Recommend the BP Catastrophe Liveblog Mothership: 72
I've written about a couple of diaries in the past few days regarding the heavy use of corexit and the issue of where the animals have gone in the Gulf regarding the gusher.
Both are relevant and important and touch on two of the major issues that will be ongoing for many years in the Gulf coast, health issues for the residents and the environment.
As the EPA continues to defend the use of dispersants, the questions have more to do with full disclosure, the amount of dispersants used and the long term consequences, from the food chain to the health of residents and workers.
Both those diaries were met with some skepticism, healthy at times and hostile at others. Which is fine, this is a community and when you write things here, it is open to comments and discussion.
But what I'm brining here are not something isolated and out there, there are legitimate scientists who have yet to be bought up by BP who are concerned about these issues.
Workers have been forced to sign confidentiality agreements to keep them from talking about what they've seen. This is a condition of employment, employment that will probably make them sick for a lifetime. They need to sign these agreements.
BP Forced Clean-Up Workers To Sign Contract Forbidding Them From Talking With Media. Although, remember when all those horrific photos of birds struggling in the thick goopy oil hit everyone's computer screens?
Recently, a BP contract frustrated with the oil company’s cover-up surreptitiously escorted a New York Daily News crew around some of the affected sites, allowing them to observe a shore “littered with tarred marine life, some dead and others struggling under a thick coating of crud.” “There is a lot of coverup for BP,” said the contractor. “They specifically informed us that they don’t want these pictures of the dead animals. They know the ocean will wipe away most of the evidence.”
That was the last of it though, that was enough to spark outrage, those photos enraged many people and probably also meant that even less could get out of the Gulf in terms of photos etc.
But there is a call for more transparency. As I noted in one of my diaries, the only way we can know about how to protect species is how this spill has affected their populations, etc. If BP is covering this up, it leaves so much of the conservation community in the dark.
Scientists Call for Full Disclosure of Gulf Oil Disaster Data, End of Confidentiality Agreements. This is just a portion of the letter, here is the pdf of the entire letter.
"Just as the unprecedented use of dispersants has served to sweep millions of gallons of oil under the rug, we're concerned the public may not get to see critical scientific data until BP has long since declared its responsibility over," added Dr. Bruce Stein, the National Wildlife Federation’s associate director for wildlife conservation and global warming, and one of the letter's signers. "Reported three-year confidentiality agreements in contracts between BP and researchers makes transparency that much more imperative to avoid perceived conflicts of interest or allegations of obfuscation. Do we really want scientists forced to choose who to share their data with – BP or the public?"
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"It is clear that both BP and the federal government have a scientific, legal, and moral obligation to release information collected in the Natural Resources Damage Assessment and related investigations," the letter said.
“From day one, BP has been sluggish and selective in releasing vital environmental data. BP needs to open the books on everything, no exceptions. And the Obama administration needs to do a better job enforcing the directive it issued requiring BP to make data public,” said Jeremy Symons, senior vice president of the National Wildlife Federation. “BP is mounting a PR campaign suggesting that the environmental damage of the spill is over when we know that they have dumped millions of gallons of toxic dispersants to sink the oil out of sight, turning the Gulf into a toxic chemistry experiment.”
The scientists signing the letter (PDF) are:
Doug Inkley, Ph.D., Senior Scientist, National Wildlife Federation
Bruce Stein, Ph.D., Associate Director, Wildlife Conservation and Global Warming, National Wildlife Federation
Francesca Grifo, Ph.D., Senior Scientist and Director, Scientific Integrity Campaign, Union of Concerned Scientists
Joel Kostka, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Oceanography at Florida State University
Ian MacDonald, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Oceanography at Florida State University
Fiorenza Micheli, Ph.D., Professor of Biological Sciences, Marine Community Ecology, Stanford University
Cary Nelson, President of the American Association of University Professors
Barry R. Noon, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Fish, Wildlife and Conservation Biology, Colorado State
Carl Safina, Ph.D., President and Cofounder, Blue Ocean Institute
It is a PR campaign, a badly run one as well.
And yes, I understand the stakes here, that the Administration is holding a great deal of information close in order to be able to hold BP accountable, but this was a dismal failure in the case of the Exxon Valdez spill.
