Tuesday, August 17, 2010

( I am glad Louis is not here to see this!)

The Late Great Louis Armstrong... What a wonderful world.
( I am glad Louis is not here to see this!)

Surprise, surprise, sur-damn-prise!

Pressure worries stall relief well for damaged Gulf of Mexico oil well

BP engineers and the U.S. government's science team met Monday afternoon to figure out the best way to relieve pressure in the outer shell of the Macondo well before BP is allowed to complete the relief well, the ultimate step in permanently sealing the exploded oil well in the Gulf of Mexico.

Patrick Semansky, The Associated Press archive

National Incident Commander Thad Allen, left, speaks at a news conference in Schriever on Friday with U.S. Coast Guard Rear Admiral Paul Zukunft.

Although BP pumped cement into the well through a procedure called a "static kill" this month, the government wants the company to proceed with filling the well with cement through a relief well to make sure the broken well really is dead.

But now officials are concerned that pumping cement through the relief well could put too much pressure on the sealed outer layer of the well, called the annulus, and National Incident Commander Thad Allen asked BP to figure out how to relieve the pressure before he would let the company complete the relief well.
On Monday afternoon, advisers to BP and the federal government met to consider two options for handling the pressure, and they will advise Energy Secretary Steve Chu and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, Allen said.
Chu will make a recommendation on how to proceed.
"We want to make sure before I give the order to intercept that we understand the implications of that pressure and how we will deal with it," Allen said.
One option is to remove the existing capping stack and blowout preventer and put a new blowout preventer in its place. Taking anything off the well is considered somewhat risky, but a new blowout preventer would be best equipped to handle pressure and would enable officials to shut down the well if a problem arises.
If the scientists opt to remove existing equipment and install a new blowout preventer, BP would use the blowout preventer from the backup relief well that has been drilled. BP would have to get permission from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the successor to the Minerals Management Service, to temporarily abandon the well with a cement plug so it could take off the blowout preventer.
The other option is to develop a pressure relief mechanism in the capping stack. That would keep more of the existing structure in place, but it would take more time because engineers would have to design a new piece of equipment and have it fabricated.
Allen said Monday that the government and BP will decide "in the next day or two" how to proceed.
Considerations about how to handle pressure in the outer portion of the well will likely push back the ultimate shutting down of the Macondo well until at least next week.
The move also sidesteps considerations of the remnants of Tropical Depression 5, which the National Hurricane Center on Monday gave a 60 percent of re-forming into a tropical system. On Monday afternoon, the site where the Deepwater Horizon rig sank on April 20 was experiencing 8-foot waves.
Once Allen allows BP to resume drilling, it should take 96 hours for the company to drill the final length and intercept the well. As with the "static kill," it will take 24 to 36 hours to pump cement into the well and permanently kill it.
But, Allen said, that five- or six-day period won't begin until BP has made whatever changes are needed to deal with the pressure.
"We're being responsible in how we're moving forward," Allen said. "We have to have a stake in the heart of this well."

Rebecca Mowbray can be reached at rmowbray@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3417.

Tracy Kuhns speaks up on behalf of commercial fishermen

Tracy Kuhns speaks up on behalf of commercial fishermen gathered in Panama City Florida to demonstrate and hold a press conference denouncing the continued use of dispersant.

The fishermen are asking for...

1.    Stop spraying toxic dispersants.

2.    Keep fishing grounds closed until better testing methods of seafood prove that it is safe to eat.

3.    Establish community health care clinics with occupational & environmental medicine (OEM) doctors to treat citizens & workers.

4.    Create short and long-term jobs that go to local commercial fishermen first.

Monday, August 16, 2010

Interior halts deepwater environmental exemptions

The Associated Press

Vessels assisting in the drilling of the relief well at the site of the Deepwater Horizon oil wellhead are seen on the Gulf of Mexico near the coast of Louisiana Saturday. The Obama administration announced Monday it is requiring environmental reviews for all new deepwater oil drilling.

Erica Werner, The Associated Press

Published: Monday, August 16, 2010 at 4:01 p.m.
Last Modified: Monday, August 16, 2010 at 4:01 p.m.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration announced Monday it is requiring environmental reviews for all new deepwater oil drilling.

Uncovering the Lies That Are Sinking the Oil

Monday 16 August 2010

by: Dahr Jamail and Erika Blumenfeld, t r u t h o u t | Report

The rampant use of toxic dispersants, out-of-state private contractors being brought in to spray them and US Coast Guard complicity are common stories now in the four states most affected by BP's Gulf of Mexico oil disaster.

