One year today since a capping stack on the well contained the gusher, but Gulf folks say things are not back to normal. Mario Rubio brings his Senate committee to Florida to hear their concerns. Mississippi AG sues Feinberg. Jindal wants over $500 million from BP for restoration projects. Kostner's centrifuge wasn't vetted like other proposed ideas. Tariffs to be removed from shrimp brought in from Asia. Judge orders Hayward video removed from web. Canadian pipeline defects and Yellowstone spill amounts disputed.
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| It was a year ago this week that a new "capping stack" was placed upon the Macando well to stop the gushing oil until the relief well could kill the well forever. (except for a little seepage, as we saw) Areas of the Gulf were reopened for fishing, cleaning of beaches and marshes continued and supposedly recovery began. BP announced just last week that the region has "bounced back" and that no new final claims should be paid.
However,the recovery that BP seems to believe has happened in the Gulf is not so apparent to those living in the effected coastal areas. Beaches are open; the tourist industry appears to have had a great holiday weekend; fishermen and shrimpers. Yet there remains an atmosphere of anxiety and distrust, even among those not fighting for compensation or suffering spill related illness.
This Friday will mark one year since oil stopped flowing into the Gulf of Mexico, and a drive along the coast from the sugar white sands of Pensacola, to the barrier islands of Louisiana over the Fourth of July weekend found many signs of progress: Bustling beaches were free of oil, Gulf seafood was on the menus and marinas that had canceled fishing rodeos when the oil was swirling say the fish are biting.
But despite those scenes of a region recovering, conversations all along the Gulf Coast showed that many are still grappling with an enormous sense of distrust.
Some can’t quite bring themselves to believe government assertions that the spill didn’t do as much damage as first feared. Others don’t believe assurances that the seafood is safe to eat. Everywhere, people expressed fear that oil still lurks deep in the Gulf and that a sizable hurricane could spit it back onshore.
Billboards appear everywhere advertising lawyers for spill related cases. Unhappiness with the GCCF claims process is ubiquitous. Suspicion of the seafood is rampant, even among those who catch it.
In Pensacola, where the white sand beaches look pristine after months of work, Tim Morris, who stopped at his favorite fishing hole at daybreak after working a night shift, admitted that he has the same worry. Flinging a net off a pier in search of mullet, he talked about how his fears have led him to prep his dinner differently, just in case: “I marinate the hell out of it,” he said.
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Louisiana shrimper Dean Blanchard estimates that he lost millions because of the spill and said business was only just now starting to come back. Shrimpers in white boots — “Cajun Reeboks,” as they’re called here — tromp hourly into his office, some complaining that the yield is down.
“I worked 30 years to get to where I was,” said Blanchard, who earned fame during the spill for challenging BP’s then-chairman, Tony Hayward, to a fight. “And I don’t know they can ever give that back to me. We’ve been kicked in the chops.”
Blanchard says his shrimp is safe; he pointed to a sardonic poster on his office wall that suggests that diners have a choice between shrimp harvested from the Gulf or the Pacific, where, thanks to the tsunami-induced meltdown of the Fukushima Dai-ichi reactor in Japan, they could “glow in the dark.”
Still, he keeps a careful eye on the take, pulling two shrimp with black spots out of the freezer.
“The government says it’s nothing, but I’m 52 and I never seen anything like that,” he said.
“I don’t think anyone trusts anyone anymore,” said Eric Mitchell, 41, a Pensacola physician. “There was always a significant attempt to minimize the damage, and now they tell us it’s all supposed to be back to normal. But who knows how much and what is still sitting out there.”
Mitchell said he’d only now allowed his young son to play on the beach and swim, and he’s still highly suspicious of the cumulative effects of the chemical dispersants used to break up the oil. He won’t eat Gulf seafood.
“We had a shrimp boil last week,” Mitchell said. “We got the Ruby Reds from Antarctica.”
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Always eager to make political hay, Senator Mario Rubio (R-Fla) brings the Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship to Pensacola to hear concerns and assure constituents that he will bring their message to Congress.
Nonprofit organizations and small business representatives were invited to the meeting.
Testimony centered on persistent issues with claims payments, concerns about unknown environmental consequences and lingering effects on tourism.
"Congress has the attention span of a 20-minute sitcom, and it is critical to remind them of what the continued harm is to the Gulf Coast," state Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam said.
Putnam said the state engaged in an intense marketing campaign to counter public misconceptions that Florida beaches and seafood were tainted by the oil spill.
"We have found no evidence of damage to Florida seafood, but that preconception remains," Putnam said.
Putnam said Florida needs more than billboards and TV ads to restore its tourism economy. Funding also should be poured into fish stock enhancement methods, such as artificial reef development and saltwater-fish hatcheries, he said.
Not to be outdone in political grandstanding,senior Senator Bill Nelson sent a sternly worded letter to claims administrator Kenneth Feinberg.
In a letter to Feinberg sent Monday, Nelson said the extent of environmental and economic damage from the oil spill is still unknown, noting that environmental damage from the Exxon Valdez spill wasn't fully realized for years.
"BP doesn't need to be protected from the citizenry. It's the other way around," Nelson said.
