Super Moderator
Location: essex ma
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a lack of co-ordination and/or information sharing and/or overarching framework for parsing information all combine to make it curiously difficult to say things. so they say:
Quote:
Determining oil spill's environmental damage is difficult
By David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 5, 2010; A04
How dead is the Gulf of Mexico?
It is perhaps the most important question of the BP oil spill -- but scientists don't appear close to answering it despite a historically vast effort.
In the 2 1/2 months since the spill began, the gulf has been examined by an armada of researchers -- from federal agencies, universities and nonprofit groups. They have brought back vivid snapshots of a sea under stress: sharks and other deep-water fish suddenly appearing near shore, oil-soaked marshes turning deathly brown, clouds of oil swirling in deep water.
But, with key gaps remaining in their data, there is wide disagreement about the big picture. Some researchers have concluded that the gulf is being spared an ecological disaster. Others think ecosystems that were already in trouble before the spill are now being pushed toward a brink.
"The distribution of the oil, it's bigger and uglier than we had hoped," said Roger Helm, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service official and the lead scientist studying the spill for the Interior Department. "The possibility of having significant changes in the food chain, over some period of time, is very real. The possibility of marshes disappearing . . . is very real."
Helm said that his prognosis for the spill had worsened in the past week -- as the amount of oily shoreline increased from Louisiana to Florida, despite cleanup efforts. "This just outstrips everybody's capability" to clean it up, he said.
This research has mainly occurred in the background, as public attention has focused on the "open-heart surgery" at BP's leaking wellhead.
The patient is a 600,000-square-mile sea, which contains swirling currents, sun-baked salt marshes and dark, cold canyons patrolled by sperm whales. Complicating matters is that even before the spill began in late April, the patient was already sick.
In recent years, Louisiana has been losing a football field's worth of its fertile marshes to erosion every 38 minutes. In the gulf itself, pollutants coming from the Mississippi's vast watershed helped feed a low-oxygen "dead zone" bigger than the entire Chesapeake Bay. Measuring the spill's damage, then, requires distinguishing it from the damage done by these other man-made problems.
So far, even the simplest-sounding attempts to measure the spill's impact have turned out to be complex.
The official toll of dead birds is about 1,200, a fraction of the 35,000 discovered after the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989. But this, too, has been called into question. Officials can only count the birds they can find, and many think a number of oily birds have sought refuge in the marshes.
"It's an instinctive response: They're hiding from predators while they recover," said Kerry St. Pé, head of a government program that oversees Louisiana's Barataria Bay marshes. "They plan to recover, of course, and they don't. They just die."
Other scientists have focused on more subjective measures of the gulf's health -- not counting the dead, but studying the behavior of wildlife, the movements of oil and the state of larger ecosystems. For them, solid answers are even more elusive.
For example: Is the oil killing off Louisiana's coastal marshes? state officials have said in interviews that they've seen it coating the grasses and mangroves that hold the region's land in place.
"The marsh grasses, the canes, the mangrove are dying. They're stressed and dying now," said Robert Barham, secretary of the state's Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. "There's very visible evidence that the ecosystem is changed."
But Paul Kemp of the National Audubon Society said he flew over the same area and saw a different picture: The oil's damage was relatively small, at least in comparison with the marsh's existing problems.
"Here, we have a patient that's dying of cancer, you know, and now they have a sunburn, too," Kemp said. "What will kill coastal Louisiana is not this oil spill. What will kill coastal Louisiana is what was killing it before this oil spill," including erosion and river-control projects that have reduced the buildup of new land.
Further offshore, federal scientists and university researchers have disagreed about the existence of "plumes" or "clouds" of dissolved or submerged oil. Several educators have reported finding underwater oil dozens of miles from the spill: Sometimes, they reported it was so well dissolved that the water appeared clear. In other situations, they found what they thought to be oil globs the size of golf balls.
Just around the leaking BP wellhead, a Texas A&M University scientist reported finding pockets of water with very low dissolved oxygen. That might be a sign that bacteria were consuming oil from the spill -- but, in the process, the water became suffocating for other sea life.
The government has presented a very different picture of the deep gulf.
An official at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said his agency had found evidence of significant submerged oil -- 1 to 2 parts per million -- from the BP spill only within six miles of the well. In addition, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has said it has not seen "large scale" problems with low dissolved oxygen around the submerged oil in the gulf.
Doug Inkley, senior scientist at the National Wildlife Federation, said he did not think the government had studied these areas well enough yet.
"I've been frustrated with the calm reassurances that we've been receiving, because . . . I don't know what they're based on," Inkley said. In particular, he said he was worried that submerged oil might kill deep-water coral colonies that had grown over the course of centuries.
"Think of going and cutting down a giant Sequoia tree. . . . If these corals are killed, then those areas will be vacant for some time," Inkley said.
For those who study fish -- literally, moving targets -- the data so far are a confusing hash of anecdotes and sightings.
In Sarasota, Fla., scientists found an 11-foot tiger shark, normally an open-water fish, drifting near the surf. That, plus sightings of whale sharks and other creatures outside their normal environmental range, raised concerns that oily water or low oxygen in the central gulf might be driving fish toward land.
"It would be like, to these fish, almost like an island, a huge island rising up in the middle of the gulf," said Bob Hueter of the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota. Seeing this and other strange patterns in fish, Hueter said, "I just, all of a sudden, just felt this impending sense of doom, that the place that I loved was going to be changed in a very dramatic way."
Federal scientists, however, say that they've seen evidence that even plankton -- some of the smallest, most sensitive creatures in the gulf -- are living in the area around the leaking well.