Commercial and charter fishermen, residents and members of BP's Vessels Of Opportunity (VOO) program in Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana have spoken with Truthout about their witnessing all of these incidents.

Toxic Dispersants Found on Recently Opened Mississippi Shrimping and Oyster Grounds

On Monday, August 9, the Director of the State of Mississippi Department of Marine Resources (DMR), Bill Walker, despite ongoing reports of tar balls, oil and dispersants being found in Mississippi waters, declared, "there should be no new threats" and issued an order for all local coast governments to halt ongoing oil disaster work being funded by BP money that was granted to the state.

BP had allocated $25 million to Mississippi for local government disaster work. As of August 9, Walker estimated that only about $500,000 worth of invoices for oil response work had been submitted to the state. Nobody knows what the rest of the money will be used for.

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Recent days in Mississippi waters found fishermen and scientists finding oil in Garden Pond on Horn Island, massive fish kills near Cat Island, "black water" in Mississippi Sound and submerged oil in Pass Christian.

Mississippi residents and fishermen Truthout spoke with believe Walker's move was from an order given by Gov. Haley Barbour, who has been heavily criticized over the years for his lobbying on behalf of the Tobacco and Oil industries.

Two days after Walker's announcement and in response to claims from state and federal officials that Gulf Coast waters are safe and clean, fishermen took their own samples from the waters off of Pass Christian in Mississippi.

The samples were taken in water that is now open for shrimping, as well as from waters directly over Mississippi's oyster bed, that will likely open in September for fishing.

Commercial fisherman James "Catfish" Miller, took fishermen Danny Ross Jr. and Mark Stewart, along with scientist Dr. Ed Cake of Gulf Environmental Associates and others out and they found the fishing grounds to be contaminated with oil and dispersants.

Their method was simple - they tied an absorbent rag to a weighted hook, dropped it overboard for a short duration of time, then pulled it up to find the results. The rags were covered in a brown, oily substance that the fishermen identified as a mix of BP's crude oil and toxic dispersants.

Shortly thereafter, Catfish Miller took the samples to a community meeting in nearby D'Iberville to show fishermen and families. At the meeting, fishermen unanimously supported a petition calling for the firing of Dr. Walker, the head of Mississippi's DMR, who is responsible for opening the fishing grounds.

Dr. Cake wrote of the experience: "When the vessel was stopped for sampling, small, 0.5- to 1.0-inch-diameter bubbles would periodically rise to the surface and shortly thereafter they would pop leaving a small oil sheen. According to the fishermen, several of BP's Vessels-of-Opportunity (Carolina Skiffs with tanks of dispersants [Corexit]) were hand spraying in Mississippi Sound off the Pass Christian Harbor in prior days/nights. It appears to this observer that the dispersants are still in the area and are continuing to react with oil in the waters off Pass Christian Harbor."

Ongoing Contamination and the Carolina Skiffs

On August 13, Truthout visited Pass Christian Harbor in Mississippi. Oil sheen was present, the vapors of which could be smelled, causing our eyes to burn. Many ropes that tied boats to the dock were oiled and much of the water covered with oil sheen.

(Photo: Erika Blumenfeld © 2010)
oil slick near boat version 2

A resident, who has a yacht in the harbor, spoke with Truthout on condition of anonymity due to fears of reprisal from BP. "Last week we were sitting on our boat and you could smell the chemicals," he explained. "It smelt like death. It was like mosquito spray, but ten times stronger. The next day I was hoarse and my lungs felt like I'd been in a smoky bar the night before."

Oil boom was present throughout much of the harbor. Despite this, fishermen, obviously trusting Mr. Miller's announcement about the fishing waters being clear of oil and dispersant, were trying to catch fish from their boat inside the harbor.

"Last week oil filled this harbor," the man, an ex-commercial fisherman added. "BP has bought off all our government officials, and shut them up. You can't say the oil is gone, it's right here! Them saying it's not here is a bunch of bullshit."

Truthout spoke with another man, who was recently laid off from the VOO program. He also spoke on condition of anonymity. "Just the other day one of the Carolina Skiffs passed us spraying something," he said. "We went west instead of east as we turned and a group of Carolina Skiffs was spraying something over the water."

A Carolina Skiff is a type of boat, usually between 13' and 30' long, very versatile and can function well in shallow or deep waters. They are known for having a large payload capacity and a lot of interior space.

