Potential Disaster

It’s back — the federal government’s push to expand offshore oil drilling.

The waters off Long Island are not in the plan, as of now. As the recent headline in Newsday reported: “Plan for New Oil Drilling Off Fla. and Calif. Coasts.” The subhead on the Associated Press article: “States push back as Trump seeks to expand production.”

The following day, November 22, Newsday ran a nationally syndicated cartoon by Paul Dukinsky depicting President Trump declaring in front of a line of offshore wind turbines: “Wind Turbines Ruin the View!” Then there was Trump in front of a bunch of offshore oil drilling rigs saying: “… But Oil Rigs Are Beautiful!”

Two days later, The New York Times ran a piece with more details headlined: “In One Week, President Makes Moves To Reshape U.S. Environmental Policy.” This included, it noted, “new oil and gas drilling across nearly 1.3 billion acres of U.S. coastal waters, including a remote region of the high Arctic where drilling has never taken place.”

The “plan to hold as many as 34 sales of leases” involves “an area more than half the size of the United States,” it said.

It’s been decades since I broke the story of offshore oil drilling proposed off Long Island, which led to writing about the federal plans to drill up and down the Atlantic Coast.

It was 1970, and I was doing investigative reporting at the daily Long Island Press. A fisherman out of Montauk told me about seeing a ship in the Atlantic Ocean east of Long Island, one similar to those he had seen searching for oil in the Gulf of Mexico when he was a shrimper there.

I telephoned oil company after oil company to inquire about this, and each gave a firm denial about having any interest in looking for petroleum off Long Island.

Then, as I was leaving the office, an editor yelled out that Gulf Oil was calling back.

The PR man from Gulf said, yes, his company was looking for oil and gas off Long Island — and was involved in a consortium of 32 oil companies, including those which had earlier issued denials.

It was my first experience in oil industry honesty — an oxymoron.

I broke the story and stayed on it. In 1971, I got onto the first offshore oil drilling rig set up in the Atlantic, across the border in Canada.

Shell Canada invited the Suffolk County Legislature for a visit. Strong opposition to offshore oil drilling off Long Island was happening, with the legislature in the lead, joined by environmentalists, New York Assembly Speaker Perry B. Duryea Jr. of Montauk, and congressional representatives.

The legislators had listed my name as part of the delegation. However, on the tarmac of the airport in Sydney, Nova Scotia, a Shell Canada executive came over to me and said: “You don’t think you’re going to get on this helicopter, Mr. Grossman.”

The group of Suffolk County legislators intervened, with Legislator John Wehrenberg of Holbrook telling the Shell Canada executive, “If Karl isn’t going, we’re not going.”

There was a stand-off. The men from Shell Canada huddled. And I went on the chopper.

The visit was instructive — it was clear on the rig, with its equipment in preparation of a blow-out and oil spill, that offshore drilling is a dicey proposition.

There were spherical capsules to eject workers in the event of an accident. And a rescue boat went round and round, 24 hours a day. The man from Shell Canada told me: “We treat every foot of hole like a potential disaster.”

I thought of those movies, with scenes of a “gusher” at an oil rig and it raining oil on happy workers. But on an offshore rig, that “gusher” would be raining oil on the sea, and life in it. And then the oil would move to shore.

The Shell Canada executive gestured to the Nova Scotia shore and said that peat moss was being stockpiled to try to absorb any spilled oil. On Long Island, he said, “You’d use straw.”

For years, I went to hearings in Boston, Trenton and elsewhere about the Atlantic offshore oil drilling plan, and traveled down the coast to the Florida Keys, its turquoise waters on the agenda for drilling, too. There were hearings on Long Island. And action was taken by states to block oil drilling in state waters (in New York, three nautical miles out) and by Congress in federal waters (which extend 200 nautical miles).

State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. of Sag Harbor, co-sponsor of a 1979 state bill, said at the time: “Tourism is a major economic driver for Long Island; we also have a very viable commercial and recreational and fishing industry. The proposal for offshore oil drilling threatens both our economy and our environment.”

Oil spills — then and now — are routine in offshore oil drilling.

The largest offshore oil rig spill ever was the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. According to a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration website about it:“The 87-day Deepwater Horizon oil spill released 3.19 million barrels (134 million gallons) of oil into the ocean. … Oil rose from the wellhead on the seafloor,” spreading over “1,300 miles of shoreline across five states. … The cumulative extent of the surface oil slick during the course of the spill totaled 43,300 square miles (approximately equal to the size of Virginia).”

“Offshore Drilling 101” is a recent online report of the Natural Resources and Defense Council. Dated November 24, it begins: “Offshore drilling is risky business. It can have devastating impacts on oceans and coastal communities. It is also expensive. But fossil fuel companies are willing to pay the price to access the potentially large reserves under the sea floor.”

Despite the notion of “a clean energy future, large swaths of our federal waters remain for sale. Until we stop sacrificing public waters to fossil fuels, we’ll continue to see disastrous oil spills … and the acceleration of our climate crisis.”

Will the Trump administration, with its call to “drill, baby, drill,” focus again on waters off Long Island and the Atlantic Coast?