Courtesy of Orlando Sentinel > Kansas City Star > From The Wilderness: By Kevin Spear The Orlando Sentinel
http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/nation/13456588.htm
EMPIRE, La. - Remember the Exxon Valdez?
It was the infamous supertanker that disemboweled itself on a rocky reef, spewing nearly 11 million gallons of crude oil into Alaskan waters, coating 200 miles of shoreline and killing thousands of birds and otters. Nearly 17 years later, it remains the nation's worst oil spill and a benchmark for environmental disasters.
Just months ago, oil spills on the Louisiana coast almost reached the scale of the Valdez disaster. But the spills drew little attention because they were only one piece of an even bigger story: Hurricane Katrina.
The storm smashed pipelines and tanks, unleashing at least 7 million gallons of crude; it laced valuable coastal wetlands and oiled wading birds.
"If not for the human impact of Katrina, these spills would be headline news all over the world," said Dan Walker, a scholar at the National Research Council's Ocean Studies Board.
As hurricanes are expected to bludgeon the Gulf of Mexico coast more often during the coming decades, the region's century-old oil industry is poised to expand toward the eastern part of the Gulf. Offshore rigs and oil-production platforms may soon dot the waters off Florida. And once the oil starts flowing, development of petroleum-handling facilities in the state may seem like a logical next step.
Hurricane Katrina was a crucial test for how the industry manages disaster.
In a way, a lot went right. Though most of the spills came from pipes and tanks on Louisiana's shore, federal authorities said none of thousands of undersea wells below the Gulf floor leaked significantly.
It was a triumph for a business eager to prove its trustworthiness and win leverage as it seeks approval to drill in the mostly unprobed petroleum deposits along Florida's coast.
Congress and Florida have not resolved key issues, including when drilling might occur, or where rigs and platforms will anchor - if just out of sight or more than 100 miles from beaches. Nobody can predict whether there will be dozens or thousands of platforms or whether shoreline oil facilities will be permitted.
But there is unrelenting pressure to drill in Florida waters, and that's why what went wrong during hurricanes Katrina and Rita and other recent storms are now lessons for Florida.
Katrina and Rita visited the worst-ever destruction on the Gulf of Mexico oil-production industry and the Louisiana coast. As a result, officials are moving with even more vigor to improve rig and platform designs and their anchors and to better shield platform pipelines from storms.
"In reality, I think our record is pretty stellar, considering the forces of Mother Nature," said David Mica, executive director of the Florida Petroleum Council, a division of the American Petroleum Institute.
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