What will happen when a hurricane comes through the gulf?
Jun 15, 2010
in
Hurricane
Now that we have massive amounts of oil in the Gulf of Mexico; what’s going to happen? Every Hurricane season we get at least one hurricane that comes in the Gulf, it’s almost inevitable. What’s going to happen this time? Will it slow it down? Will it sling oil all over 50 states? Or will we get one big tidal wave of oil coming on the beaches?
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One comment
fizixx on June 15, 2010 at 1:04 am
Whatever oil that has been carelessly spewed into this area will be churned up and driven into the shoreline. I can’t even imagine the scope of damage if this happens.
A hurricane won’t spread the oil beyond the shores bordering the Gulf (to whatever degree) and it will look like someone spilled tons of chocolate milkshakes all over. It will penetrate into the bayous, and probably up into the rivers, but unless I’m mistaken the major rivers flow into the Gulf, not from it, so any oil that gets into the water will just flow back into the Gulf again, but that doesn’t mean it won’t taint the shoreline to some degree.
This is a record level disaster as far as the ecosystem is concerned, not to mention the people who earn a living from the sea down there. The hurricane will also do something else….and you can do a little experiment….get a large pot and put a small blop of oil into the middle of it….say a tablespoon, then observe it. For the most part it wants to stay together as one puddle of oil.
If you put a spoon in it and swirls it around a little bit it will break up into smaller but still large enough ‘pads’ to float around in the pot. This would be like the normal wave action of the ocean.
Now, get a whisk, and swirl it around vigorously in the pot. The oil will be broken up into very tiny beads. If you do it long enough and vigorously enough you could probably break it apart so much that you have a hard time even seeing anything is in the water. This is what the hurricane is going to do with all this oil.
What’s the big deal?
Well, this means that the oil will be such fine ‘particles’ it will penetrate much more readily into the shores, marshes, and rocky terrains all along the Gulf shore. Not only that; there are ting particles in the water….the oil will cling to these particles and tend to want to remain apart as opposed to wanting to congeal back together into larger portions again afterward. This will make it much harder to clean up than the Exxon Valdez fiasco that happened back in about 1990 I think…something like that, when that idiot Hazelwood (Captain) wrecked the ship and spilled about 10-15 million gallons of oil into Prince William Sound. There’s still oil up there and down into the beaches. They did a poor job of cleaning it. The Gulf spill is spewing about 200,000 galls per day, depending on what your source is, but this is a consistent and average number from what I found.
It’s unbelievable how little is being done for this, and the severe lacking of ANY sort of shut-off mechanisms.
BP has caused an unprecedented disaster of far-reaching and epic proportions to our country….and it’s amazing how lackluster our govt has been about this whole thing as well.