Nelson asked that Feinberg fully account for all losses -- past, present and future.
"Anything less would be legally and morally insufficient," Nelson said.
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BREAKING NEWS! Mississippi AG files lawsuit against the administrator of BP's 20 billion dollar claims fund.
Jim Hood, attorney general for the state of Mississippi has filed a lawsuit in Hinds County Chancery Court in order to have the records of Mississippi residents who filed claims with the Gulf Coast Claims Facility be made available to him. He believes that Ken Feinberg's offices have deliberately delayed and denied payments to legitimate claims. He says he has tried "every which way to negotiate with Feinberg, but to no avail. He says that his investigation into the claims process falls under the Mississippi Consumer Protection Act and is the purview of the state, although he believes BP will try to have the case transferred to Federal Court in New Orleans. Feinberg's only comment"Our lawyers will respond in ordinary course.",
Despite filing subpoenas for the records and obtaining affidavits from about 100 Gulf Coast residents allowing his office access to their claim records, Hood said oil spill fund administrator, Kenneth Feinberg, hasn't turned over the requested records.
"Make no mistake, Mr. Feinberg is an employee of BP," Hood said. "I don't know why he wouldn't want an independent third party to look at the records. If you have nothing to hide, why not let us look at the records?"
But in court papers, filed in federal court in Louisiana, Feinberg has said Hood could undermine the claims process by urging a court to intervene and by making allegations that border on defamation.
The claims process has paid roughly 4 billion in claims from the $20 billion dollar fund. Last week BP said it was time to shut it down, excepting only those in the oyster business..maybe. (it wasn't our fault the freshwater was released, they whined) The fund was originally scheduled to remain open until 2012. Hood had originally asked Federal judge Barbier, who is handling other spill related cases, to take over the claims process, and said if he did not that he (Hood) would file a civil suit in state court.
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Before BP pulls the purse strings shut, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal wants to be sure Louisiana gets it's share. He held a press conference Monday and unveiled a list of projects he felt BP money should fund, to the tune of $533 million. As it is, Louisiana will get $100 million from an advance payment agreement, as will the other five states hurt by the spill. They hope to get part of the $300 million to be divided between NOAA and the Interior Department. That leaves him a bit short, at least until all the nasty litigation over fines owed by BP is finished.
"We expect to receive a fair share -- a disproportionate share -- of those dollars, based on the amount of damage that happened to our coast," Jindal said. He cited federal statistics that he said showed coastal Louisiana had 92 percent of the heavily and moderately oiled shoreline, and that most injured, oiled and dead birds, mammals, fish and other wildlife were found off the state's coast.
"The bottom line is by any measure, whether you look at miles of shoreline, the amount of oil or you look at the species that are impacted, Louisiana has received the brunt of the impact of the damage caused by this oil spill," he said.
Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority Chairman Garret Graves, who acts as the state's trustee in the federal Natural Resource Damage Assessment Process, will present the list of projects next week to a committee of trustees representing the coastal states and federal agencies. The list must be approved by that body, and then each project and its cost must be approved by BP.
First on Jindal's list are efforts to restore the state's oyster industry and the development of a Louisiana Marine Fisheries Enhancement and Science Center that would hatcheries and research labs on three areas of the coast.
Some of the money would be added to speed up already approved projects in the Barataria Basin. Others include shore restoration, the creation of marshes and breakwater structures. List
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We here at Gulfwatchers knew it was a crazy idea, so why didn't the experts working for BP. Those experts claim Kevin Costner's water separation device failed the field test, yet BP spent $16 million on them anyway!
...the oil company gave top priority to testing the devices – ahead of the 123,000 other suggestions from the public for plugging the well and scooping up more the millions of gallons of crude from deep water, marshes and beaches.
However, technical experts in charge of sifting through those public ideas said Costner's oil-water separator did not show particular promise.
The device, a centrifuge designed to spin contaminated water through a cylinder to separate the oil, became gummed up by the thick, heavily weathered crude that was a defining feature of the BP spill. It was also not a particularly new technology, the experts said.
It appeared to work in some conditions and did not appear to work in others," said Kurt Hansen, a technical expert from the US Coast Guard's research and development centre, who was part of the test team. "My impression from talking to people who have seen it is that it's not any different than any other separators out there on the market that do the same thing."
Ellen Faurot-Daniels, an expert from California's Office of Spill Prevention and Response, came to a similar conclusion. "His oil-water separator didn't work very well on this oil. It was pretty waxy and a lot of oil-water separators had a lot of trouble dealing with it," she said
Costner, however, was apparently allowed to tweak his and get a second shot...that others did not.
Technical experts brought in by BP received 123,000 ideas when it appealed to the public for ideas on how to deal with the spill. 43,000 ideas dealt with cleaning up the oil. They were reviewed by the more than 100 experts and around 30 were actually used. Among these were Costner"s centrifuge, the Big Gulp and the A Whale.
Lee Dragna, a shipyard owner in Louisiana, said he used his own money to convert one of his barges into a giant ocean-going skimmer, which he called the Big Gulp.
