1979’s Ixtoc oil well blowout in Gulf of Mexico has startling parallels to current disaster

By Ramon Antonio Vargas, The Times-Picayune
Published: Sunday, July 04, 2010, 10:44 AM Some days, the oil sent a pungent odor over city streets, causing people headaches. Always, there was fear. Residents worried the crude would forever foul the sandy beaches dotting their shores and wipe out habitat for shrimp and fish in a place where thousands of people made their living from the sea. The 1979 Ixtoc I exploratory oil well blowout in the Bay of Campeche caused what was then history’s largest accidental marine oil spill, spewing at least 3 million barrels of crude into the Gulf of Mexico — an amount that may have already been surpassed by the Macondo well blowout on April 20. As the BP disaster will doubtlessly change New Orleans and coastal Louisiana, Ixtoc profoundly remade Mexico’s Ciudad del Carmen, the nearest community. But the changes were surprising in ways. Though it took 10 months for the oil company to finally plug the leak, the threat of environmental catastrophe never fully materialized. Ciudad del Carmen managed to evolve and even prosper — in the process growing into a much larger city than it had ever been. The Ixtoc disaster and recovery offer some hope for southeastern Louisiana that the fallout from the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon will not be as grim as some prognosticators have suggested. Certainly, the Ixtoc saga is a far more optimistic one than that of Alaska’s Prince William Sound, which still suffers from the Exxon Valdez spill of 1989. “There was recovery within a couple of years over several different habitats for several different organisms,” said Wes Tunnell, a marine biologist at Texas A & M University-Corpus Christi. Ixtoc “is not having a wide effect today.” … [A] slew of favorable conditions saved those creatures and their habitats. According to a 1981 report by the Coordinated Program of Ecological Studies in the Bay of Campeche, nature played the biggest role in attacking the slicks as they floated across the Gulf. Ultraviolet light broke down the oil as it crept toward land. So did oil-eating microorganisms. Hot temperatures spurred evaporation. The slicks also had a long way to travel before making their way onshore, giving Mexican and American officials time to erect barriers in front of vulnerable ecological areas. On the Mexican beach of Rancho Nuevo, national fisheries agents, with the help of Pemex employees, airlifted thousands of endangered Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle hatchlings out of the path of oncoming tar balls. In the United States, officials boomed off estuaries and positioned stand-by skimming boats. Cleanup crews scraped off about 10,000 cubic yards of “oiled material” from the beaches, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association. …