Vermilion Bay

Its name is drawn from a ruddy pigment used since ancient times. But right now the collective worry is that it’s about to become streaked with a fresh leak of brown crude: The site of an Gulf oil platform explosion, reported Thursday morning by a helicopter company flying over the area, is 80 miles from Vermilion Bay along the central coast of Louisiana.

Surge Desk has the details on the bay’s location, wildlife and history with oil rigs — and oil disasters like this one on Mariner Energy’s platform.

Where is Vermilion Bay exactly?

The bay is an inlet of the Gulf of Mexico, to which it’s linked by the Southwest Pass straight. Vermilion River, a 72-mile stretch of water that flows through southern Louisiana, feeds into the bay.

On the bay’s southwestern shore, there’s a dedicated wildlife refuge zone — it’s also in close range to Marsh Island, home to yet another state wildlife refuge.

What’s Vermilion Bay known for?

Largely wildlife and fishing. The bay is home to myriad marine life, as well as alligators, shorebirds and wading birds.

The flora and fauna in the area also make it a hot spot for camping: Cypremort Point State Park, on the coast of the bay, offers fishing, canoeing, kayaking and bird watching for tenting tourists.

Has It Been Affected by Oil Spills Before?

Oh, you know it. The BP oil spill was a direct hit to the bay: 1,100 miles off the coast of Vermilion were closed to fishing after the April spill.

Patches of oil were spotted in the bay via satellite imagery throughout the summer.

Conservation projects in the area, like an oyster reef restoration project, were stalled by the spill and have just started picking up steam again. Time will tell whether this latest rig incident stops them yet again. So far, reports of another oil leak have not been confirmed.

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Oil Rig Explosion

Another oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico exploded today. All crew members survived. Right now, nobody knows whether or not the explosion caused a leak in any of the seven wells that the rig collects from. There have been reports of an oil slick on the water near the fire, but that could just as easily be from the finite amount of oil stored on the rig—which would still a spill, but a significantly less problematic one.

Other than that, there's not really much information out about this right now. If anybody's learned anything from Deepwater Horizon it seems to be that you're better off, PR-wise, if you don't have to correct everything you say two days later.

To give you something to chew over in the meantime, though, Deep Sea News has been doing a really interesting series on the science (such as it is) of oil dispersants. It's interesting, not just because of the basic facts, but also because it gets into the details of why we don't know more.

    Dispersants must be applied successfully and have a high effectiveness once in ocean waters. This sounds easy, in principle--once you've perfected your Corexit formula in the lab, just spray it from a helicopter, and voila! Except there are a lot of factors which you also have to take into account: the composition of the oil spilled, sea energy, whether the oil has been subjected to weathering at all, exact type of dispersant used and the amount which you sprayed, and ocean temperature/salinity.

    Thank goodness for all those lab tests over the years which figured all this stuff out, you say. Um, well actually it seems like even designing simulation experiments is difficult, and different tests can report different effectiveness scores for the same dispersant. It is difficult to accurately scale up lab tests in order to predict dispersant action on real spills. Older studies used methods and analyses which have since been discredited. Wave-tank tests can probably provide upper limits on dispersant effectiveness, but there are SEVENTEEN (!!) critical factors that require strict control for accurate results (Fingas 2002). Field tests in open ecosystems are even worse for measuring the fate of oil and controlling variables. In terms of measuring dispersant effectiveness, tank tests, field tests, and lab tests all disagree. Awesome.

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