The stark differences between wind and oil industry accidents

Tar-covered vegetation collects on containment boom in Bayou Lafourche on Aug. 2, 2024, from an oil spill at the Crescent Midstream Crude Oil Facility six days ago. (Photo credit: Greg LaRose/Louisiana Illuminator)

Two recent accidents in the energy sector — an oil spill in Louisiana and a wind turbine failure in New England — have generated starkly different responses from the impacted communities and government agencies that regulate the industries.

The distinctions, so far, are separated by geography, culture and wealth, among other factors.

In Louisiana, the term “disaster” can be heard relatively frequently, but it is generally not used lightly. The term is often reserved for a hurricane that destroys part of the state or an environmental calamity such as the 2010 BP oil spill.

For the most part, public officials and residents in Louisiana have not used “disaster” to describe the July 27 oil spill of 34,000 gallons, with a large portion flowing into Bayou Lafourche. Cleaning crews have worked to contain the spread of crude petroleum into a vital ecosystem that serves as the population’s main source of drinking water.

Contrast that to the property owners on the Massachusetts islands of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket who on July 13 experienced what many of them have called the worst energy industry “disaster” they’ve ever seen. A single blade from a turbine at Vineyard Wind’s offshore wind farm broke off and fell into the ocean.

The Vineyard Wind incident did not involve a release of any chemicals or toxins, did not injure any humans or animals and has had no apparent impact on the local ecosystem.

By comparison, the oil spill from the Crescent Midstream facility in Raceland put an 8-mile-long black oil slick on the surface of the bayou, contaminated miles of shoreline vegetation, and, according to company spokesman Mike Smith, has so far killed 21 animals.

About a week after the wind turbine broke, federal regulators ordered the company to suspend all operations and shut down all its turbines indefinitely while they investigated the incident. Soon after the oil spill, Crescent Midstream had to turn off two pipelines at the request of federal regulators, though no official orders have been issued. On Friday, Smith said the company expects one will be turned back on in the coming days.

While mitigation crews continue the crude cleanup and wildlife teams pull oiled animals from the bayou, Crescent has been free to continue running its many other pipelines and facilities along the coast.

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Some environmental experts and advocates for affordable energy see the juxtaposed incidents as indicative of an uneven playing field for the renewable energy industry.

“Oil and gas industry failures tend to be pretty mundane, but anytime something goes wrong with renewable energy, people just become incensed,” the Alliance for Affordable Energy’s Jackson Voss said in a phone interview. “Oil and gas is either not treated with that same level of concern or is treated as if it’s overblown.”

Complaints of the rich

The biggest threat to the communities of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard has been pieces of styrofoam and fiberglass from the 300-foot blade washing up onto their beaches. This has sparked protests from property owners, many of whom don’t live there year-round but have been opposed to the project since the state first approved it in 2019.

Last week, a 10-year old was selling customized T-shirts on the docks of Nantucket Harbor that stated “Vineyard Wind is ISIS,” according to a social media post by the Nantucket Current . Other opponents are calling for a complete end to the wind energy industry in the United States.

The islands have some of the most expensive property in the country. The median listing price for homes in Martha’s Vineyard is $2.2 million. In Nantucket, it is $4.8 million, according to Realtor.com .

On both islands, the majority of the residential properties are vacation homes. The year-round population of about 20,000 includes the residents who aren’t rich property owners and work in farming, the service industry and maintaining the infrastructure. The population can swell to over 200,000 during the summer months as tourists converge and the mega-rich fly in to enjoy their beach houses.

When news of the turbine blade’s failure spread across the islands, government agencies mounted a swift response. Local officials held emergency town hall meetings in which they pressed company executives for explanations and turned over the floor to angry property owners who berated the executives, threatened litigation and accused them of various evils, according to the Vineyard Gazette .

The Nantucket Police Department immediately closed the entire south shore of the island and told residents to wear shoes when outside and keep their pets indoors. The beaches were reopened a few days later.

The U.S. Coast Guard cordoned off a 500-meter exclusion zone surrounding the broken turbine.

Vineyard Wind deployed emergency response teams that included boats to remove debris from the water. Employees and contractors were placed on beach patrols to collect any debris from the shore.

The company also mobilized a team of shorebird monitors to conduct visual monitoring for any state-listed and protected avian species. The shorebird monitors were also tasked with escorting any vehicle involved in debris removal within the vicinity of known nesting areas.

The Town of Nantucket Select Board issued a statement, saying it was alarmed by the “catastrophe” that befell the island. The board said it’s committed to holding Vineyard Wind and General Electric accountable and to collecting “full restitution” for the costs of all damages and recovery efforts. The board further demanded that the companies implement “comprehensive measures to prevent such incidents from occurring in the future.”

Photos of styrofoam and fiberglass found by beachgoers fueled days of social media outrage aimed at the company and at liberal politicians, including Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris. Former President Donald Trump had delayed federal approval of the project when he was in office, so its final clearance came under President Joe Biden in March 2021.

Within about a week of the accident, most of the debris had been removed from the beaches, though Vineyard Wind crews were still patrolling for any small pieces that were overlooked.

The Nantucket Current posted a photo on X that showed a few handfuls of beachgoers lounging under the sun while four workers in long pants and reflective vests patrolled the pristine sand behind them for any missed debris. The photo drew dozens of reposts and comments suggesting the workers’ presence was diminishing the area’s value.

Someone responded with a photo of his own that showed a worker driving a utility vehicle along a different beach. Another user replied with a single word: “Ruined.”

