The New Orleans Times-Picayune has been reporting massive plumes of weathered oil off the Louisiana coast.
Just three days after the U.S. Coast Guard admiral in charge of the BP oil spill cleanup declared little recoverable surface oil remained in the Gulf of Mexico, Louisiana fishers Friday found miles-long strings of weathered oil floating toward fragile marshes on the Mississippi River delta.
The report was dismissed by the Coast Guard, which suggested the miles long orange plumes were likely to be algae.
It is déjà vu all over again.
These new plumes have been described by boat captains in the area.
On Friday reports included accounts of strips of the heavily weathered orange oil that became a signature image of the spill during the summer. One captain said some strips were as much as 400 feet wide and a mile long. The captains did not want to be named for fear of losing their clean-up jobs with BP.
One of the captains laughed off the suggestion that it was algae.
"I've never seen algae that looked orange, that was sticky, smelled like oil and that stuck to the boat and had to be cleaned off with solvent," said one captain, who like the others wished to remain anonymous for fear of losing their BP contracts.
Perhaps a new species of algae has been discovered, orange algae genus BP. It looks, smells, and behaves like oil, but is really benign organic matter for which oil companies cannot be held accountable. Perhaps all the gunk in the Gulf this past summer was nothing but algae masquerading as oil.
The sightings were also confirmed by the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, which closed the area to fishing until further study.
Area scientists also noted that the appearance and behavior of these orange plumes would be consistent with the oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill.
LSU environmental sciences professor Ed Overton, who has been involved in oil spill response for 30 years, said he believes both claims could be accurate. The Louisiana sweet crude from the Deepwater Horizon is very light and has almost neutral buoyancy, Overton said, which means that when it picks up any particles from the water column, it will sink to the bottom.
Overton suggested caution because incident responders are looking for oil, but also noted:
"This is unusual, but nothing about this bloody spill has been normal since the beginning."
A week ago, the Coast Guard announced that all the oil from the Gulf spill had disappeared.
Just Tuesday, Coast Guard Rear Adm. Paul Zukunft, in charge of the federal response, and his top science adviser, Steve Lehmann, said that little of the 210 million gallons of oil spilled into the Gulf remained on the surface or even on the Gulf's floor. Lehmann pointed to extensive tests conducted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that included taking samples of water from various depths, as well as collections of bottom sediments both far offshore and close to the coast.
This latest all-clear announcement came a few days after the lifting of the deep water drilling ban by the Interior Department on October 12.
Picture source: Matt Hinton, New Orleans Times-Picayune
Reports of oil followed by official dismissal followed by official reluctant admission has been a pattern we have seen from the start of this man-made catastrophe.
For a month after the Deepwater Horizon sank in flames, the official estimate of the flow rate from the ruptured well was 5,000 barrels per day. When BP finally released video from the spewing well, scientists were quick to question the official spill rate. The NOAA and the Coast Guard finally acknowledged that the spill rate was 19 times larger than the original estimates. The decision to release the more realistic flow rates was fought by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), a decision that undermined the Obama administration's credibility.
In late May, scientists reported large plumes of undersea oil, which were promptly dismissed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). NOAA eventually relented to acknowledge the existence of the undersea oil.
In August, the NOAA announced that almost all of the oil had disappeared. Two weeks later, a study by scientists at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution indicated that large plumes of oil were still present and the official oil budget estimates were wrong.
In September, NOAA finally announced an official extensive study of the fate of oil from spill and its effects on the aquatic and shore ecosystems. Such a study is long overdue.
The boss of the study will be Jane Lubchenco, the administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and a respected marine scientist. It will involve seagoing research vessels and extensive tests in the water column, from the surface to the sea floor. It will draw on the expertise of Ms. Lubchenco’s own agency; universities in Florida, Louisiana and other gulf states; and independent research bodies like the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
For budgetary purposes, the study will be classified as one more component of the government’s ongoing response to the April spill, which means that BP will pick up the tab, whatever that turns out to be. BP has already promised to set aside $500 million to underwrite private scientific studies in the gulf over the next 10 years. But this offer has become mired in a political dispute involving gulf state governors and will not, in any case, relieve BP of its responsibility to pay for the NOAA study.
Diplomacy is the only reason I can find why the administration has been unwilling to side first with the scientists and pummel BP relentlessly. Pensions in Britain are heavily invested in BP, making it uncomfortable for the British government. BP provided further support for that hypothesis on Monday.
I want to take this opportunity to thank the UK business community and the UK government for your support during what has been a very difficult time. Believe me, at the height of the crisis it made a big difference knowing we had such good friends at home. The British ambassador in Washington was constantly helpful, and the Prime Minister's visit to DC had real impact with President Obama. I am grateful for their support.
BP also said we need them.
There is too much at stake, both for BP and the US. The US has major energy needs. BP is the largest producer of oil and gas in the country and a vital contributor to fulfilling them. We also employ 23,000 people directly, have 75,000 pensioners and have ½ million individual shareholders. Our investments indirectly support a further 200,000 jobs in the US. We have paid roughly $25B in taxes, duties and levies in the last several years. These are significant contributions to the US economy.
The reality is that we do not need them and cannot afford to have their reckless drilling, pipeline, and refinery operations on our shores and in our waters. Even the military acknowledges that we can and should kick BP to the curb.
In the spring of 2009 she called a meeting with BP’s new general counsel, Jack Lynch, at the Fairmont in Seattle to show him an e-mail her office had received from the Defense Department. In it, an official with the Defense Logistics Agency, the division responsible for BP’s fuel contracts, offered unconditional support for debarment.
[Read Propublica's discussion of why BP should be debarred here.]