BP Oil Update by Your Emerald COASTKEEPER

Emerald Coastkeeper
April 1, 2011
   



Proud member of the Waterkeeper Alliance



In the past couple weeks I have attended 3 meetings related to response and recovery from the BP oil discharge. Below is a summary of what was discovered at each meeting.

The Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) meeting with Natural Resource Damages Assessment (NRDA) Trustees: Florida Trustees are in the process of assessing the ecological damage incurred from oil. Water, soil and tissue samples continue to be collected and will be compared to baseline sampling which occurred before the discharge. Things being assessed: water column, fishery resources, seagrasses, subtidal offshore environments, shoreline habitats, wetlands, birds, marine mammals, other terrestrial wildlife and human uses. Some examples of restoration given at the meeting include: creation of habitat, sand replacement, law enforcement to protect endangered species, boat ramps/piers and acquiring property. There are 4 steps which must be defined and supported in order to call something an injury: release of harmful substance (proven), pathway that substance took (partly known), exposure to that substance (in the process of analyzing) and finally a quantifiable injury (to be determined).

Remember, NRDA is a legal process set up in the Oil Pollution Act 1990. It is a lengthy process and due to the legal nature, data and chain of custody information is much slower to be released to the public than under other circumstances. This has unfortunately added to many questions folks have about the safety of our beaches and seafood; which is a perfect segue to the next meeting.
                                                                                                                                                    
BP and response agencies held a town hall meeting to discuss the current situation in northwest Florida. First the good news: response agencies and UWF/CEDB have restarted their weekly water and sediment sampling at northwest Florida beaches and so far continue to get non-detect values for hydrocarbons, PAHs and dispersant. What this means is that even though oil product continues to wash up on our beaches as a tar like substance we have yet to see any data which shows that this oil product is dissolving into the water column.  This has led to the health department issuing statements that our beaches are safe and clean.

The not so good news: There are at least a dozen areas in northwest Florida where offshore tar mats exist. As long as these tar mats exist we will continue to see oil product washing ashore on our beaches. Now, according to currently released data, as long as you physically avoid the oil/tar you should not be at risk of accumulating the toxins which exist in it. However, a very disturbing quote from response agencies at this community meeting: “the technology to remove these offshore mats in a safeway does not exist and therefore the benefit for removing these tar mats does not outweigh the risk involved”.  Now I will be the last one to insist that that worker safety be ignored in order to remove all of the oil impacting the Gulf, however, there are 3 serious problems I see with this statement:

1.       All northwest Florida counties are pushing hard for beach renourishment to be the first and foremost project for restoration in Florida and insisting that this should happen sooner than later. However, we have no idea where most of the offshore oil is (recall at least ¾ of the oil discharged last summer has yet to be accounted for), and even if we do diligent studies to find a proven clean supply of sand, where is the logic in bringing that sand onshore while we are still having oil impacts every time a storm passes? Don’t get me wrong, BP should be forced to replace the sand we are having to remove due to it being soiled with oil; however this should not be done until we stop seeing tar washing ashore.
2.       How is it possible that response agencies can go to Washington touting the response to the BP discharge (using dispersant to sink the oil) as highly successful and pushing for the same response in future events and at the same time they are in our communities telling us that there is no safe way to remove sunken oil which continues to wash ashore.
3.       Aquatic species cannot be warned to avoid the oil, they are definitely at risk of accumulating the toxins found in the dispersed, sunken oil. In addition, many locals eat much more seafood than the national average, and FDA has yet to address this fact in their assessment of seafood safety.


Finally, last night I attended a meeting with the Ecosystem Restoration Task Force in Mobile. The objective of the task force is different than that of NRDA Trustees. The Trustees are charged with defining the damage/injuries incurred from the BP discharge and creating a restoration plan to address those injuries. The Task Force is charged with defining a broad, Gulf of Mexico wide restoration plan. The Gulf has suffered from declining health of coastal ecosystems, water quality and fisheries for decades, yet has received very little attention and funding to address these issues (especially compared to other regions of the US, like the great lakes for example). The executive order which created this task force was very clear in the charge for local input and involvement in a Gulf wide restoration plan. This plan is due to the Obama administration on October 5, 2011. The Task Force is holding meeting throughout the Gulf to get input on priorities for restoration and to define what the impediments are which have kept this restoration from happening sooner. If you have input into restoration priorities that you would like for me to address at these meetings let me know. Otherwise I will continue to push for creation of oyster/seagrass habitats and stormwater improvements as top priorities for restoration in the Gulf region.

