HURRICANES AND OIL, A LOOK BACK

Written by: Bob Metcalfe

It's sort of a guilty pleasure of mine... I enjoy watching Joe Bastardi's video posts and reading his blog. While I find his forecasts sometimes a bit extreme, he does often post some very valuable history lessons and nuggets of information. Earlier this week he took a look back at hurricanes and how they interacted with the biggest oil spill up until this point.

In 1979, an oil rig down in the bottom ring of the Gulf of Mexico spewed what could be by comparison even more oil that what has already leaked from the BP disaster. It also took several months to patch up. The oil migrated north slowly and eventually affected the eastern Texas coast and into parts of Louisiana.

Now that leak was MUCH further away from our coast than the current one, so it is a bit of a different story, but in his video Joe explained a few things:

1- The presence of oil did not seem to have any direct effect on hurricane development OR weakening. 4 tropical storms interacted in this area within two hurricane seasons of the spill.

2- Joe feels that a hurricane in this spill will act like a "giant blender" and actually dilute the oil even quicker than if nature were to take its course otherwise.

He doesn't say anything about the beaches, but the way I interpreted his discussion, it seems to me that a hurricane could actually help restore life in the water quicker. Granted, this could also increase the amount of oil on the land and further into the inland fisheries/waterways, but its an interesting idea nonetheless.