15 miles out from the Louisiana coast, the oil spill from BP’s Deepwater well begins, blogs Alex Thomson. And as it enters the animal food chain, an ecological disaster looms.
It takes about an hour and a half in skipper Troy Wetzel’s fishing charter boat Kingfish Two.
With twin outboards opened up to 500hp, we belt down through the delta at what feels like at least 25mph.
You fly past the tugs, tankers, bulk-carriers and shrimpers that throng the brown waters of the Mississippi Delta.
Out into the Gulf itself. It’s a bizarre seascape dotted all about with lonely oil wells and distant vast platforms shimmering ghostly on the horizon to port, starboard, fore and aft. Landmarks in a world where you are out of sight of land.
The brown silty Gulf waters, the cloudless hot blue sky and the architecture of Big Oil.
Fifteen miles out and the first streaks of crude oil appear at the surface. It isn’t black – frankly it’s the colour of excrement, emulsified by water, wind and sun.
Precisely the natural forces which, in time, will break down crude oil to harmless silt.
In time.
But whilst that happens it is deeply toxic to the food chain, from plankton to pelicans, watersnakes to whales.
And to humans too. Which is why the rich Gulf fishing and spawning grounds will be shut till who knows when.
“I’m in shock. I just can’t believe it,” says the skipper of Kingfish Two.
Troy surveys at least 20 fishing boats, outriggers dragging orange booms to try and collect the slick.
“I give ’em A for effort, but Jeez – this is cartoon stuff. How much are they getting’? Maybe a gallon a boat tops. Try 200,000!”
A reference to the daily spillage rate said to be belching from BP’s Deepwater well.
He describes his local, national and world fishing records from a lifetime in these once pristine waters.
We have Prof Rick Steiner aboard, a marine pollution expert from Alaska. He believes the booming is more or less useless.
The problem being, he says, that the oil is now suspended throughout the water column from seabed to surface. The more toxic stuff won’t float but will certainly get ingested by shrimps and molluscs and thus pass right up the food chain.
Nothing – repeat – nothing, can stop this happening now. It is already too late.
Each day the slicks widen and deepen. They go from London to Bristol, Edinburgh to Aberdeen. Even if BP get their funnel over the leaks in the coming days, it is way too late for these coastal waters.
Not two miles distant lies the low sandspit of Breton Island, a US National Nature Reserve.
Ten thousand brown pelicans breed here, the state bird of Louisiana. There are thousands more gulls and terns currently breeding. You hear the screaming mass cacophony way before you see the island clearly. Even the roar of Kingfish’s mighty outboards cannot muffle it out.
And all these birds rely, of course, on food from these now-devastated waters. Some will simply be externally oiled and poisoned as they preen fouled plumage.
Others will eat oil-poisoned fish and marine invertebrates and then pass on the fatal results to the fledglings on Breton.
The ecological time bomb is thus well and truly primed already, regardless of when – or even if – these slicks reach land.