June 12 I wrote about one Gulf oil spill solution I thought might work and that was letting the Mississippi River flow into the bays, marshes and bayous of the Delta to create a current to push the oil offshore, keeping it out of the wetlands. At the time I did send the suggestion to the EPA at its Gulf spill website.
A couple of days later there was news from Washington that President Obama had spoken of doing just that to rebuild the Delta after years of loss due to rechanneling and controlling the river.
After being gone from the news for a week, I learned last night that just that is being done ... fresh water from the river has been allowed to flow into the bays of the delta in an effort to hold the oil offshore where it will maybe be kept out of the grasses and where it is easier to collect than it is to clean it off blades of grass.
One problem that developed was the fresh water killed oysters in the area. Now, I have three things to say about that. (maybe four)
To begin with, if fresh water kills them, they probably are not indigenous. For another if oil intruded, they probably would have died anyway. For a third, oyster spat is readily available, people in Alaska buy it all the time from Oregon for farms here, so the population could be reinstated after the danger passes. The fourth is not as pleasant. Sometimes the individual has to be sacrificed for the whole and perhaps this is one of those times. Oil getting into the wetlands would probably be a far worse catastrophe than the loss of oysters by fresh water.
As for the idea of releasing the Mississippi water into the Delta to try to hold the oil offshore, I am not going to take credit for this. But I will accept the idea of parallel thought processes and take a little comfort in that. I just hope it works and relieves some of the threats to the Gulf Coast, and maybe in the longer term begins the rebuilding of the Mississippi Delta.
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