When the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded two years ago in the
Gulf of Mexico, many scientists, including me, stepped outside of the
Ivory Tower to study what was an unprecedented — and unintended —
environmental experiment. We succeeded in gathering mountains of data,
learning all sorts of new things, and advancing science.
But we also failed.
Academic scientists chose the research that most interested us, rather
than what may have been most important to responding to the immediate
disaster. We failed to grasp the mechanics of the media. And we
struggled with how our data was vetted and whom we could trust with it.
Simply put, problems arose when academia did not appreciate the cultures
of the other players responding to the spill.
To add to these challenges, we were very much in the fog of war,
literally and figuratively. The smell of oil, floating in a sea of
orange/brown oil, the roaring jets of burning oil, and the hundreds of
boats was overwhelming. And on land, the press just kept calling.
Opportunities were missed when others did not understand the academic culture, too.
Unlike most previous oil spills, the ruptured Macondo well spewed oil
and gas nearly a mile beneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. That
was aqua incognita to the oil industry and federal responders, but it
was a familiar neighborhood for oceanographers who had been studying the
deep sea for decades.
BP as well as federal officials were under enormous pressure and did
little to enlist outside help. Very few were readily aware of what
academic scientists could contribute. Nor did they communicate what
research would be most useful for them, or provide funds to do it. A
month passed before government officials invited academic leaders to a
meeting in Washington, D.C., about the spill.
Many scientists were keen to help but did not know whom to contact. In
the initial days, they forged ahead without outside direction, and many
were awarded rapid-response grants from the National Science Foundation.
But they were guided solely by their scientific instincts and
information they gleaned on their own and not by what could have helped
the overall effort.
We were trying to find Atlantis instead of contributing to solving problems.
Our academic training did not prepare us for the media attention we
received, and sometimes liked too much. We did not recognize that the
media’s mission to provide immediate, definitive information about
unfolding events to an anxious public can limit its ability to be
comprehensive and complex. Academia provides us the luxury to move
slowly with the goal of perfection. So we had problems explaining
uncertainties, and we did not understand the ramifications of our
statements to the media.
Time, more than anything else, separated us. The media has hours to make a deadline. We have five to eight years to get tenure.
An example of how this played out was the reporting of oil plumes flowing from the well deep underwater.
Oil
generally floats, so in the early days of the spill, scientists were
startled to find high levels of hydrocarbons deep in the Gulf and
relayed their findings to the media. The scientists hypothesized that
high pressure at the depth where the leak occurred was causing some
hydrocarbons to flow horizontally away from the well, rather than up to
the surface.
The resulting news reports gave the impression that rivers of oil were
flowing at the bottom of the sea, potentially killing shrimp and fish
that supported the local economy and harming the ecosystem. Government
responders and industry had to respond to the press about the plumes,
rather then focusing on higher priorities such as capping the well. And
the public had to respond to these reports, too. I recall one Gulf
resident asking me if he should sell his house and move away.
Many academics, including me, were hard on the scientists who reported
the presence of plumes. We thought they had veered from the standards of
good science. Their findings were not peer-reviewed. In their
communications with the public, they seemed susceptible to the lure of
limelight.
But I now recognize the upside. Those scientists awakened the public,
and me, to an important and unrecognized phenomenon that needed further
study. Soon I was out in the Gulf with cutting-edge technology and a
team that, just a few months earlier, had successfully mapped oil and
gas seeping naturally from the seafloor near Santa Barbara.
I wish I could say I wasn’t thinking about scooping my peers, confirming
the plume, and publishing a top-notch science paper, but that wouldn’t
be true. In fact, I called an editor of a journal from the bow of a boat
asking him if he was interested in our findings.
A month after the well was capped, we published a study in the journal Science confirming
a subsurface plume more than a mile wide and 600 feet high that flowed
for miles from the Macondo well at a depth of 3,600 feet. However, this
plume was not a river of oil, but rather a layer in the ocean that was
enriched in hydrocarbons. Water samples taken from within the plume were
crystal clear.
We had just mapped an underwater plume with a one-of-a-kind underwater
vehicle carrying a state-of-the-art mass spectrometer. It could be the
greatest scientific contribution of my career. But the media wasn’t that
interested. They were more concerned with whether the plume was toxic.
We were confused and said to them, “You need to know where the plume is
before you can consider harmful effects.” It seemed so simple to us, but
it was only newsworthy if the plume, at that time, could harm marine
life or the environment.
We had published the study a little more than two months after gathering
the data — lightning fast for a scientific paper. But when I was the
academic liaison at the oil spill’s headquarters the following month, I
learned that those on the front line weren’t impressed by the
publication of a paper a month after the crisis was over. Crisis
responders often must make decisions on the spot, with imperfect
information, even if it is risky.
During a crisis, “peer review is the biggest problem with academia”
Juliette Kayyem, who was an assistant secretary at the Department of
Homeland Security during the Deepwater Horizon and teaches crisis
response at Harvard, told me.
But to release unvetted data is a leap of faith. I observed a very
talented junior scientist struggle with this. He was afraid he might be
not be 100 percent correct, word would get out, and it would affect his
tenure decision.
The good news is that most of these problems are avoidable. The many
stakeholders involved did not share a common language, timeframe, set of
values, or pre-existing relationships. We can take a lesson from
Deepwater Horizon and start opening new lines of communication before
the next disaster. For example, I have asked around and many of the oil
spill responders would be glad to visit campuses to explain their world.
It’s time for academia to embrace a maxim in crisis management that “a crisis is no time to start exchanging business cards.”
0 comments:
Post a Comment