Alarmed by what he saw, the former VOO worker called the Coast Guard to report what he believed was a private contractor company spraying dispersants. "We were later told by the Coast Guard they'd investigated the incident and told us what we saw were vacuum boats sucking oil, and they were rinsing their tanks," he said. "But we know this is a lie and that BP is using these out of state contractors to come in and spray the dispersant at night and they are using planes to drop it as well."

He worked in the VOO program looking for oil. When his team would find oil, upon reporting it, they would consistently be sent away without explanation or the opportunity to clean it. "They made us abort these missions," he said. "Two days ago I put out boom in a bunch of oil for five minutes, they told me to abort the mission, so I pulled up boom soaked in oil. What the hell are we doing out there if they won't let us work to clean up the oil?"

He told Truthout that as his and other VOO teams would be going out to work on the water in the morning, they would pass the out-of-state contractors in Carolina Skiffs coming in from what he believed to be a covert spraying of the oil with dispersant in order to sink it. He believes this was done to deliberately prevent the VOO teams from finding and collecting oil. By doing so, BP's liability would be lessened since the oil giant will be fined for the amount of oil collected.

"BP brings in the Carolina Skiffs to spray the dispersant at night," he added, "And they are not accountable to the Coast Guard."

James Miller, who had taken the group out into the Mississippi Sound that found the oil/dispersants on August 11, told Truthout that the Carolina Skiff teams spraying dispersants were "common" and that it "happened all the time."

Miller, who was in the VOO, is an eyewitness to planes spraying dispersants, as well as the Carolina Skiff crews doing the same.
"We'd roll up on a patch of oil ½ mile wide by one mile long and they'd hold us off from cleaning it up," Miller, speaking with Truthout at his home in D'Iberville, Mississippi, said. "We'd leave and the Carolina Skiffs would pull up and start spraying dispersants on the oil. The guys doing the spraying would wear respirators and safety glasses. Their boats have 375 gallon white drums full of the stuff and they could spray it out 150 feet. The next day there'd be the white foam that's always there after they hit the oil with dispersants."

Some nights VOO crews would sleep out near the work sites. "We'd sleep out there and some nights the planes would come in so close the noise would wake us from a dead sleep," Miller added. "Again, we'd call in the oiled areas during the day and at night the planes would come in and hit the hell out of it with dispersants. That was the drill. We'd spot it and report it. They'd call us off it and send guys out in the skiffs or planes to sink it."

Mark Stewart, from Ocean Springs, Mississippi, was in the VOO program for 70 days before being laid off on August 2. The last weeks has seen BP decreasing the number of response workers from around 45,000 down to around 30,000. The number is decreasing by the day.

Stewart, a third generation commercial fisherman, told Truthout he had regularly seen "purple looking jelly stuff, three feet thick, floating all over, as wide as a football field" and "tar balls as big as a car." He, like Miller, is an eyewitness to planes dispensing dispersant at night, as well as the Carolina Skiff crews spraying dispersant. "I worked out off the barrier islands of Mississippi," Stewart said. "They would relentlessly carpet bomb the oil we found with dispersants, day and night."

Stewart, echoing what VOO employees across the Gulf Coast are saying, told Truthout his crew would regularly find oil, report it, be sent away, then either watch as planes or Carolina Skiffs would arrive to apply dispersants, or come back the next day to find the white foamy emulsified oil remnant that is left on the surface after oil has been hit with dispersants.

Stewart added, "Whenever government people, state or federal, would be flying over us, we'd be instructed to put out all our boom and start skimming, acting like we were gathering oil, even when we weren't in the oil."

While acting as whistleblowers, Miller and Stewart have both been accused of being "troublemakers" and "liars" by persons in the Mississippi government and some of their local media, in spite of the fact that they are doing so from deep concern for their fellow fisherman and the environment.

Meanwhile, both men told Truthout they live with chronic headaches and other symptoms they've been experiencing since they were exposed to toxic dispersants while in the VOO program. Recent trips to investigate their waters for oil and dispersant have worsened their symptoms.

"Why would we lie about oil and dispersant in our waters, when our livelihoods depend on our being able to fish here?" Miller asked. "I want this to be cleaned up so we can get back to how we used to live, but it doesn't make sense for us or anyone else to fish if our waters are toxified. I don't know why people are angry at us for speaking the truth. We're not the ones who put the oil in the water."

Miller is bleak about his assessment of the situation. He pointed out toward the coast and said, "Everything is dead out there. The plankton is dead. We pulled up loads of dead plankton on our trip on Wednesday. There are very few birds. We saw only a few when there are usually thousands. We only saw two porpoises when there are usually countless. We saw nothing but death."

