Offshore drilling can harmoniously exist with nature — and does so

I believe the Asheville Citizen-Times’ editorial, “Expanded offshore drilling is no answer to our energy crisis” (AC-T, July 16), is in desperate need of a response.

It’s one thing to take a position on an issue, but it’s quite another to use as the foundation for your arguments fears that have little basis in reality, and the editorial to which I refer has a few of them.

First and foremost is the assumption that because the North Carolina coast is indeed in “Hurricane Alley” that any drilling rigs off the Carolina coast would be in danger, thus they would pose an immediate threat to the coast of Carolina. Oil companies pay engineers a lot of money to design those rigs to withstand all that Mother Nature can dish out. While they’re not completely foolproof, the rigs do have an outstanding safety record considering what they have to endure.

Rigs withstand storms

In 2005, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita ripped through the Gulf of Mexico. At least two dozen active rigs were damaged to some degree, but little oil was lost. A Houston Chronicle article dated Nov. 13, 2005 (“Spills from hurricanes staining the coast”), details the environmental disasters of the those two hurricanes, but a close examination of the article shows that the vast majority of the spills came from damaged storage tanks, not off-shore rigs. In fact, what oil leaked from the rigs is described in the article this way, “The spills are so thin and evaporate so easily that they likely disappeared before anyone could reach them.” In other words, they were of little consequence.

The solution obviously would be that if drilling is to take place of the coast of Carolina, then the storage of whatever crude is produced should be handled somewhere else.

Not really pristine

The second fear — that somehow having oil rigs off the Carolina coast automatically means an end to pristine beaches — is pure hogwash as well. I grew up along the Gulf Coast of Mississippi (which shares the same Gulf waters as rigs off the coast of Louisiana), and never once did I ever see an oil slick at the beach, and the beach was never closed due to any oil-related matter that I can remember. I just returned from a visit to Sunset Beach along the Carolina coast, and it is indeed beautiful, but I wouldn’t call it pristine.

Every day, I found myself picking discarded lures, floats, parts of fishing nets, plastics, Styrofoam and who knows what else off the sand and out of the surf. Should we ban the fishing and shrimping industries too? How about tourists? Certainly, they’re polluting as much, if not more, than the folks who make their living out in the water.

The final fear stated in the AC-T editorial is the fear that the rigs will somehow interrupt or ruin the fishing industry in Carolina and, somehow, bird habitats (that one’s a real stretch). The U.S. has had active rigs in the Gulf of Mexico for decades, and I can personally attest to the fine fishing and abundant seafood to be found there. I have a freezer full of it thanks to a recent trip to my parents’ house in Mississippi.

Abundant marine life

Fishermen along the Gulf have long known that fish love to hang around the artificial reefs represented by the rigs — reefs teeming with marine life that usually mean great fishing. Ask any charter captain along the Gulf Coast of Louisiana or Mississippi where the good fishing is, and he’ll tell you, he’s headed out to the rigs. I’ve been fishing out in the Gulf, and the water is crystal-clear south of the barrier islands off the coast of Mississippi. My point is oil rigs off the coast of Carolina might actually enhance, not ruin, Carolina’s fishing industry.

Perhaps I should invite my colleagues on the editorial staff down to the Gulf on a fact-finding mission. I’m sure it won’t change their minds about drilling off the Carolina coast, but at least they’ll know that offshore drilling can harmoniously exist with nature, and we can eat some great seafood while we’re down there.

Doug Mayer is a multimedia specialist for the Asheville Citizen-Times. He lives in Fletcher.