As always if you would like to get involved we look forward to hearing from you. We are still monitoring shoreline areas for oil and could use mroe volunteers to help with that effort. We are also waiting for results from our second round of oyster sampling.



Chasidy Fisher Hobbs
Coastkeeper
Emerald Coastkeeper

Un Freakin Believable!

Transocean Execs Get Bonuses for ‘Best Year in Safety,’ Despite Gulf Disaster

• April 2, 2011 7:07 am
• 
  

By Jeff McMahon
Forbes
Original Article

Transocean Ltd., owner of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, awarded millions of dollars in bonuses to its executives after “the best year in safety performance in our company’s history,” according to an annual report and proxy statement released yesterday.
Eleven people were killed, including nine Transocean employees, in the April 20 explosion and collapse of the rig, which gushed crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico for 86 days.
“Notwithstanding the tragic loss of life in the Gulf of Mexico, we achieved an exemplary statistical safety record as measured by our total recordable incident rate and total potential severity rate,” Transocean states in the filing. “As measured by these standards, we recorded the best year in safety performance in our Company’s history, which is a reflection on our commitment to achieving an incident free environment, all the time, everywhere.”
Transocean President and Chief Executive Officer Steven L. Newman received about $4.3 million in cash bonuses and stock and option awards. With other compensation — such as pension increases and cost of living, housing, and automobile allowances — Newman earned $6.6 million in 2010, almost $1 million more than in 2009.
His base salary, $900,000 in 2010, will increase 22 percent to $1.1 million in 2011.
Transocean built and staffed the Deepwater Horizon. It was leased by BP, which denied most executives bonuses in 2010. In justifying the bonuses, Transocean cites the increased burden on executives of responding to the spill:

Although in 2010 we made significant progress in achieving our strategic and operational objectives for the year, these developments were overshadowed by the April 20, 2010 fire and explosion onboard our semi-submersible drilling rig, the Deepwater Horizon, off the Louisiana coast that resulted in the deaths of 11 of our colleagues, including nine Transocean employees, and the uncontrolled flow of hydrocarbons from the well for an extended period (the ‘‘Macondo Incident’’). As a result, many of our senior executive officers… dedicated a significant portion of their time in 2010 following the Macondo Incident to responding to the needs of the victims’ families, coordinating the involvement of additional resources required to stem the flow of hydrocarbons, including drilling rigs and personnel to drill relief wells and other operations as requested by the Unified Area Command, cooperating with the numerous federal, state, and local reviews and investigations into the incident, overseeing our internal investigation of the incident, and managing other demands stemming from these activities, in addition to performing their normal responsibilities.

In the proxy, Transocean’s directors also ask shareholders to shelter “the Board of Directors and the executive management From liability for activities during fiscal year 2010.” The company is being sued by some shareholders for failing to monitor risk leading up to the spill.
Transocean contends it has no liability:

It remains our view that Transocean is contractually indemnified against all claims stemming from the environmental and economic impacts of the hydrocarbons spilled into the Gulf of Mexico from the Macondo well after the sinking of the Deepwater Horizon.”

At the other end of that contract, however, BP contends Transocean shares liability for the disaster.
The world’s largest builder and operator of oil rigs, Transocean was incorporated in the Cayman Islands but now keeps its executive offices in Vernier, Switzerland.
Transocean released its Annual Report and Proxy Statement middawy Friday, and the bonuses were first reported by Sheila McNulty of The Financial Times (paywall).

Watchdog analysis suggests recent Gulf oil spill was major

Sue Sturgis, Facing South

The same watchdog group that showed the federal government was low-balling the estimate of last year's BP oil spill rate is now saying that the size of the latest oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was also underestimated.