Coast Guard Complicity

"Lockheed Martin aircraft, including C-130s and P-3s, have been deployed to the Gulf region by the Air Force, Coast Guard and other government customers to perform a variety of tasks, such as monitoring, mapping and dispersant spraying," states a newsletter published in July by Lockheed Martin.

An article by the 910th Airlift Wing Public Affairs Office, based in Youngstown, Ohio, states that C-130H Hercules aircraft started aerial spray operations Saturday, May 1, under the direction of the president of the United States and secretary of defense. "The objective of the aerial spray operation is to neutralize the oil spill with oil dispersing agents," it says.

Joseph Yerkes, along with other Florida commercial fishermen and Florida residents, have seen C-130s spraying dispersants on oil floating off the coast of Florida numerous times.

But the Coast Guard denies it.

At a VOO meeting in Destin on August 3, Lt. Cmdr. Dale Vogelsang, a liaison officer with the United States Coast Guard said, "I can state, there is no dispersant being used in Florida waters."

The room, filled mostly with commercial fishermen, who were current or former members in BP's VOO program, erupted in protest and disbelief. When Vogelsang was immediately challenged on his statement, he replied, "I'll investigate the C-130s."

Two BP representatives, along with Vogelsang, found themselves confronted by a large group of angry fishermen for over an hour. At times, the meeting resembled a riot more than the question-and-answer session it was intended to be.

Yerkes, who lives on Okaloosa Island, has been a commercial fisherman and boat captain most of his life. For the last 12 years, he has owned and operated a commercial live bait business.

Employed by BP as a VOO operator for more than two months, Yerkes, along with many other local commercial fishermen in the VOO program in his area were laid off on July 20 because BP and the Coast Guard believed there was no more "recoverable oil" in their area of Florida. Yet residents, fishermen, swimmers, divers and surfers in Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana have been reporting oil floating atop water, sitting on the bottom and floating in the water column, in oftentimes great amounts, for the last two weeks. There have been many reports of various kinds of aircraft, including C-130s, dispensing dispersants over oil.

Yerkes provided Truthout with a letter he wrote to document his witnessing a C-130 spraying what he believes to be dispersant.
"I witnessed [from my home] a C130 military plane flying and obviously spraying" over the Gulf of Mexico on July 30, "flying from the north to the south, dropping to low levels of elevation then obviously spraying or releasing an unknown substance from the rear of the plane. This substance started leaving the plane when it was about ½ to 1 mile offshore, with a continuous stream following out of the plane until it was out of sight flying to the south."

The substance, Yerkes wrote, "was not smoke, for the residue fell to the water, where smoke would have lingered." He added, "this plane was very low near the water and the flight was very similar to viewings I made over the past few weeks when dispersants were sprayed over the Gulf near our area."

A member of the VOO program provided relevant information of a "strange incident" on condition of anonymity. He was observing wildlife offshore the same day Yerkes witnessed the C-130 when he received a call from his supervisor. He told his supervisor he and his crewmember were not feeling well, so he was instructed to return in order "to get checked out because a plane had been reported in our area spraying a substance on the water about 10-20 minutes before." The employee complained of having a terrible headache and nasal congestion while his crewmember said he had a metallic taste in his mouth.

After filling out an incident report, both men were directed to go to the hospital. The following day the two men were "asked to go to the hospital for blood tests."

One week after the aforementioned meeting, The Destin Log quoted Vogelsang as saying he had contacted Unified Command who "confirmed" that dispersants were not being used in Florida waters. Vogelsang added, "Dispersants are only being used over the wellhead in Louisiana," a statement that Truthout has heard refuted by dozens of commercial fishermen from Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana.

Yerkes told Truthout that he, too, was aware of the Carolina Skiffs coming in from out of state to dispense dispersants over the oil. In the recent VOO meeting in Destin, Vogelsang was asked about the out-of-state contractors being brought in to work in Florida waters. He replied, "The only vessels we are using in the program are local, vetted vessels."

His response caused an uproar of protest from the crowd, with various fishermen and VOO workers yelling that Carolina Skiffs were being brought in from out of state. To this, Vogelsang responded, "Vessels that are from out of the area are contractors with special skills."

Vogelsang went on to claim that the amount of "product" [oil] being found in Florida is decreasing daily. This, too, caused an uproar from the room full of fishermen.

