Will is an adult male Kemp’s Ridley Sea Turtle. He washed ashore near Port Aransas, Texas on April 19, 2009. He was nursed back to health by Tony Amos and the good folks at the Animal Rehabilitation Keep (ARK), on the campus of the University of Texas Marine Science Institute.
He began his career as a scientific researcher on July 23, 2009 when he was tagged and released on a beach near Port Aransas by the Sea Turtle & Fisheries Ecology Research Lab of Texas A&M University at Galveston.
Will roamed along the central Texas coast for nearly eight months, feeding on blue crabs. Last September he began his swim up the coast and crossed into Louisiana coastal waters April 27, 2010.
Swimming east, he is now directly in the path BP’s oil gusher. Has he already surfaced in an oil slick that fouled his eyes or burned his lungs? How have the dispersants and oil affected the blue crabs on which he feeds?
This weekend, the New York Times reported that scientists studying the gigantic oil spill in the Gulf have discovered enormous oil plumes below the surface of the water. These findings backup claims from other independent experts that BP's drilling disaster has been spewing far more oil in the Gulf than previously estimated by BP and the government. In fact, some scientists have estimated that 1 to 3.4 million gallons of oil could be spilling into the Gulf every day!
Use PBS's Gulf Leak Meter to see how much oil has already leaked into the Gulf if these new estimates are correct.
After official reports of oil hitting Raccoon Island in the Terrebonne Barrier Island chain, we jumped on a plane with a photographer and a VIP in tow to document the containment efforts, and the wildlife at risk.
We spotted what looked like blobs of oil threatening the amazing brown pelican and roseate spoonbill rookery that was teeming with birds.
Unfortunately, the boom that was deployed had broken apart, and the rookery would need significant luck to avoid the oil coming ashore.
This is the third and last installment of interviews that I shot last Sunday on my journey to the south pass where we unfortunately found tarballs just off shore from Captain Kennedy's favorite unprotected fishing spot.
While BP hasn't been able to stop the flow of over 200,000 gallons of oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico, they have been holding some things back. After lots of pressure, BP finally agreed to release a 30-second clip of their video of the underwater oil geyser, but they're not sharing the rest. Also, some recently unemployed fishermen and shrimpers are still waiting to be hired to help clean up.
As this catastrophe worsens, BP is trying to control the "spin" to maintain a positive image by limiting public information, but they need to be putting everything they've got into containing their oil drilling disaster.
* Make impacted coastal communities whole again, * Provide honest and fully transparent assessments of the disaster, and * Pay for all impacts and clean-up without standing in the way of an effective response.
Conflicts of interest are becoming clear. Oiled birds, the classic image of an oil spill that BP doesn't want you to see, must rely on BP to be found and cleaned. Independent monitoring of the situation is being made more difficult, while BP controls the majority of air and water sampling data.
This is one of our country's largest environmental disasters. The Gulf of Mexico's coastal communities, our marine wildlife and environment, and Americans everywhere deserve more than PR spin from BP.
Please visit the link below and take action to make BP clean up its mess.
Recently, the State of Louisiana submitted a proposal to the Army Corps of Engineers to dredge up sand and sediment to build 6-foot high and 20-foot wide “berms” in front of the barrier islands from the Chandeleurs to Grand Isle. We share the State’s desire to protect our coast from the harmful effects of the ever-growing oil slick approaching our wetlands. However, based on conversations with scientists, conservationists, and federal resource agencies, we have some concerns about this massive plan. Basically, there isn’t enough information to properly make a decision. All that we have seen is a letter from the State, and five very basic and general graphic representations of what is being proposed. Before the Corps considers this plan, we suggest that the following areas are closely examined:
Given the time it would take to build these barriers, and uncertainties regarding how the sediment would behave, would they be effective?
Is this the best use of the limited sediments available for coastal restoration?
What impact will the oil have on these barriers?
How will these barriers change the hydrology? Could they inadvertently bring the oil in faster?
What are the impacts to fish and marine life?
Instead of this huge project, we suggest that, if the Corps wants to proceed along these lines, that we focus on restoring existing barrier islands or just authorize a pilot study to see if this will even work.
