Covediver's Underwater World

The story appeared below the fold on the front page of the business section of the Anchorage Daily News, heralded by the headline “Scientist says offshore oil platforms make ideal fish habitat.” With a dateline of Santa Barbara, I anticipated that the “scientist” in the story was none other than Milton “Milt” Love, a widely respected and dedicated marine biologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The story was quoting attorney Linda Crop, a longtime Love detractor and a lawyer with the Environmental Defense Center by the article’s fifth sentence; long before Milt Love has a chance to chime in to relate why he believes what he does. This is objectivity as it is taught in today’s J-schools; don’t try to state facts, just quote both sides and let the public figure it out.

Full disclosure time. I have known Milt Love professionally for nearly 15 years. I knew of him by reading his insightful and humorous book on California fishes. No one can write quite like Dr. Love. For a few years, I also managed the U.S. government/University of California cooperative research program that funded some of Dr. Love’s research. Before that, I was affiliated with the Ocean and Coastal Policy Center of the Marine Science Institute where I worked on my Ph.D. and taught Political Science and Environmental Management at a small state-supported university in Alabama.

I got involved in this issue in earnest in 1993. Brandon Cole, a now world-renowned marine wildlife photographer, and I dived on two of California’s offshore oil platforms. Just a short time before, all California offshore platforms were off limits to everyone but commercial divers working on the structures. That changed in the early 1990s when Chevron decided to cease operations on the four platforms close to Summerland and Carpentaria, just south of Santa Barbara, because most of the oil had been produced from the underlying field in the quarter century the platforms had been operating. The platforms, with their Coast Guard-approved designators Hilda, Hazel, Hope, and Heidi (collectively known as the “4H’s)--were among the first to be placed off the California coast. Now, under the terms of the leases from the State of California, they would be among the first to be removed.

With the cessation of operations, Chevron allowed small dive boats to dive on the platforms by appointment while they planned for the disposition of the structures. Brandon and I dived from a Radon, a locally constructed vessel designed to handle the rigors of the Santa Barbara Channel. Radons are work boats, fanatically favored by urchin divers and others who made their living from the sea.

I was impressed by the diversity and thickness of marine life on the structures. While Brandon shot images of the critters swimming through the underwater truss structure that is a platform, I went exploring. A platform is like a big underwater jungle gym. The two dives so impressed me that I decided to learn more about the possibility of preserving some of the marine life and habitat that the structures provided.

I learned that before platforms could be converted to artificial reefs, all vestiges of oil and gas operations, including much of the topside deck and production spaces would have to be cleansed of contaminants and removed. Any of the remaining structure left in place or “reefed” at another location would have to be a minimum of 50 feet from the surface so as not to constitute a hazard to navigation. Once deconstructed, what remains of a platform is literally tons of steel, akin to something an ambitious and industrious boy could build with an Erector Set. Finally, I discovered that scientists were not certain whether these platforms-as-artificial-reefs merely aggregated existing fish populations (the attraction hypothesis) or whether they increased fish populations (the production hypothesis). Furthermore, if they did produce, a debate raged whether the design and vertical relief of the structure was optimum for mimicking the topography of a natural reef.

In the absence of scientific certainty (and as events bear out, often in the overwhelming presence of it) the issue becomes more than emotional, it takes on the trappings of religion. Environmentalists hold as a tenet of the faith that offshore oil and gas is the ultimate evil; representing the literal and figurative rape of Mother Ocean. In their theology, redemption is not possible, good cannot come from evil, and the entire structure must be damned to the fires of Hell, in this case the recycling furnace. Any compromise undermines the fundamental beliefs of the faith. An offshore structure can have no possibility of redemption.

I countered this religious dogma in several newspaper and popular press articles, using the analogy of the platform as a steel pinnacle, with zones of different marine life as one moved from top to bottom; the same zones that one found on our rocky offshore pinnacles. I wondered out loud how long it took before “artificial” could be considered “natural” and whether or not it was a distinction without a difference to the organisms that inhabited the reefs? I noted that an oil company announcement revealing plans to alter an equivalent amount of “natural reef” through their operations would have the deep greens launching a flotilla of a thousand kayaks to blockade the site. In the case of the 4H’s, nary a single windsurfer sailed in protest. Finally, the State’s own environmental analysis on other fields determined that removing platforms could have significant, albeit local, environmental effects that would have to be mitigated as a condition of State approval of the State-mandated removal. Since on-site mitigation was not possible, compensation would be in order. Yet, the environmentally-preferred mitigation is to avoid the effect by not undertaking the operation that will cause it. Twelve years later I am still waiting for rational responses to these points.

The “precautionary principle,” long a touchstone of the environmental movement dictates that “when the potentially adverse effects of a proposed activity are not fully understood, the activity should not be allowed to proceed.” The principle was disavowed by the environmentalists and the platforms were ripped out. Tons of biomass was taken to shoreside landfills and the chance to preserve function reefs disappeared. By the way, the latest scientific evidence indicates that reefs are more likely to be “producers” rather than “attractors.”