Scientists say oil spill could make it up Atlantic coast

CORRECTION: A headline and caption on the front page Thursday incorrectly said oil from the Gulf of Mexico spill was likely to reach the waters off Virginia, according to Old Dominion University oceanographer Larry Atkinson. He said it was possible, not probable.

NORFOLK

Scientists are increasingly worried that spilled oil from the Gulf of Mexico may get sucked into the Gulf Stream and make its way up the Atlantic coast to Virginia and North Carolina, perhaps within two or three weeks.

The same scientists say it is unlikely that any oil would reach shore and spoil beaches in either state, though offshore fishing and sea turtle migration off the coast of both states would likely suffer.

If the massive spill that resulted from an oil rig explosion off Louisiana "keeps going, and they don't stop it, we might start to see small tar balls on the edges of the Gulf Stream" off Virginia and North Carolina, said Larry Atkinson, an oceanographer at Old Dominion University in Norfolk.

He said it would take unusual and sustained northerly winds to blow oil from the Gulf Stream onto beaches in Virginia and North Carolina, "but stranger things have happened."

Atkinson is a member of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Ocean Observation System, a group of scientists and marine businessmen who are monitoring the Gulf spill and providing information to the Coast Guard and other potential responders.

Cape Hatteras on North Carolina's Outer Banks is especially vulnerable, scientists say, given the way it juts into the ocean and is only 10 to 15 miles from the Gulf Stream.

In Virginia, this same offshore belt of warm moving water, rich in fish and marine mammals, is about 20 to 30 miles from beaches.

"We are concerned, definitely concerned," said Harvey Seim, a marine science professor at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. He and other scientists have been briefing emergency management coordinators along the Atlantic coast for several days.

Seim could not recall whether spilled oil from the Gulf of Mexico had ever traveled all the way to the mid-Atlantic coast. But, he said, studies have proved that silt from the Mississippi River has reached North Carolina via the Gulf Stream.

"We know silt and debris can move along the coast in this way, which is why we're watching this oil so closely," Seim said Wednesday.

A company in Florida that tracks oil spills, Roffer's Ocean Fishing Forecasting Service Inc., issued a bulletin Tuesday indicating that some oil has drifted into the "Loop Current," southwest of Florida.

This development is significant, the company says, because the Loop Current leads directly into the Florida Current, just below Key West, and then becomes the Gulf Stream.

In short, some oil already has entered the ever-changing system of currents that flow past North Carolina and Virginia.

"It is possible that the oil will move as far as Cape Hatteras," the company said on its website Wednesday.

Environmental groups responded that potential impacts in the mid-Atlantic from the Gulf spill are evidence that plans to drill for oil and natural gas at least 50 miles off the Virginia coast are too dangerous and should be scrapped.

"The mere fact that we're sitting here discussing possible effects in Virginia from a spill in the Gulf is astounding," said Mike Tidwell, executive director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network. "I mean, can you imagine the damage if such a spill, or even a smaller one, occurred off Virginia and not thousands of miles away?"

Tidwell and other environmentalists who held a conference call with reporters Wednesday urged Gov. Bob McDonnell to reconsider his support for offshore drilling. While some political leaders have supported a time-out from drilling in order to better understand what went wrong in the Gulf, McDonnell so far has remained behind a planned sale of oil and gas leases off Virginia in late 2011 or early 2012.

Scott Harper, (757) 446-2340, scott.harper@pilotonline.com