Ixtoc I to Deepwater Horizon… The more spills change, the more they stay the same

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

More than a month after the Deepwater Horizon oil platform explosion and leak began, the memory of the media has finally been jarred — "this all seems vaguely familiar, oh yeah, it happened before!"

The Rachel Maddow Show put together a decent compilation from the 1979 Ixtoc I oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that at that time was the largest oil spill in history, and affected Mexico and Texas for years.

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Earlier this week, the Arizona Republic published this article about the history of Ixtoc I. Mexico recalls a similar oil disaster:

Here on Mexico's Gulf Coast, the Deepwater Horizon disaster has revived vivid memories of the world's worst accidental oil spill, a 1979 blowout that spewed oil for nine months, devastated marine life and covered the Texas and Mexican coasts with gobs of crude.

Now, residents here are worried they may be in for a repeat of that disaster, as ocean currents begin to catch oil from the Deepwater Horizon and the Atlantic hurricane season gets under way June 1.

There are strong parallels between the two spills. Like the Deepwater Horizon spill, the Ixtoc I spill on June 3, 1979, involved the failure of a blowout-preventer device, a kind of emergency shutoff valve. In both cases, metal domes put over the well failed to stop the leak.

And as they did in Mexico, BP crews are trying to stop the spill by drilling reliever wells horizontally through the seafloor, a technique that could take months.

The Ixtoc I was an exploratory well being drilled in 160 feet of water about 60 miles northwest of Ciudad del Carmen on Mexico's Gulf Coast. The well was owned by Petroleos Mexicanos, Mexico's state oil company known as Pemex, but it was being drilled by Sedco Inc., a predecessor to Transocean Ltd., which also owns the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig.

About 3 a.m., the drill bit hit a high-pressure pocket of gas and oil. The drill pipe bent, the blowout preventer failed and a geyser of oil shot 150 feet into the air before bursting into flame.

Armando Rodriguez was a deckhand on a ship that was laying pipe for the Ixtoc I well and was standing watch when the drilling platform exploded, sending a pillar of blue flame shooting into the night sky.

"The tower bent in half and went down in sparks," Rodríguez said. "We pulled out all the survivors. Then the oil started getting sucked into the engines, and the captain ordered us to back away."

The spill wiped out fishing along the Mexican coast for nearly two years, said fisherman Agapito Quintana, 73.

Reaching under a boat behind the offices of the Miguel Aleman Fisherman's Cooperative in Coatzacoalcos, Quintana pulled out what looked like a lump of rubber: hardened sludge from a more recent oil spill. Inside, the lump was glossy black and smelled like especially pungent tar.

"This stuff is poison," Quintana said. "It's going to go everywhere. We saw this happen in '79."

Pemex and a series of U.S. contractors struggled for months to stop the leak. One company managed to close the well casing, but the oil broke through below the seal and caused another blowout. Another contractor built a dome for the well that it called the Sombrero, Spanish for hat, but oil continued to seep from cracks in the sea floor.

In August 1979, balls of sticky tar began washing up on the hotel beaches of South Padre Island in Texas. Crews scraped them up with construction equipment and giant vacuum cleaners, and the Coast Guard stretched a net across the Port Mansfield inlet to catch submerged tar balls.

Pemex began drilling two horizontal relief wells soon after the spill in June 1979, but they did not reach the Ixtoc I well until November, five months later. The crews used the relief wells to pump mud and steel balls into the gusher, finally capping the leak on March 25, 1980.

BP, which owns the well in the Deepwater Horizon spill, began drilling its own relief wells on May 2 and May 16, respectively. They will take about three months to complete, the company says.

* * *

The Ixtoc I leak spilled between 3 million and 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, making it second in size only to the intentional oil spill caused by retreating Iraqi troops during the 1991 Gulf War.

The spill wiped out fishing along the Mexican coast for about two years.

Sea turtles and dolphins also suffered. The Kemp's ridley sea turtle, which spends much of its life in the Gulf of Mexico, was nearly driven extinct. Scientists dug up hundreds of oil-covered turtle eggs and flew them to cleaner beaches in an attempt to save them.

Many residents now fear a repeat of the disaster. A variation in the Gulf currents that occurs every six to 11 months could eventually carry the oil toward Mexico, said Mike Pigott, a meteorologist with the Accuweather forecasting company in State College, Pa.

"The winds are dead out there now, but in June they're going to start blowing again," said Roman Dominguez, president of the Gavilan del Rio Fisherman's cooperative in Coatzacoalcos. "That's what people are worried about. Everyone here remembers Ixtoc."