Worst-case scenario now appears likely

Valdez spilled 10.8 million gallons of oil into Alaska’s Prince William Sound; the Deepwater Horizon rig has already released an estimated 12 million gallons of oil into the Gulf; this is based on the conservative estimate that the well releases between 10,000 and 15,000 barrel of oil into the water — some scientists say that the well releases between 60,000 and 90,000 barrels a day (there are 42 gallons in a barrel of oil); if takes until mid-August to cap the underwater gusher, then we should expect the equivalent of 900,000 barrels, or 37,800,000 gallons, to released into the water yet — about four times the amount of oil released by the Exxon Valdez.

Now, as if this were note enough, officials and scientists are worrying that the environmental disaster could be compounded later this year by a natural one. The hurricane season starts today and runs through November, and forecasters expect one of the most turbulent seasons ever. If a hurricane rolled over the spill, the winds and storm surges could disperse the oil over a wider area and push it far inland, damaging the fragile marshlands.

“It would very definitely turn an environmental disaster into an unprecedented environmental catastrophe,” said Brian D. McNoldy, a tropical storms researcher at Colorado State University.

The New York Times’s Kenneth Chang writes that specific predictions are impossible to make because the effects would depend on the path, strength, and speed of a hurricane, as well as the size and location of the oil spill when the storm arrived. Because of the counterclockwise rotation of hurricane winds, a storm passing to the west of the slick would tend to push the oil to the coast, while a storm passing to the east would drive the oil away from land.

Chang notes that the winds churn water down only a few hundred feet, so a hurricane would probably not have a major effect on the large plumes of oil believed to be accumulating deep underwater.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is predicting 14 to 23 named storms this season, of which 8 to 14 will turn into hurricanes and 3 to 7 of those will grow into major hurricanes with sustained winds of at least 111 miles per hour. Last month, hurricane forecasters at Colorado State issued similar predictions: 15 named storms, 8 hurricanes and 4 major hurricanes.

The Colorado State team, Philip J. Klotzbach and William M. Gray, said there was a 43 percent chance that at least one hurricane would make landfall in Louisiana this year, based on the higher number of storms and the historical pattern of hurricane paths (the atmospheric administration does not predict where the hurricanes will head).

A hopeful speculation is that the oil might not be all bad news and that it might sap the storm’s energy. In 1966 a husband-and-wife team of federal hurricane researchers, Joanne and Robert H. Simpson, speculated that spraying an insoluble liquid like oil onto the ocean might even be a way to combat hurricanes by cutting off the evaporation that feeds energy into the storm.

Chang notes that in a fact sheet issued last week, however, the atmospheric administration noted that hurricanes span 200 to 300 miles wide, much larger than the current size of the spill, and doubted that the oil could have much effect on the strength or path of a storm.

Hurricane winds would also minimize the evaporation effect. A few years ago, when researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) built a laboratory experiment to look at the flow of heat from water to air under different conditions, they, almost as a lark, followed up on the Simpsons’ suggestion. They applied fatty alcohols onto the water, and at very low wind speeds the alcohols did suppress evaporation.