Gulf's future looks grim

WASHINGTON -- If the growing oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico isn't contained soon - and the latest efforts suggest it won't be - then the damage to the fragile region will intensify over the coming summer months as changing currents and the potential for hurricanes complicate the containment and cleanup efforts.

"It's all lose, lose, lose here," said Rick Steiner, a retired marine scientist who's familiar with both the current Gulf oil spill and the Exxon Valdez disaster two decades ago.

"The failure of the top kill really magnified this disaster exponentially," he said. "I think there's a realistic probability that this enormous amount of oil will keep coming out for a couple months. This disaster just got enormously worse."

As the federal government and BP try yet another strategy to curb the flow of oil from the blown well a mile below the surface of the Gulf - one that could increase the flow of oil in the short term by as much as 20 percent - scientists anticipate a range of disastrous effects, only some of which are well understood.

The damage to the shorelines of Gulf states is literally only the surface of the problem: The damage to the sea floor could be extensive, and oil could also devastate marine life between the Gulf floor and its surface.

If none of the short-term solutions plug the well, the only long-term fix - drilling two relief wells to stem the flow of oil - likely won't be completed until late July or August. President Obama on Saturday called the news about the latest failed attempt "as enraging as it is heartbreaking."

Larry Crowder, a professor of marine biology at Duke University, said that if the spill continues for a couple more months, then oil almost certainly would get into the Loop Current that flows clockwise around the Gulf. It then would be a week to 10 days before it got to the Florida Keys, and a couple of weeks more before the Gulf Stream carried it to North Carolina.

"If you have enough oil, it can go a big distance," and some 100 million gallons could be spilled by this summer. "There's almost no place that's off-limits," Crowder said.

With summer approaching, hurricanes are the most obvious complication. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts an above-average hurricane season, and a hurricane getting into the Gulf and moving toward the Louisiana coast could force BP to halt its effort to drill the relief wells until the storm passed.

Hurricanes also could disperse the oil farther and wider - or roil the waters so that oil at the surface plunges to great depths and poisons the deepwater ecosystem.

Any hurricane and its accompanying storm surge also could drive oil onto land, even into the rice and sugarcane fields that aren't far from the coast in Louisiana, said James H. Cowan Jr., a biological oceanographer at Louisiana State University.

"It's a nightmare that just won't quit," Cowan said. He's spent his career researching fisheries production and ecosystem management, but he now sees nothing ahead but studying what the oil is doing to the Gulf. "I'm 54, and I never expected I'd spend the rest of my career dealing with oil spill issues," he said.