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Another warning about pipelines

What’s more impressive than a long, elaborate fireworks show?

The OCEAN ON FIRE!

When that happens, it looks like the cauldron of JRR Tolkien’s Mount Doom.

An unprecedented phenomenon that was quickly dubbed “The Eye of Fire” formed in the Gulf of Mexico over the Fourth of July weekend when a gas line ruptured and managed to catch fire underwater.

How does that happen?!

Watching the video of raging flames spouting from the ocean was like staring down a Satan/Cyclops.

The undersea gas line, stemming from a nearby drilling rig operated by the national Mexican petroleum monopoly Pemex, burned for five hours. That is much, much longer than any fireworks spectacle, but not nearly as loud.

Not loud in a literal sense, that is. It probably hissed like a gas grill heating up for an Independence Day cookout.

But, in a figurative sense, it was a deafening warning shot from the future.

“The Eye of Fire” is further proof, if such were needed, that the Gulf of Mexico is a mess. And, by extension, so is the ocean.

The Gulf of Mexico is where the first “dead zone” formed, a vast area so anaerobic that organisms other than algae cannot survive there. Annual inundations of fertilizer runoff from the sprawling Mississippi River watershed created the original dead zone. It has grown steadily, as years of farming and lawncare keep flushing petroleum-based nitrogen products from the brown water of the rivers into the blue water of the sea.

Now, dead zones are forming — or very likely will form soon — in all similar embayments around the world: the Persian Gulf, the Bay of Bengal, the Mediterranean, Black, and Yellow Seas … Also, big estuaries, where freshwater meets salt, are actively deteriorating as marine environments: the Chesapeake, San Francisco Bay, the Guayaquil River in Ecuador, the Pearl River in China … Will the Great Lakes be on the list?

But the “Eye of Fire” phenomenon is more closely related to a different debacle in the increasingly dystopian Gulf of Mexico: the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010. The benthic zone in the region around that catastrophe continues to suffer its consequences — weird mutations and population reduction among our crustacean friends, for instance. The same is true of the littoral region, where beach-walkers must beware oil blobs in the sand.

As the nation’s terrestrial infrastructure erodes and collapses (most recently, condos in Miami; not long ago, an interstate bridge in Minneapolis), the disintegration of the subaqueous bones of the energy economy do the same.

The cause of the “Eye of Fire” is unknown at this moment, but it is likely to follow the pattern of the myopic overreach of the Deepwater Horizon operation, drilled at a depth too far. Pipelines everywhere face the same prospect of failure.

A nearby freshwater example is the decrepit and accident-prone Line 5 through the Straits of Mackinac, which is facing long-overdue scrutiny and causing U.S.-Canada tensions that are ongoing at this very moment.

Last week, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dealt a death blow to Line 5, by upgrading the requirements Enbridge Inc. must meet from a superficial “environmental assessment” to a far more thorough “environmental impact statement.” The oil pipeline is 68 years old. It has never had to pass an “environmental impact statement.” The research for such a study takes an average of three-and-a-half years.

Wait for it: Line 5 will soon be forced to shut down, never to reopen.

The fiery eye in the ocean over the weekend sends the same message as the other disasters that preceded it, and which will follow: We H. sapiens must stop relying on chemical fertilizers and quit burning fossils or the planet will not be able to sustain our species much longer.

Eric Paul Roorda is the editor of “The Ocean Reader: History, Politics, Culture” (Duke University Press, 2020). His cartoons appear in The News on Saturdays, and his monthly column on Alcona County, “The Latest from the First,” comes out every second Monday.

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