"I can take anybody in here out and show them oil, every single day," David White, a local fishing charter captain responded. "I was in the VOO program, driving around calling in oil, telling them where it is and nobody ever came. I never saw any skimmers there and I'm talking about some serious oil. I can show you tar balls going across the bottom like tumbleweeds."

Yerkes provided Truthout with a written statement from Lawrence Byrd, a local boat captain who was a task force leader in the VOO program from June 4 to July 21. On July 27 and 28, Byrd took BP officials, Coast Guard officials and an EPA official on a fact finding mission in search of oil.

"The Coast Guard told us if we could show them the oil, they'd put us back to work," Yerkes told Truthout, "So Byrd took him, and other officials out on his boat and showed them the oil."

Byrd's statement contains many instances of the group encountering oil on the trips:

"Within 30 minutes in the Rocky Bayou and Boggy Bayou we found 4 different football field sized areas of oily sheen on the water ... We moved east from there in search of weathered oil, just past Mid Bay bridge we found a 2 acre oil slick with a water bottle full of crude oil. At this time the Coast Guard Lt. had seen enough to warrant a 2nd trip with BP officials and EPA."

The next day, July 28, Byrd wrote:

"On board were BP officials, a Parson official, 2 Coast Guard Lts and EPA. First stop Crab Island Destin where we found tar balls, dead fish and plenty of dead sargasm grass. All officials seemed very concerned about all of our findings."

The report goes on to list further oil findings and added, "In the eyes of BP officials, Coast Guard Lts. and EPA, this was more than enough oil product to warrant the need for more VOO boats to serve as a first line of defense against this toxic pollution. To this day Destin VOO is still operating with ½ task force in the bay and ½ task force in Gulf with Walton County being completely unprotected! I feel all parties have good intentions but nothing is being done!"

"Somebody is stopping that process," Yerkes told Truthout. "[Retired Coast Guard Adm.] Thad Allen stood up at Tyndall Air Force Base the same night that they sprayed dispersant on the oil in front of Destin and he said we are going to use local fishermen in each local area to do the jobs, even beyond the cleaning of the oil. The day after he said that at Tyndall ... every one of the Carolina skiffs is loaded to the hilt with boom. Nobody else got reactivated."

Yerkes expressed his frustration further. "They are lying about this whole thing and it's got me in an uproar," he said. "I'm by myself. I'm the only one willing to stand up. I have a lot of friends who want to stand up and speak out. They know the Coast Guard and BP are lying, but they won't talk because they are getting paychecks and don't want to jeopardize that. They are saying they are finding new oil all the time, but the Coast Guard claims they are testing it and saying it's safe. I know for a fact they are not testing it and we watched and heard C130s fly every night in July."

There is a clear pattern that VOO workers in all four states are consistently reporting:

VOO workers identify the oil.

They are then sent elsewhere by someone higher up the chain of command.

Dispersants are later applied by out-of-state contractors in Carolina Skiffs (usually at night), or aircraft are used, in order to sink the oil.

The oil "appears" gone and, therefore, no additional action is taken.

"There are surfers coming in with oil on them," Yerkes continued, "There are divers telling us it's on the bottom. We have VOO workers coming in after finding oil three inches thick atop the water as of last week and they go back out there and it's gone."

"There are stories of people getting notes on their cars, verbal and phone threats. I don't want to become one of those people. I'm trying to heighten my profile so they don't want to mess with me," Yerkes added. "I want the truth to come out so the public knows. I'm trying to make BP and the government come out and tell the facts instead of lying to the public about what is going on. I want to know how much dispersants they are using, where all the oil is and the effects these are having on all of us. Somebody is lying and we want the truth."

Fishermen are demanding:

First Speaker at the fishermen's demonstration in Panama City.

Fishermen are demanding:

1. Dispersant use be stopped immediately

2. All fishing openings in Gulf and inland waters be stopped until seafood tissue sampling, using updated testing protocol, for BP chemical dispersants shows the seafood to be safe; and

3. Local commercial fishermen are given first and full employment in the short and long-term clean-up and recovery of the gulf coast, starting immediately.

Hide and Leak

BP’s Cleanup Is More Like a Cover up. Holding the Company Accountable Will Require Digging for the Truth.

By Riki Ott

photo of a man standing on an industrial ship watching a fire at sea

On July 15, BP managed to finally seal its broken Macondo wellhead and stop the oil that had been hemorrhaging into the Gulf of Mexico for 87 days. The very next week, as I was driving up the Florida coast, locals kept pointing out to me where cleanup workers were packing up and pulling out. From Crawfordville through to Carrabelle, and Port St. Joe to Pensacola, the booms were disappearing, the crew tents folded up and removed from beaches.

