A little less than two months after agreeing to fund a $20 billion escrow account for economic damage claims flowing from its massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, BP has deposited its first installment into the fund.
Washington (CNN) -- The Justice Department announced Monday that the details have been completed for establishing a $20 billion escrow account that BP has promised to fund. The money will pay for claims to those who suffered from the effects of the Gulf oil spill.
After BP announced it had made a $3 billion dollar deposit into the account, Associate Attorney General Tom Perrelli issued a statement confirming the action.
"We are pleased that BP made an initial contribution and has taken an important step toward honoring its commitment to the President and the residents and business owners in the Gulf region," Perrelli said.
According to the initial deal, BP was to deposit $3 billion initially followed up by another $2 billion in two quarters. It agreed to deposit $5 billion in each of the following three fiscal years, bringing the total to $20 billion.
Kenneth Feinberg, who administered the 9/11 victims fund, will administer the claims fund.
BP had been dragging its feet on paying claims while the final details of the escrow account were negotiated, but with the fund now in place, Gulf Coast residents will have a way of obtaining compensation for their economic losses. As the Washington Post reports, that compensation is more critical now than ever, especially for fisherman:
On July 15 -- the day a mechanical cap finally shut the gushing well -- 2,763 private boats had been chartered by the cleanup as "vessels of opportunity." By late last week, the number had been reduced by 45 percent, to 1,510.
For Acy Cooper, a shrimper from Venice, La., weekly checks from BP had replaced income lost when large sections of the gulf were closed. But then his 25-boat task force shrunk to 21, to 12, to nine. And he wasn't one of the nine.
Cooper says that leaves him in a hole; shrimp-trawling season won't start for one week. And even then, he worries that the remaining oil could turn up in somebody's net and ruin his business all over again.
"If we get these shrimp and they get one person sick, you know how long it will take us to come back?" Cooper said at the meeting with Mabus. To prove his point that oil was still out there, he held up a Gatorade bottle filled with oil taken from a nearby marsh. "We ain't through the cleanup. We can't go into recovery. It is not recovery. Somebody's lying."
The risk isn't just that one person might get sick; there's also a risk that yields will be much lower in coming years for Gulf Coast fisherman. One troubling sign: oil has embedded itself into blue crab larvae at the foundation of the Gulf food chain.
"It would suggest the oil has reached a position where it can start moving up the food chain instead of just hanging in the water," said Bob Thomas, a biologist at Loyola University in New Orleans. "Something likely will eat those oiled larvae ... and then that animal will be eaten by something bigger and so on."
Tiny creatures might take in such low amounts of oil that they could survive, Thomas said. But those at the top of the chain, such as dolphins and tuna, could get fatal "megadoses."
Marine biologists routinely gather shellfish for study. Since the spill began, many of the crab larvae collected have had the distinctive orange oil droplets, said Harriet Perry, a biologist with the University of Southern Mississippi's Gulf Coast Research Laboratory.
"In my 42 years of studying crabs I've never seen this," Perry said.
She wouldn't estimate how much of the crab larvae are contaminated overall, but said about 40 percent of the area they are known to inhabit has been affected by oil from the spill.
At this point, only time will tell exactly how much damage the oil spill caused. And if the worst fears don't come to pass, that doesn't somehow mean that disasters like this pose an "acceptable risk." And no matter what Joe Barton might say, nobody owes BP an apology.