up on beaches, according to Pilcher.

“You would see oil on the beach or along the shoreline in the water, but it wasn’t there for more than about a month,” he said. But oil slicks had an immediate and catastrophic impact on local wildlife.

Christophe Tourenq, science and research manager at the World Wildlife Fund’s UAE office told CNN that researchers estimate 30,000 water birds were killed by the oil.

Fish eggs and larvae were killed by slicks, which in turn reduced the breeding success of some bird species by 50 percent in the year after the spill, he said.

You can read the rest of the story and see some amazing photos here.