SkyTruth, a West Virginia-based nonprofit, analyzed recent satellite imagery of the spill that was first reported on March 18. Assuming the thickness of the 2,427 square-kilometer slick was only 1 micron or one-millionth of a meter, the organization concludes the slick held at least 640,728 gallons of oil.

"That would make it a major spill (more than 100,000 gallons), and a heckuva lot more than the 4 gallons in total that was reported to the National Response Center," SkyTruth states on its blog.

Following last April's explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, BP and the U.S. government claimed the well was leaking about 1,000 barrels of oil a day. But SkyTruth's analysis of satellite imagery concluded the flow rate had to be at least 5,000 barrels a day and probably far more, leading the government to revise its own estimate upward.

Oil samples from this latest spill were tested by a Louisiana State University scientist who concluded that it matched the chemical fingerprint of the crude oil taken from an Anglo-Suisse Offshore Partners well damaged by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Houston-based Anglo-Suisse was trying to plug the well when the spill occurred, but it has disputed it was responsible for all of the oil spilled.

The worrisome news about the latest spill's magnitude comes as the region's commercial fishing industry is already reporting problems related to last year's BP oil disaster. Karen Hopkins of Dean Blanchard Seafood on Louisiana's Grand Isle told the Natural Resources Defense Council that catches are way down:

During the first three months of this year, Dean Blanchard  bought just 5,281 pounds of sea bob, small shrimp often caught in the winter, compared to 35,740 pounds during the same period in 2009. Karen says catches of black drum, sheephead and vermilion snapper are down significantly this year too. And she worries this may not be the end of it. "Boat captains are terrified this will be like the Exxon Valdez. They had decent catches for several years until some species couldn't reproduce and everything crashed."

(Photo of oil from the recent spill washing up on Grand Isle from the Louisiana Bucket Brigade. To see more of their photos of the spill, click here.)

By Sue Sturgis on March 29, 2011 11:44 AM

U.S. lawyers say BP, spill partners harmed cleanup crew

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Workers clean booms stained with oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill in Waveland, Mississippi July 8, 2010.

Credit: Reuters/Lee Celano

BANGALORE | Thu Mar 31, 2011 7:08am EDT

BANGALORE (Reuters) - BP Plc and other companies who had used chemical dispersants to fight the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill should compensate the cleanup crew and residents harmed by those toxic chemicals, lawyers suing the firms said in a court filing.
To date, BP and its contractors have used more than 1.8 million gallons of Nalco Holding's chemical dispersants in the Gulf of Mexico in connection with the oil spill, according to the complaint. Nalco was also named in the complaint.
Lawyers said many plaintiffs, who were assisting in the effort to prevent oil slicks from reaching the shore, or cleaning oil spill residue from the beaches, came into contact with crude oil, chemical dispersants and other toxic chemical mixtures.
The complaint has sought unspecified compensatory damages from BP and the other companies involved in the clean up act. The lawsuit has also sought damages for medical screening and monitoring.
BP in London declined comment.
The Case is in re: Oil Spill by the Oil Rig "Deepwater Horizon" in the Gulf of Mexico, on April 20, 2010, Case No. 2:10-md-02179-CJB-SS, U.S. District Court, Eastern District Of Louisiana.
(Reporting by Sakthi Prasad in Bangalore; Editing by Hans Peters)

True toll of Deepwater disaster may be 50 times worse than thought

by ClickGreen staff. Published Wed 30 Mar 2011 12:15, Last updated: 2011-03-30

Dolphin deaths may be 50 times worse than official estimate

The recorded impact of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill on wildlife may have severely underestimated the number of deaths of whales and dolphins, according to a new report.

The Deepwater Horizon disaster of 2010 devastated the Gulf region ecologically and economically. However, a new study published in Conservation Letters reveals that the true impact of the disaster on wildlife may be gravely underestimated. The study argues that fatality figures based on the number of recovered animal carcasses will not give a true death toll, which may be 50 times higher than believed.