The well had been capped, after all. The gusher had stopped. Game over. Everyone can go home, right?
Not even close. If all goes according to plan, the relief well should provide a more permanent fix. But that hasn’t been the nature of this disaster. Every time BP thought it had the solution, something somehow went wrong. At the time of this writing, at least one oil seep had sprung in the ocean floor near the well as the pressure from the plug found other releases; methane, too, looked to be leaking. And BP was, once again, dodging the government’s requests for more monitoring.
The capping of the geyser will not, unfortunately, mean the end of the Gulf disaster. Don’t forget that it took nearly a month after the blowout for the first oil to make landfall. The oil-and-chemical mix will be coming ashore in the water and on the wind long after the relief well delivers on its promise.
I don’t share that fact to be discouraging, but only to remind us all that, if we turn our backs on the Gulf now, we will lose the high stakes game that started on April 20 when the Deepwater Horizon exploded. And I mean us – because every American has a stake in this game. This contest is about far more than dollars for damages; it’s about our country’s ability to hold big corporate criminals accountable to the public interest and ensure that they follow the laws we enact.
That’s going to be tough, especially given our national attention deficit disorder. The media will lose its focus soon and shift its gaze to the next catastrophe. Politicians will be tempted to move on to other agendas. But the environment may not recover for years. And the political and legal effort to hold BP to its promise to “make it right” will take a decade at least – if not two.
I know this because I am a survivor of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill – and the 20 years of litigation that followed. The experience completely changed my life. I started as a marine toxicologist, became a commercial fisherwoman, and ended up a democracy activist. I helped start three nonprofit organizations to deal with the lingering social, economic, and environmental harm that Exxon claims never existed. I wrote two books: one on the biological impact of the spill, the other on the emotional impact of disaster trauma and the process of healing. Then I saw it begin all over again. It’s strange – discouraging, really – to witness how seamlessly my work went from the Gulf of Alaska to the Gulf of Mexico.

photo of a sea turtle in a net on the transom of a boat

Carolyn ColeThousands of endangered turtles were affected by the gusher.

Our effort to hold BP accountable for its actions is so complicated because US political leaders have opted to leave the criminals in charge of the crime scene. As we saw this spring and summer, BP managed most of the response to its spill, with the federal government playing a kind of auxiliary role. Some countries, like Norway, nationalize the cleanup of oil spills. On a visit to Norway in 1990, the year after the Exxon spill, I was escorted through World War II-era bunkers full of protective booms and absorbent material. National Guardsmen kept a sharp lookout for troubled tankers. One explained to me, “We treat oil spills like a war.” It was clear that meant a war against the spill, to protect human health and the environment.
Here in the United States, the spiller-in-charge wages a very different war. It’s a war to minimize the spiller’s legal liabilities, which means it’s a war against the truth, the injured people, and the environment. Each decision the spiller makes is filtered through the lens of accounting rather than accountability. BP’s every act is motivated by its desire to reduce its legal and financial liabilities – as was Exxon’s after the spill in Alaska. This is not a moral judgment, it’s just a point of fact. It’s how things work in a system where corporations have one legal reason for being: to make money.
This explains why there are two versions of spill reality: what the spiller says is going on, or the “official” industry-government story, and what is really happening, as told in eye-witness accounts.
I came down to the Gulf on a one-way ticket in early May anticipating the dual reality and committed to highlighting the truth as I found it. I hoped to share experiences from the Exxon Valdez saga with Gulf residents in an effort to help them avoid the mistakes we made in Alaska – mistakes for which we are still paying. I hoped to work in solidarity with communities to help counter the inevitable “official” story. Because correcting the false story is the first step toward accountability. It’s the only way to make BP pay and to avoid the secondary disaster, euphemistically known as the “cleanup,” but more accurately called a cover-up.

It was already an uphill battle by the time I arrived. The broken pipe was spewing under a mile of ocean water. BP was the only one with access to the site and estimates of flow rate. The company’s early estimates inched up as its credibility shot down. One thousand barrels a day… 5,000 a day … 25,000 a day … would you believe 50,000?