The wind turbine blade failed because of a manufacturing deviation that wasn’t caught during quality control inspections, according to manufacturer GE Vernova. The manufacturer told the Vineyard Gazette that it has begun reinspecting all the blades that came from that same factory in Canada where the defective one was made.

A separate environmental accident on Aug. 3 caused a brief disruption to the anti-wind backlash among Nantucket social media feeds.

On Saturday, the Nantucket Current posted a photo on X of a petrochemical slick on the surface of the water and a statement from Nantucket Harbormaster Sheila Lucey who reported a small diesel spill of about 2 gallons from a boat. The boat owner was issued a fine. No one attempted to clean up the fuel, and the post received little attention as news coverage on the island shifted to a much larger story about a seagull stealing the Nantucket airport manager’s wallet.

The response in Lafourche

Compared with the wind blade failure in Massachusetts, the oil spill in Louisiana has drawn a more tempered response from government regulators, local officials and residents despite its significantly greater damage to the ecosystem.

“If a wind turbine breaks down, there’s a small possibility someone gets hurt … but when an oil and gas spill happens, it’s a real potential public health hazard,” Voss said. “Often, it’s many times more expensive to address and requires years of mitigation.”

Because Bayou Lafourche is the primary source of drinking water for a four-parish area, officials issued a temporary advisory encouraging residents to conserve water but later lifted it, stressing all along that the water was always safe to consume.

Crews surrounded the drinking water intake in Lockport with containment booms to keep any oil out, and water quality tests have been performed hourly as is standard practice.

The impacted section of the bayou remains closed to boat traffic, and mitigation crews continue to skim oil from the water and banks. Wildlife rescue teams have managed to pull some live oil-covered animals from the water, including one alligator and two mallard ducks.

Other dead or injured animals, included crawfish, turtles, ducks, salamanders and fish, though the Louisiana Department of Fish and Wildlife has not blamed the fish kill on the oil.

The state hasn’t issued any advisories on consuming seafood from Bayou Lafourche. Although the section of bayou where the spill occurred is more of a transportation channel than a fishing spot, it still attracts some recreational anglers. People were seen fishing the bayou in Lockport while cleanup crews were taking bags of oil-soaked vegetation to a nearby boat launch for disposal.

Aside from the bayou’s closure, Lafourche Parish and its residents have, for the most part, carried on with little fuss or concern about the mishap.

The Lafourche Parish Council has not called for any emergency meetings, and area residents have not organized protests. And no one in the parish, where home prices list at a median of $239,000, is selling merchandise that likens Crescent Midstream to a terrorist organization.

The July 27 incident marks the largest of 48 other oil spills and oil accidents in the parishes of Lafourche and Jefferson since 2010, according to Healthy Gulf Community Science Director Scott Eustis. It’s also the third oil spill in Crescent’s seven-year history operating the “Bonefish” system of pipelines in the Lafourche-Barataria area.

The pipeline sustained one other major leak in 2012, though that accident was attributed to Exxon, which sold the infrastructure in 2017.

In researching the accidents documented for the pipeline, Eustis said he found 70 patches made to the pipeline since it was built in 1963.

“We question how long these facilities should be allowed to operate like this, without being re-engineered for our climate,” he said. “We have to rebuild our houses often, but why is an oil company allowed to operate a 1963 facility without some substantial upgrades during the 2017 sale?” … “At what point do we decommission this pipeline unless it is rebuilt?”

The oil spill also comes just a few months after Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality Secretary Aurelia Giacometto, a former Trump administration official, announced her intent to relax environmental permitting standards in the state.

Different standards

Voss said many people in Louisiana have become used to oil spills and other petrochemical accidents.

At the same time, people tend to hold the renewable energy industry to impossible standards. It’s not enough for wind and solar to be significantly cheaper sources of electricity. Everything else about renewables needs to be perfect, and there can be no accidents or mistakes, Voss said.

Louisiana Oil and Gas Association President Mike Moncla said he disagrees with the notion that the wind industry is held to higher standards than the oil industry.

“First of all, let me say that LOGA is for all kinds of energy — oil, gas, wind, solar — we support all of it, and all are vital in driving Louisiana’s economy forward,” Moncla said in an emailed statement. “That being said, the idea that the wind industry is more heavily scrutinized than oil and gas is simply laughable. The media lives to tear down the oil and gas industry.”

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Moncla cited about a dozen Louisiana news outlets that have covered the Crescent Midstream oil spill, and he challenged any detractors to cite one that has ever reported anything negative about the wind industry.

The oil spill has been widely covered by local news outlets, though the incident has received very little national coverage. The Vineyard Wind blade failure has received significant national coverage, but much of that is attributed to the project’s status as the first offshore wind farm in the country. National outlets were already familiar with the project and had covered it as it was being built.

The lack of negative news coverage about wind energy in Louisiana tracks with the total lack of wind energy in the state. Louisiana has no industrial wind turbines, so local news outlets have little reason to devote coverage to that sector.

“I could go on for days, citing countless examples of negative media coverage towards oil and gas,” Moncla said. “To imply otherwise just shows a complete lack of awareness. It’s actually an irony of biblical proportions when you consider that the entire existence and push for wind energy is due to the complaint that the oil and gas industry is causing climate change.”

In cases of natural and environmental disasters, an aggressive press coverage often fills in for an inadequate response by officials and regulators, Voss said.

“News coverage tends to be a little more even-handed about things than the political response,” Voss said. “In general, the news does a good job in alerting the public about the incident, and the oil and gas industry does a good job of downplaying it.”

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