KEY WEST, Fla. — Park rangers found dozens of tar balls from the Dry Tortugas to Big Pine Key, and a new computer model forecast black oil ringing the Florida peninsula next week, stoking fears Tuesday for the state’s tourism industry that fallout from the massive BP oil spill had reached the Sunshine State.
The Coast Guard urged calm, saying it would not be known until later this week whether the 50 3- to 8-inch flattened tar balls found Monday and Tuesday were from the Gulf of Mexico disaster or perhaps oil remnants from a passing ship.
The discoveries stirred many concerns: for the environment, should the oil waste reach the Keys’ precious mangroves; for the Florida economy — both its tourism and fishing industries, after federal authorities imposed a fishing ban in 19 percent of the Gulf of Mexico.
Cuba called U.S. oceanographers last week and sought help, the State Department revealed Tuesday, on how Havana might prepare for any oil-spill waste that could threaten the most pristine coral reefs in the Caribbean, thick mangroves and nesting areas for green sea turtles.
Since then, the two sides have engaged in a “low, technical level” of talks, a State Department official said, focused on environmental cooperation akin to earlier hurricane collaborations.
BP on Tuesday doubled its estimate of the amount of crude being captured by a mile-long recovery tube to 2,000 barrels per day — but what percentage of the spill that is remains uncertain.
BP has said it thinks that 5,000 barrels of crude a day are leaking from the well, but a video made public Tuesday after the tube was placed inside the broken pipe showed clouds of crude oil still billowing into the sea.
Another video provided the first public view of a second leak much nearer the runaway well’s failed blowout preventer spewing oil, too. A BP robot took that video on Saturday and Sunday.
Meanwhile, the president of Shell Oil Co., Marvin Odum, says the company will take additional steps to ensure safety during the Arctic Ocean exploratory drilling it hopes to begin this summer.
The measures include staging a “prefabricated coffer dam” in Alaska that would help contain any spillage, more testing of the blowout preventer, and designing a “hot stab system” so the preventer could be activated remotely.
Odum outlined the measures in a letter to Elizabeth Birnbaum, director of the federal Minerals Management Service. Birnbaum requested the information in light of the gulf spill.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
What are tar balls?
They’re potentially lethal. A tar ball can smother a seabird, mangrove roots or spawning shrimp, experts say.
Chemically, tar balls are natural byproducts of oil. As oil from a spill forms a thin rainbow sheen atop the water, the heavier elements form particulates that can become tar balls, said Lynne Fieber, an associate professor of marine biology at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science.
“Sunlight, the composition of seawater and natural microbes work on oil, changing it into other forms, one of which is tar,” she said. McClatchy Newspapers