It was hard to tell from the video footage BP released. A high-definition, live-feed camera deployed at the leak would have ended the guesstimates, but BP resisted until Congressman Edward Markey, among others, insisted on transparency. Then it turned out that BP and the Coast Guard had been viewing HD video all along.
In early June, federal and university scientists estimated a worst-case scenario flow rate of up to 100,000 barrels daily (over four million gallons), most likely from Day One. The scientists and media then settled on an “accepted” rate of 25,000 barrels per day. (By early August, that number had been revised upward yet again to 53,000 barrels.)
Where can people vote “do not accept”? The accepted spill volume for the Exxon Valdez was 11 million gallons (262,000 barrels). But eyewitnesses this was the low-end estimate. Five years after the spill, the State of Alaska released its independent analysis putting the spill at 30 to 35 million gallons.
Underestimating spill volume is common in the oil industry because stiff penalties are based on volume spilled: $1,100 per barrel under normal circumstances. If BP is found guilty of gross negligence for failing to repair the damaged blowout preventer, fines rise to $4,300 per barrel. By the time the Macondo was capped, estimates ranged from 100 million to 200 million gallons of oil blown into the Gulf. That’s a big enough discrepancy for BP to save billions with fuzzy videos.
BP got serious about scrubbing out evidence when it released oil dispersants onto the surface of the ocean and under the water. Dispersants are industrial solvents designed to break up oil slicks into droplets that sink and spread out. In other words, they make oil slicks, and liability, “disappear.”
In late May, when surface slicks began rolling into Louisiana’s coastal marsh, BP CEO Tony Hayward declared, “The oil is on the surface,” a bald attempt to distract attention from the huge amount of oil lurking within the mile-deep water column. He stated that BP had found “no evidence” of the oil-dispersant plumes suspended in large masses and reported by at least three universities.
Alas for BP – and the entire Gulf ecosystem – the persistent plumes became an inconvenient truth. In July, Hugh Kaufman, a senior policy analyst at the EPA, blew the whistle on the industry-government cover-up when he confirmed that nearly two million gallons of dispersant had been applied as of July 20, and 44,000 square miles of ocean were contaminated by the oil-dispersant toxic stew.
The use of dispersants amounts to an experiment of unprecedented proportion on the Gulf’s wildlife and people. Dispersants were developed by the oil industry in response to public outrage when the tanker Torrey Canyon wrecked on England’s coast in 1967. As a budding marine scientist, I researched effects of the first-generation dispersants in the mid-1970s. They were like straight kerosene: They killed everything they touched.
The oil industry went back to the drawing board and, during the next 40 years developed successive generations of less toxic dispersants. The problem is that dispersants are dangerous by nature. They are solvents, which means they can dissolve oil, grease, and rubber. Workers on the Vessels of Opportunity (the lemons-into-lemonade name given to BP’s cleanup fleet) have told me that their hard rubber impellors are falling apart and need frequent replacement; divers say they have had to replace the soft rubber o-rings on their gear after dives in the Gulf.
Unfortunately, replacement is not an option for the Gulf’s once plentiful denizens – the dolphins, sea turtles, whales, fish, birds, and manatees that make the place home. In May and June, I frequently heard about sightings of dying wildlife or distressed animals fleeing into coastal areas. The first reports came from the offshore cleanup workers and pilots who discovered carcasses concentrated by rip currents, and windrows of dead dolphins, turtles, and birds “too numerous to count” on barrier islands.
Such evidence is rare because BP, and its puppet the Coast Guard, pushed cameras away from the spill, then away from beaches. On June 2, I was flying on a charter from New Orleans to Orange Beach, Alabama, when the straight orange lines delineating FAA’s flight restriction zone jumped onshore to include Alabama’s beaches. The shocked pilot shook his head and said, “There’s only one reason for that: BP doesn’t want cameras on the beaches.”
The situation reached a new low when the Coast Guard ignored the First Amendment and said anyone who got within 65 feet of response operations without government permission could face felony charges and up to $40,000 in fines. That policy, and other unwritten forms of censorship, have been aggressively enforced by BP’s private security teams and local police who commonly work off-duty (in their uniforms) for BP.
Retired Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, the person allegedly in charge of the cleanup, said the restrictions were intended to protect “safety.” Really? If the federal government or BP were so concerned about safety, then maybe any of the four agencies – EPA, OSHA, NIOSH, or the Coast Guard – that are supposedly sampling air and water quality should design better monitoring programs. None of those agencies has found unsafe levels of oil or the notorious human health hazard, 2-butoxyethanol, a primary ingredient in one of the dispersants (the ironically named “Corexit”) dumped into the Gulf. But plenty of other people have discovered dangerous chemical levels in the environment.
For example, about a week after the oil started coming ashore in Alabama, the Mobile television station WKRG took samples of water and sand from Orange Beach, Gulf Shores, Katrina Key, and Dauphin Island. The test was nothing fancy. The on-air reporter simply dipped a jar into the ocean and another into some surf water filling a sand pit dug by a small child. In the samples, oil was not visible in the water or the sand, but the chemist who analyzed them reported astonishingly high levels of oil ranging from 16 to 221 parts per million (ppm).
Except for the Dauphin Island sample – that one exploded in the lab. The chemist thought maybe the exploding sample contained methane or 2-butoxyethanol.
These levels of oil could explain the bouts of skin rashes I heard about from coastal residents, pharmacists, and medical doctors in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. The rashes ranged from a fiery red discoloration to deep blistering. The worst cases I saw were on the legs of offshore cleanup workers who were diagnosed by BP with “staph infections.” Sick workers who sought out independent doctors were fired, according to the workers.
Toxicologists and medical doctors told me that oil alone would not cause deep blisters and scarring – but dispersants could. There is also evidence of dangerous levels of oil in the air. What people described as “invisible jellyfish” in the water became “stinging rain” in the air. I suspect the sting is from the micelles, little oil bubbles wrapped in solvent. A preliminary study commissioned in mid-July by Guardians of the Gulf, a community-based nonprofit organization in Orange Beach, Alabama, found that nightly air inversions – common in the area during the summer and fall – were trapping pollutants near the ground. Total Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) – including the carcinogen benzene, and oil vapors – reached 85 to 108 parts per million at 9:00 a.m. but rapidly dropped to zero (or non-detectable) within half an hour as the sun burned through the inversion layer. This would help explain why the EPA has failed to detect VOCs with its own tests: The agency typically does its sampling during the daytime.
The high VOC levels could explain the bout of respiratory problems, dizziness, nausea, sore throats, headaches, and ear bleeds I’ve heard about from residents and health professionals from Houma, Louisiana, to Apalachicola, Florida. Even the oil industry knows that these chemicals are unsafe. As long ago as 1948, the American Petroleum Institute confirmed that “the only absolutely safe concentration for benzene is zero.”
And yet throughout the entire debacle, the regulators with OSHA have refused to require respirators for offshore cleanup workers, arguably the most at risk from high exposure levels of oil-dispersant contaminants. Under public pressure, OSHA finally insisted respirators be provided to offshore workers (only), yet the agency well knows that BP has consistently informed cleanup workers that wearing respirators will result in job termination. Why would BP be opposed to such an easy and cheap worker protection measure? For the same reason the company chases cameras off the sand – it doesn’t want to look bad. Workers wearing respirators would be an admission that something is terribly wrong, and leave BP open to long-term medical surveillance.

