| Mississippi oil spill cleanup making headway Speedy reaction, cooperative weather help curtail effect 12/02/2000 By Glynn Wilson / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News NEW ORLEANS – A fast response, a little luck and cooperative weather have minimized the effect of a half-million-gallon oil spill in the Mississippi River, Coast Guard officials say.
The cleanup is "going extremely well," Mark Mackowiak, of the Coast Guard public response team, said Friday. "The weather has been extremely cooperative."
The mild wind kept most of the oil on the west bank of the river south of New Orleans, away from the Delta National Wildlife Refuge and the Pass-a-Loutre State Wildlife Management Area on the east bank.
The weekend forecast calls for cloudy skies, slight wind, no rain, and temperatures in the 60s during the day and the 40s at night.
Friday afternoon, the Coast Guard reopened a 26-mile stretch of the Mississippi River to shipping traffic after three days of battling the 550,000 gallons of oil released when an 890-foot oil tanker, the Westchester, lost power and ran aground Tuesday night near Port Sulphur.
The Coast Guard has at least 120 people working to contain and clean up the spill. About 30,000 feet of boom has been used, along with 30 vessels, 15 oil skimmers, 11 vacuum trucks, three barges and one helicopter.
A lock at Empire, several miles down river from the spill, was opened Friday so that oystermen could get to oyster beds in the marshes and bay areas along the river. The lock had been closed to keep oil out of the areas.
"We got ahead of the oil, so it doesn't head down in there, and we've contained most of it," Mr. Mackowiak said. "So itdoesn't seem like it's going to be affected as they thought it would."
"The oyster beds and fish remain unaffected."
Buras, further down river,is suffering the worst shoreline damage, where most of the oil is pooling. But the area is largely barren, Mr. Mackowiak said.
The east bank across from the spill is an important waterfowl migration destination, and it is a critical time of year, when 300,000 geese and ducks settle in every fall in the bayous and marshes of eastern Plaquemines Parish. The hunting industry, which attracts duck hunters from all over the country, generates $125 million for the local economy.
The harm to ducks appears to be minor so far, and the season ends Sunday.
The state Wildlife and Fisheries department is busy collecting and treating injured birds, including some pelicans, although, officials said, the damage will largely fall on microscopic organisms and small fish and won't be known for some time.
The spill is equivalent to about 5 percent of the disaster off the coast of Alaska in the spring of 1989, when the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Prince William Sound, officials said. The Exxon Valdez leaked 10.5 million gallons over a much wider area, and the leak is considered the largest in U.S. history. Another 10.5-million-gallon spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 1979 south of Galveston, resulted in a massive fire.
"The numbers in this one aren't anything like what happened in Alaska or even the Gulf of Mexico in '79," Mr. Mackowiak said.
Glynn Wilson is a free-lance writer based in New Orleans.
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