It took persistence on his part, he said, but BP eventually was persuaded the barge would work. "The problem is they had all these engineers who told me mine would not work. So I said: you have to take that aside and listen to common sense."
On its first outing, the Big Gulp collected more than 1,000 barrels of oiled water, he said.
BP went on to order eight of the monsters, which had holds of up to 600,000 barrels.
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Other technologies such as the A Whale, a Taiwanese supertanker that was supposed to be able to suck up to 400,000 barrels of oil a day, was defeated by high waves, and the relatively thin sheen of oil on the surface in some places.
Ah...good old common sense.
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Gulf coast shrimpers have been hurt by the oil spill, both by the perception that the shrimp may be contaminated and by smaller catches. Although import duties on imported shrimp were to remain in place for 5 more years, they were recently declared illegal.
Four months after the U.S. International Trade Commission voted to continue import duties for five more years on shrimp from Vietnam, a World Trade Organization panel ruled today that those tariffs break international trade rules.
The federal government dropped tariffs in 2007 against Ecuador in response to a similar WTO ruling.
“We certainly view this as a setback for American commerce,” said David Veal, executive director of the Biloxi-based American Shrimp Processors Association.
In its report today, the three-member WTO panel found that duties the United States imposed in February 2005 because of alleged price dumping by Vietnamese exporters were inflated because of Washington D.C.’s use of “zeroing” to calculate whether the shrimp were being sold at below-cost price. Under zeroing, commerce economists ignore — or “zero” — import prices above market levels and consider only those below when calculating what duties should be.
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TransCanada's proposed oil pipeline to Texas could be subject to leaks much more than the company's study shows
according to an independent study. Although many environmental groups oppose the building of the pipeline which would carry oil from Canada's tar sands to Texas, the study done by a water supply professor from the University of Nebraska, John Stansbury, was not funded by any of them.
Stansbury's analysis, which looked at federal data on the incidence of spills on similar pipelines, said the duct would likely average 91 major spills of over 50 barrels, including 12 spills from holes greater than 10 inches (25 cm) over its 50-year lifetime. TransCanada has estimated the line would have major spills about 11 times.
In addition, many leaks would release more oil than TransCanada has estimated because it takes more time on average to detect leaks than the company indicated, the analysis said.
TransCanada strongly disagreed with Stansbury. Spokesman Terry Cunha said the company based its assessments on the "industry leading methods to quantify failure frequency."
The leaked oil could flow down rivers including the Yellowstone, the scene of a recent Exxon Mobil (XOM.N) pipeline spill, sending benzene and other hazardous chemicals downstream, Stansbury said.
Water treatment facilities would likely detect the benzene keeping it from drinking water supplies. But efforts to clean the water or get fresh water from other sources could be costly to communities. In addition, some residents near the proposed line depend on well water, he said.
TransCanada hopes to get a permit from the State Department by the end of the year.
The Environmental Protection Agency has asked the State Department for a more extensive review of the pipeline. It said the State Department needs to "carefully consider" both the routes of the planned expansion and what measures are needed to prevent and detect spills. As for so-called "industry standards', we have learned the hard way that they don't include a high degree of safety.
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Lastly, a bit of deja-vu. Now why would an oil company want to lie about the amount of oil released into a body of water? Montana questions Exxon-Mobil"s estimate in Yellowstone oil spill.
The Texas-based company estimates between 31,500 and 42,000 gallons of crude flowed into the Yellowstone near Laurel on July 1, fouling the shoreline and backwaters along dozens of miles of the scenic river.
Exxon Mobil Pipeline president Gary Pruessing initially said it took six minutes to shut down the pumps, but information submitted by the company to federal pipeline safety regulators later revealed it took almost an hour to fully stop the flow.
In a letter to Exxon Mobil executives, Montana Department of Environmental Quality Director Richard Opper asked for an explanation of why the spill volume was not changed given the longer timeline.
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Opper also requested information from the company concerning the pipeline's pressure and flow rate beginning 48 hours before the spill through Monday. Exxon Mobil was asked to provide an answer by next Monday.
Because much of the oil was swept away by the river, only 1 to 5 percent of the oil is expected to be recovered.
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If you haven't yet watched the video of Tony Haywards faltering legal deposition...here.. Be warned a U.S. magistrate has ordered that they be removed from the internet.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Sally Shushan's order dated Tuesday says that release of the video may violate a previous court order. The clips were posted Saturday and Sunday on thedaily.com and youtube.com.
The Associated Press published a story Friday detailing what Hayward said in the deposition he gave to lawyers for the Justice Department, the plaintiffs suing BP and states harmed by last year's oil spill off Louisiana. The story was based on transcripts of the deposition.
Shushan's order does not address publication of text from the deposition.
The Daily is a newspaper published only on Apple's iPad tablet devices. It also operates a website that includes marketing information, a blog and selected video clips. YouTube is a video sharing site on which users can post videos. The Daily's website contains a link for sharing its video via YouTube.
The order appears to be directed only at The Daily. In a statement Wednesday, The Daily said it believes the order is "an extraordinary example of prior restraint" and it has no intention of taking down the video clips from either site "until we've had the opportunity to present our case to the court."
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