We appreciate the desire to do whatever we can to stop the oil from further impacting the shores of Louisiana, but we would also encourage caution so we can be sure that limited resources (manpower, sediment, and money) are put to the best purposes.
Click here to see our full suggestions and concerns that GRN submitted to the Corps.
On Wednesday, BP finally released some of the first video of the massive oil leak gushing into the Gulf of Mexico – a full 30 second clip of it! Since this tragic accident first occurred, we have been concerned with BP’s efforts to keep important information from the public and downplay the significance of this event. The data that BP and its contractors collect concerning the oil drilling disaster should be available to the government, independent experts, and the public. Cherry-picking 30 seconds of video from the hours of footage which probably exist is yet another example of BP's pattern of secrecy and constant efforts at positive spin over the course of this catastrophe.
Nonetheless, the release of this short video has led several prominent, independent experts to again question the official estimates of the rate at which oil is gushing into the Gulf. An article published in the New York Times today pointed out several problems with the method that was used to calculate the current official estimate, and interviewed several experts about the rate. The full article is worth a read, but here is one particularly striking passage:
Mr. [Alun] Lewis [a British oil-spill consultant] cited a video of the gushing oil pipe that was released on Wednesday. He noted that the government’s estimate would equate to a flow rate of about 146 gallons a minute. (A garden hose flows at about 10 gallons per minute.)
“Just anybody looking at that video would probably come to the conclusion that there’s more,” Mr. Lewis said.
Representatives from the Coast Guard, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA), Bureau of Land Management (BLM), Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), and BP have been traveling around Mississippi and Louisiana to take questions from scared residents. I attended the meeting in Ocean Springs hosted by the STEPS Coalition.
I was mostly struck by the minimizing of the disaster and the impacts from the oil. Mr. Willis from BP equated the struggle of trying to stop the blowout to the heroics of the Apollo 13 engineers. The major difference between these two situations is that the Apollo 13 scientists were successful. BP had no plan in place to deal with this catastrophic failure and does not know how to stop it. On the clean-up efforts, Mr. Willis reported that 1800 fishing boats had been contracted and that 684 were currently working on clean-up. BP has SCAT teams, some type of super oil fighters that try to head off rogue oil from coming to shore. "Sometimes they get it sometimes they don't," Mr. Willis said. Apparently not, since we have reports as of today that tar balls have been found on Mississippi's barrier islands and on shore in Pass Christian and Long Beach.
The Coast Guard Representative, Rear Admiral Watson, said that the oil is not likely to reach in-shore environments. He stated that the response to cleaning up tar balls was fast and easy. RADM Watson also claimed confidence at being able to predict the movement of the spill. Certainly, he meant the surface oil since no one has been tracking the oil beneath the surface. Minimizing the persistence of the oil in the environment, he claimed the oil would go away when it was eaten by little marine animals. Unfortunately, oil just doesn't go away. RADM Watson is correct that animals will eat the stuff, but then it enters the food chain and accumulates as predators feast on contaminated prey.
NOAA representative, Buck Sutter, reassured the audience that NOAA was sampling the benthic layer (this is the layer of the ocean that all life depends on). NOAA's focus has been sampling and testing to establish a baseline in order to accurately measure the direct impacts of the oil contamination. They have also been working on the turtle strandings. (More on that in a later blog.)
OSHA representative, Clyde Payne, stated their focus is on worker safety and ensuring the protection of those working on the clean-up have the correct training. ATSDR is offering technical support to Federal and State agencies on health-based screenings.
EPA representatives had the most to say since a majority of the questions were about how the BP oil drilling disaster was going to impact the environment. Dispersants were discussed at length as many residents are nervous about the toxicity of these chemicals. It seems that very little is known about them though approximately 400,000 gallons have been released so far. They discussed the subsea pilot tests and stated that BP has not yet been granted permission to release dispersants at the wellhead. EPA stated emphatically that they were in charge of the dispersant use, which begs the question: if the dispersants begin causing problems in the marine and human environment will the government be on the hook for those damages or BP?
EPA addressed concerns about BP's contractors collecting data assuring participants that the quality of the data was good. They did not talk about whether this data would be open to public scrutiny.