"The Deepwater oil spill was the largest in US history, however, the recorded impact on wildlife was relatively low, leading to suggestions that the environmental damage of the disaster was actually modest," said lead author Dr Rob Williams from the University of British Columbia."This is because reports have implied that the number of carcasses recovered, 101, equals the number of animals killed by the spill."

The team focused their research on 14 species of cetacean, an order of mammals including whales and dolphins. While the number of recovered carcasses has been assumed to equal the number of deaths, the team argues that marine conditions and the fact that many deaths will have occurred far from shore mean recovered carcasses will only account for a small proportion of deaths.

To illustrate their point, the team multiplied recent species abundance estimates by the species mortality rate. An annual carcass recovery rate was then estimated by dividing the mean number of observed strandings each year by the estimate of annual mortality.

The team's analysis suggests that only 2% of cetacean carcasses were ever historically recovered after their deaths in this region, meaning that the true death toll from the Deepwater Horizon disaster could be 50 times higher than the number of deaths currently estimated.

"This figure illustrates that carcass counts are hugely misleading, if used to measure the disaster's death toll," said co-author Scott Kraus of the New England Aquarium "No study on carcass recovery from strandings has ever recovered anything close to 100% of the deaths occurring in any cetacean population. The highest rate we found was only 6.2%, which implied 16 deaths for every carcass recovered."

The reason for the gulf between the estimates may simply be due to the challenges of working in the marine environment. The Deepwater disaster took place 40 miles offshore, in 1500m of water, which is partly why estimates of oil flow rates during the spill were so difficult to make.

"The same factors that made it difficult to work on the spill also confound attempts to evaluate environmental damages caused by the spill," said Williams. "Consequently, we need to embrace a similar level of humility when quantifying the death tolls."

If the approach outlined by this study were to be adopted the team believe this may present an opportunity to use the disaster to develop new conservation tools that can be applied more broadly, revealing the environmental impacts of other human activities in the marine environment.

"The finding that strandings represent a very low proportion of the true deaths is also critical in considering the magnitude of other human causes of mortality like ship strikes, where the real impacts may similarly be dramatically underestimated by the numbers observed" said John Calambokidis, a Researcher with Cascadia Research and a co-author on the publication.

"Our concern also applies to certain interactions with fishing gear, because there are not always systematic data with which to accurately estimate by-catch, especially for large whales", noted Jooke Robbins, a co-author from the Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies. "When only opportunistic observations are available, these likely reflect a fraction of the problem."

"While we did not conduct a study to estimate the actual number of deaths from the oil spill, our research reveals that the accepted figures are a grave underestimation," concluded Dr. Williams. "We now urge methodological development to develop appropriate multipliers so that we discover the true cost of this tragedy."

Did BP LOSE YOU? BP computer with personal info missing

National Briefing | South

Louisiana: BP Loses Personal Data

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: March 29, 2011

• • P

A BP employee lost a laptop containing personal data belonging to thousands of residents who filed claims for compensation after the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a company spokesman, Curtis Thomas, said Tuesday. Mr. Thomas said the company mailed letters on Monday to roughly 13,000 people whose data was stored on the computer, notifying them about the loss and offering to pay for their credit to be monitored. The company also reported the missing laptop to law enforcement, Mr. Thomas said. The computer was password-protected, but the information was not encrypted. The data included a spreadsheet of claimants’ names, Social Security numbers, phone numbers and addresses. Mr. Thomas said the company did not have any evidence that the personal information had been misused.

Rocky Kistner’s Blog

Sea Turtle Deaths Anger Mississippi Residents

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Posted March 28, 2011 in Curbing Pollution, Health and the Environment, Moving Beyond Oil

Tags:

gulfspill, oceans, oilpollution, turtles

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As a resident of coastal Mississippi for more than 30 years, Shirley Tillman is used to seeing a few drum fish, sea gulls or jelly fish wash up on nearby sandy shores. It’s a fact of life living by the sea. But in the past few weeks Shirley has come across something she’s never seen before; dead sea turtles washing up on beaches near spring break vacationers.
They are part of a growing number of dead fish, animals and birds she and other Mississippi residents have photographed washing in with the tides in recent weeks. For Shirley, a trip to the beach no longer provides the same relaxing refuge as before.
“It’s very upsetting,” says Shirley, a grandmother and wife of a Pass Christian home builder. “I have never found anything like this until after the oil spill. It used to be if you found a dead dolphin or turtle it was front page news around here. Now it’s no big deal.”



