[♪ and rushing water]
[♪]
The Deepwater Horizon oil spill was the largest accidental
offshore oil spill that had ever occurred.
The magnitude of the task at hand
was significant and we had
never undertaken a damage assessment
of this scale before, or an oil spill response of
this scale before for that matter.
We had to think about how we were going to
get teams out to assess the entire northern
Gulf of Mexico ecosystem.
It was very challenging being in the gulf
immediately after the spill. It was a very high stress
situation and required a lot of expert support.
This assessment was different than any other
spill that anyone else had ever worked on
in terms of the scope and the duration.
We were facing an incident that we had never had
to deal with before.
Our job was to determine what was going on
with the incident, so where was the oil spill?
How was the oil coming out?
How much oil was coming into the environment?
Where was it going?
And then, what resources would be in the pathway
of that oil and what habitats, what mammals, what turtles,
what birds, what fish, what type of organisms
were going to be impacted by the oil?
How much was the injury? How significant was it?
What types of injury did they have? How long
it would take those resources to recover?
And then we had to determine what type
of restoration projects would help those resources recover.
We had to determine what the costs of those
restoration projects would be.
The whole team knew
how much was at stake.
We knew we needed to get out there and collect
the right data that was going to help us understand
what was happening in the environment.
And it was such a big spill that the pressure
to get it right was really great.
We had to send field teams out into the environment
to collect samples; things like water samples
and sediment samples and collect animals
and organisms to understand how much they were
contaminated. And we do chemical analysis of those
samples and we conduct tests on the animals.
We also do these field tests and field sampling
in combination with laboratory tests.
We conducted over 600 toxicity tests
in the laboratory and in the field,
on over 40 different species.
We determined that the entire northern Gulf of Mexico
ecosystem was affected by this oil spill.
The effects that were seen in one area of the gulf
were cascading into other areas of the gulf.
Some of the most significant impacts we saw
were along the shoreline.
We found that over 1300 miles of shoreline were oiled.
That’s the equivalent driving distance from
New Orleans to New York.
The tools and methods that we developed for the
Deepwater Horizon spill have significantly advanced
our ability to understand oiling effects on resources
for spills moving forward.
We had to develop tools to help us understand
where the oil went at a scale that we had never done before.
The surface oiling footprint was so large that
we could not characterize the whole thing by using
an airplane and we had to figure out how to evaluate
the extent of the surface oiling by using sensors
that were on satellites,
on fixed wing aircraft,
on drones, from helicopters, which is something
we had not had to do for an oil spill before.
Remotely operated underwater vehicles are now
being used to characterize oil in the water column in ways
that have not been done prior to Deepwater Horizon.
These tools are more accurate at characterizing the oil
in the environment because we are able to see
the oil with finer resolution and with sensors that
allow us to understand more about its nature
and its chemistry.
These tools that we’ve developed also allow us to
more rapidly understand what’s happening in the environment.
An oil spill is a very fast moving event
and we have a need to get out there and respond
very quickly to clean it up and also to collect data
and information to understand what’s happening to the
environment that has been affected by the oil.
[♪]