What will become of the Gulf? If the experience of Alaska’s Prince William Sound is any indicator, the future will be grim. Holes will appear where once things were solid. There will be holes in the Gulf’s ecosystem when the 2010 class of young sea life fails to return as adults, just as in Alaska, where the Prince William Sound herring fishery still remains closed. There will be holes in Gulf communities as depression crimps lives and families leave, just like what happened in my town of Cordova. There will be holes when the false economy propped up by BP’s cash crashes to the reality that this tragedy has stolen much of the Gulf’s economic foundation.

BP AmericaBP CEO Tony Hayward lost his job over the Macondo disaster, thanks in part to
inappropriate soundbytes like, “I just want my life back.”

Perhaps the biggest hole, the worst wound, is the damage done to our democracy. The BP blowout and the government’s lame response have made clear once again that in this country the corporations lead … and the politicians follow.
Accountability was something we failed to achieve in Alaska. It took me almost 20 years – and a lot of personal growth – to fully understand why. Over time, I began to see that Exxon’s oil spill wasn’t an environmental disaster; it was, instead, a democracy disaster. Exxon’s collusion with the government then, like BP’s today, made it blatantly obvious that “We the People” have lost control of our Republic. When government decides that bowing to the needs of companies is its top priority, disasters that come at the public expense are the natural result.
This was true before, but in the wake of the Gulf spill it’s plain for everyone to see. As one of my new friends in the Gulf put it: “This is not new. This is just in our faces.” The righteous anger in that statement might yet be able to mend the holes in our democracy. It might give us the chance to put our political divides aside and work together to reclaim government of, for, and by the people.

Riki Ott is author of Not One Drop (Chelsea Green, 2008) and director of Ultimate Civics, a project of Earth Island Institute. She is a member of the national grassroots coalition MoveToAmend.org.