The Exxon case offers a good example of how arming only BP with crucial information might ultimately backfire. In 1991, Exxon struck a deal with the government to pay just $900 million in damages over 10 years. The deal also allowed the government to reopen the case, if it could prove that there were remaining problems that had not been adequately addressed. But the burden of proof was on the state and federal government to show that the loss or decline of habitat or species was directly related to the spill and could not have been forseen in the initial assessment. In 2006, when government and independent studies showed that Prince William Sound was still polluted, the Department of Justice and the State of Alaska filed a claim against Exxon, asking for an additional $92 million payment. But Exxon presented hundreds of its own studies that claimed that there was no ongoing environmental impact. Exxon prevailed, and never had to pay one cent more for the damage to the Prince William Sound, despite the fact that independent studies have found it has never fully recovered.
"Exxon cut themselves a good deal," said Pettit. He warned that the public should expect the same from BP. "Everyone knows what the Exxon playbook was, and it worked."
"Buying scientists indicates that [BP is] clearly going to fight an NRDA assessment," said Aaron Viles, campaign director with the Gulf Restoration Network. The group's president has been up in Alaska this week gathering insight from Alaskans on how to prepare. "We need to be able to fight back."
And the claim that everything is alright by the Obama Administration, that 75% of the oil is gone is being challenged by some. It's a mixed bag, it's not being embraced but most certainly not a consensus.
Even among scientists specializing in the issues raised by the new report, splits emerged Wednesday about how much credence to give it.
Some researchers attacked the findings and methodology, calling the report premature at best and sloppy at worst. They noted that considerable research was still under way to shed light on some of the main scientific issues raised in the report.
“A lot of this is based on modeling and extrapolation and very generous assumptions,” said Samantha Joye, a marine scientist at the University of Georgia who has led some of the most important research on the Deepwater Horizon spill. “If an academic scientist put something like this out there, it would get torpedoed into a billion pieces.”
But other scientists, while acknowledging that the report incorporated assumptions that could not be directly tested, found them reasonable, if not conservative. Edward B. Overton of Louisiana State University, one of the most experienced gulf researchers, said the report, if anything, might have underestimated the amount of oil that had effectively gone away or been dispersed. He expressed concern, however, that dispersed oil in the deep ocean might not break down quickly.
So, for me, I will keep emphasizing the same thing, who has BP not bought and what do they have to say? What are the residents saying? Who is getting sick and how are their health issues being dealt with. What is being done to monitor the long term issues and etc.
The point is, we cannot let this disaster be swept under the rug because BP says they've done enough. We have to listen to the Gulf for that assessment and to the scientists who measure the health of our oceans and the species that live there. It's going to take time.
UPDATE: Another great resource, h/t to DWG is this post, Where has the oil gone? where Samantha Joye actually asks all the questions. She is on the scene and studying the actually oil, she is one of the scientists that discovered and is studying the plume of oil in the Gulf (that BP said didn't exist).
The Deepwater Horizon wellhead that tapped the Macondo reservoir was capped on 15 July 2010. After the venting of oil and gas into the Gulf waters was stopped, everyone felt a sense of relief. Multiple news outlets have reported that the surface oil has disappeared, for the most part. I read many reports that stated conclusively the oil had been either transferred to the atmosphere (via evaporation) or that it had been consumed by oil-eating microorganisms. Everyone’s reaction was, not surprisingly, ‘what a relief !!’.
Should we be relieved? Is this disaster over?
On the whole, I believe the answer to both questions is no. It is a relief that the volume of surface oil is reduced, as this lowers the probability of oil-fouling of coastal beaches and marshes. However, it’s likely that a great deal of oil is still out there in the Gulf of Mexico’s waters, it’s just no longer visible to us.
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The impacts of the oil, gas and dispersant on the Gulf’s ecosystems will be felt for years, if not decades. We cannot pretend the danger has passed for it has not. Additional and on-going studies of open water, deep seafloor, and coastal dynamics are necessary. We must be diligent and we must insist that long-term monitoring programs be established and maintained so that we can evaluate and insure the recovery of the Gulf’s ecosystems.
UPDATE: Disturbing discovery of crabs filled with black substance
He said a rock jetty near Waveland was covered in about 1,000 pounds of tar balls in just three days, and now there's been a disturbing discovery inside about a half a dozen full-sized crabs found near the mouth of Bay St. Louis.
"You could tell it was real slick and dark in color so I grabbed it, and opened the back of the crab, and you could see in the 'dead man' or the lungs of the crabs.. you could see the black," said Keith Ladner, longtime seafood supplier and owner of Gulf Shores Sea Products.
He said he's never seen anything like it. Ladner said a crab's lungs are normally a white, or greyish color, and that a crab would have to be extremely old and deteriorated to look the way these did. Ladner said, "it wasn't that case. The meat was in tact, but lungs were in bad shape."