Dead turtle found March 25, near Pass Christian MS         photos by Shirley Tillman
Gulfport's Institute for Marine Mammal Studies reports it has collected 38 dead or stranded turtles in Mississippi this year, most in the past few weeks. As is the case with dolphin strandings this year, turtle tissue samples are turned over to the The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), which does necropsies and further testing.
NMFS is investigating the deaths of these turtles and has increased surveillance, according to Blair Mase-Guthrie, a southeast regional stranding coordinator. “We are treating this very seriously,” she said. Possible causes could range from infectious disease, sudden shifts in water temperature, biotoxins such as red tide or the impact from the BP oil that polluted the area. "We're not ruling out any factor."
An NMFS spokeswoman in Washington confirmed agency experts are reviewing the data, but cautioned that turtle strandings tend to happen in the spring. NMFS  records show there have been 13 turtle strandings in Mississippi so far this year, a number that will rise as databases are updated.
Even 13 dead turtles is an unusually high number in March. In the past three years, NMFS reports no turtles were stranded in Mississippi until the beginning of April. The only other Gulf state to report a rise in on-shore turtle deaths this year is Texas with 48, more than twice the number counted in 2009--the year before the BP oil blowout. That year, the total number of on-shore turtle deaths in the Gulf shot up to 248, nearly five times the number from the previous year.
All five turtle species found in the gulf are endangered or threatened, including the Kemp Ridleys and the Loggerheads often seen near shore.  Federal protection and tracking programs are in place to try to preserve habitat and learn more about the lives of some of the most fascinating and revered reptile species in the world.


Dead turtles found recently in Long Beach, MS                    photos by Laurel Lockamy
Shirley Tillman and other residents nearby say in some cases they have been appalled by the lack of response in their communities. On Friday, Shirley found a dead sea turtle and reported it to authorities. She was told to leave it on the beach, so she called in the coordinates and dragged it off the shoreline, leaving it by a wall marked off with orange cones. She says the next day the turtle was still there, decomposing.
“I’m really mad. I’m finding dead turtles, birds, giant fish and other animals all over the beach. No one comes by to clean them up right away and people come down here and let their kids play next to them. And the water looks like chicken broth.”
"It's so sad," says Mississippi coastal resident Laurel Lockamy who found a dead sea turtle over the weekend wrapped in orange tape, ready for retrieval.
Turtles are just the latest sea life deaths to get federal attention. So far this year, at least 134 dolphins have been found stranded along the Gulf coast, about four times the average number. Nearly half of the  dolphins were newborns or juveniles. Earlier this year NOAA issued an Unusual Mortality Event for dolphins, which triggers a federal investigation into the deaths.
Recently, dolphin tissue samples from independent marine labs were  confiscated and sent to federal labs for analysis due to a federal investigation into their cause of death. NMFS is continuing to do testing on the turtles and dolphins but test results aren’t expected soon. Scientists say it may be impossible to know if dolphin and turtle strandings are due to the BP oil blowout. And some say the increased numbers of dead dolphins and turtles could be due to increased surveillance of the area after the oil washed in.
That’s not very reassuring to residents who have already lost trust in government officials and the BP claims process. Science may take a long time to solve these mysterious deaths, but people like Shirley feel they already know the answer. She and others blame ongoing health problems from exposures to oil and dispersants, something the medical establishment has yet to confirm. That's not surprising, Shirley says. "If they don't have a decent system to track and find out what's happening to dolphins and turtles, then why should they have one for people?"
Whether or not the oil had anything to do with the dead turtles washing up on the beaches, people here simply want answers. They want their lives—and their ocean—back. They want it back the way it used to be.