HOUSTON—What does the nation’s ongoing BP oil spill disaster have in common with a little cove just off of Interstate-10 east at the San Jacinto River? Both show what happens when oil fouls the water and shoreline.
In 1994, floodwaters ripped open oil pipelines running parallel to the San Jacinto River. Then, as resident Russell Garrison remembers, it all caught fire.
"It like shook my trailer. It looked like half the world was on fire," Garrison recalled.
The fire eventually burned out, but it didn’t burn up the 2 million gallons of crude oil and fuel that had escaped. Just as we’re seeing in the Gulf now, crews used booms, vacuums, and dispersants to try to sop it all up.
"It was very difficult to clean up," remembers Richard Arnhart, who heads the regional office of the Texas General Land Office Oil Spill Prevention and Response department.
But one spot they intentionally did not touch, but rather left coated in oil, was that little cove. Instead, scientists from Texas A&M wired it with oil-detecting sensors to see what the oil would do.
And what did they find?
"In fact, the site restored itself quicker than we thought," said James Bonner, an environmental scientist who is now with Clarkson University in New York.
In a story that aired on 11 News back in 2001, Bonner can be seen on a research project, digging into the shoreline soil.
"There’s no appreciable oil there," Bonner said.
They found that in as little as six months’ time, much of the oil had naturally degraded and was, for the most part, not detectable.
Is that cause for hope as we watch the unrelenting gusher in the Gulf?
"Mother Nature is incredibly resilient. I hope we haven’t overwhelmed her in this particular case," said Bonner in an interview last week.
The BP spill is of such magnitude, scientists are hard-pressed to make predictions.
But consider that oil is routinely spilled into waterways around Houston, home to one of the largest refinery complexes in the world.
"We do have a multitude of spills. At this particular office we average over 400 spills a year," said Arnhart.
Most spills involve just a few gallons. But others are far bigger.
Last year, a tanker in the Houston Ship Channel lost 10,500 gallons of oil. In Chambers County, a pipeline leaked 9,870 gallons of oil into Cedar Bayou. In Galveston, another tanker lost 2,613 gallons into the Galveston Ship Channel. The reported oil spills along the Gulf Coast of Texas last year totaled 87,188 gallons.
Some years, there was twice that much. In 2006, a total of 195,426 gallons spilled, and 2001 a total of 143,581 gallons seeped into Texas coastal waterways.
And yet, months later, the Land Office has found whatever oil crews could recover is usually gone.
"Typically, if you have an area that’s been oiled, a year later, you can go back and you’d be hard-pressed to see if there’s actually been a spill event or not," said Arnhart.
Is that re-assuring or can looks be deceiving?
"There have been studies that have documented the effects of oil spills on, for example, the growth rates of mussels for 50 years after an oil spill," said Anna Armitage, a Texas A&M ecoscientist working at the school’s Galveston campus. She said there’s little definitive data on long-term effects of oil spills on aquatic life or on people.
"What are the long-term health effects on the people who eat those fish?" Armitage asked.
Back on the San Jacinto River, people who’ve lived on the water for years said the big spill and many smaller ones have changed the river from what it was decades ago.
"It was clean, clear. I mean, it was so much different," said resident Garrison.
