Busier Than Usual Hurricane Season On Its Way

June 6, 2010

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Just like the neighborhood swimming pool and major league baseball the Gulf of Mexico’s annual hurricane season has opening (June 1) and closing (November 30) dates. Predictions for the season just begun are that it will be “busy” to “active.”

Experts from NOAA and Colorado State University are anticipating 14 to 23 tropical storms in the Gulf of Mexico, including five to ten hurricanes, two or three of them “major” (qualified by sustained winds of 111 mph). Typically there’s a one in three chance that one of the major’s will hit land; this year’s stats put it somewhere between 50 to 75 percent.

In a normal year those numbers would be worrying; this season is complicated by the 40 million gallons of loosed oil – 40 million gallons and still gushing!! – afloat on the Gulf’s surface, lying just below it or spreading in massive plumes down to 500 feet below sea level. The leak sits dead center in the superhighway that in past years has delivered hurricanes like Camille and Katrina deep inland.

The higher numbers are due to warmer-than-usual tropical Atlantic Ocean surface temperatures, which may be complicated by the fact that all that oil in the water is making surface temps even warmer.

“In this ‘untreaded water’ it’s tough to theorize about what would happen,” Joe Bastardi, chief long-range hurricane forecaster with AccuWeather.com told the AP.

Locals are understandably panicked by the thought of all those potential storm waters arriving laden with heavy crude. Hurricane winds would push the oil deeper into estuaries, wetlands and freshwater marshes, its waterspouts sucking up oily water and spreading it inland. Imagine a Katrina-like flood repeating in New Orleans, with its heavy surge waters filled with oil. The worst case? A long-lasting (4-5 day) storm out of the southeast, which could drive the storm surge as much as twenty miles inland.

For the rest of my report on the upcoming hurricane season, go to takepart.com.

The End of the Line: Venice, Louisiana

May 10, 2010

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Venice, Louisiana – Along the fifty-miles of Highway 23 leading south from New Orleans to the fingertip of land that ends in marshes outside of this fishing-and-oil town are reminders of disasters past and pending.

Remnants of wood-frame homes never rebuilt since the hurricanes five years ago. Cement slabs where entire sub-divisions of brick homes used to stand. New homes and workplaces built since the storms sit two, six, even twenty feet above ground, supported on cinder block , sturdy posts of brick or 4 x4s, prepared in advance for whenever the next flood waters race beneath rather than through them. Dozens of businesses shuttered, never to reopen.

Looking months and years into the future, given the still-looming crisis building in the Gulf of Mexico each day as thousands more barrels of crude are added to the mix, it’s easy to imagine many of the homes and businesses still standing as vacant, abandoned shells. Once oil reaches the marshes and coastal beaches of Louisiana – as it is right now threatening in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida – for many years after there won’t be work for the shrimpers and seafood processors, charter boat fishermen and the dependent businesses (restaurants and bars, bait shops and hardware stores) lining the four-lane. For the rest of my dispatches from Louisiana, see takepart.com.