"Right now," said John Valentine, who studies the gulf from the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama, "we should be more impressed by what we don't know than what we do know."
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washingtonpost.com
meanwhile, yet another glimpse of the extent of petro-oligarchy:
Quote:
BP has steady sales at Defense Department despite U.S. scrutiny
By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 5, 2010; A01
The Defense Department has kept up its immense purchases of aviation fuel and other petroleum products from BP even as the oil company comes under scrutiny for potential violations of federal and state laws related to Gulf of Mexico well explosion, according to U.S. and company officials.
President Obama said last month that the company's "recklessness" in the gulf contributed to the disaster, and he promised that BP will "pay for the damage." Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said on June 2 that Justice Department lawyers were looking into possible violations of civil and criminal statutes. "If we find evidence of illegal behavior, we will be forceful in our response," he said.
BP, meanwhile, remains a heavy supplier of military fuel under contracts worth at least $980 million in the current fiscal year, according to the Defense Logistics Agency. In fiscal 2009, BP was the Pentagon's largest single supplier of fuel, providing 11.7 percent of the total purchased, and in 2010, its contracts amount to roughly the same percentage, according to DLA spokeswoman Mimi Schirmacher.
"BP is an active participant in multiple ongoing Defense Logistics Agency acquisition programs," Schirmacher said, without providing details. BP spokesman Robert Wine said he was aware of at least one "big contract" signed by the U.S. military after the oil rig explosion on April 20, involving the supply of multiple fuels for its operations in Europe.
So far, members of Congress have discussed barring BP from any new oil and gas drilling leases, not from fuel sales to the government. Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), who co-chairs the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee, said last week that he would introduce legislation to shut BP out of such leases for the next seven years, as punishment for what he described as "serial" legal violations. But Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee's subcommittee on oversight and investigations, said in a statement that "the U.S. government needs to look at all possible options when it comes to showing BP, or any corporate bad actor, that a continued culture of cost cutting and increased risk taking will absolutely not be tolerated."
Even before the gulf debacle, the Environmental Protection Agency had begun to explore cutting off BP from all federal contracts -- including those with the Defense Energy Support Center (DESC), which buys all fuel for the military services. The EPA plays the lead role in debarment proceedings related to the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act, and its probe was sparked by BP's 2006 oil spill in Alaska and a 2005 explosion at a refinery in Texas.
The EPA's deliberations, however, are suspended until the gulf spill investigations conclude, according to an EPA spokeswoman. The agency may decide to shut off federal contracts with specific divisions within BP, or with the whole company "if it is in the public interest to do so," it said in May. Any such action would be meant to punish "environmental noncompliance or other misconduct," it said.
Jeanne Pascal, a former EPA lawyer who until recently oversaw the review of BP's possible debarment, has said she initially supported taking such action but held off after an official at the Defense Department warned her that the Pentagon depended heavily on BP fuel for its operations in the Middle East. "My contact at DESC, another attorney, told me that BP was supplying approximately 80 percent of the fuel being used to move U.S. forces" in the region, Pascal said. She added that "BP was very fortunate in that there is an exception when the U.S. is involved in a military action or a war."
Pascal then sought a settlement to allow contracting with BP while forcing the company to elevate an internal office dealing with health, safety and environmental issues within its corporate structure. She also demanded that the company keep an ombudsman, retired federal judge Stanley Sporkin, whom BP first hired after the Alaska spill but had sought to let go. BP resisted both demands, and the talks were stalemated when the Deepwater Horizon rig sank, Pascal said.
"At some point, debarment attorneys throughout the government need to look at BP's record," she said. "This is one of the wealthiest corporations in the world. . . . Do we want to do business with this foreign corporation, which has a horrendous record of chronically violating U.S. law? You have to look at the overall behavior pattern."
A spokeswoman for the Defense Department, Wendy L. Snyder, gave a different account of the internal debarment discussions. She said the Defense Logistics Agency "informed the EPA that there are adequate procedures and processes to protect the U.S. military missions should EPA determine that BP should be debarred." That claim was reinforced by Schirmacher, who said that "none of BP's current energy contracts are in direct support of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan" and that the department could meet its requirements without BP fuel. But she indicated that the Pentagon had no intention of taking such action in the absence of an EPA decision.
Wine, the BP spokesman, said that although he is not familiar with details of the company's negotiations with EPA, Sporkin's tenure was extended earlier this year until the middle of 2011. He did not challenge Pascal's claim that BP's health, safety and environmental unit had been moved lower on the corporate structure before the gulf spill, reporting to the head of a business unit instead of directly to the top executive. But, Wine said, "what difference does that make?"
"Safety comes through the organization through every root," he said, and remains "paramount in every part of the business."
Several federal agencies have continuing contracts with BP, although none worth as much as the Pentagon's. Since 2008, the Federal Aviation Administration has contracted to spend at least $2.26 million to station weather, communications and aerial surveillance devices on several BP platforms in the gulf, including the Atlantis oil production platform roughly 100 miles from Deepwater Horizon's former location. Critics, including a former BP contractor, have alleged that the Atlantis was built without proper safety controls, which BP denies.
FAA spokeswoman Laura J. Brown said that BP's environmental and legal record was not a consideration in her agency's contracts. The Atlantis platform was selected "based purely on how it would support air traffic," she said.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn.../04/AR20100704 03632.html?hpid=topnews
meanwhile bp tries billing transocean and anadarko for some of the damages.
BP asks oil spill partners to pay $400m | Business | guardian.co.uk
and the weather is not co-operating:
The Oil Drum | BP's Deepwater Oil Spill - July 5 - and Open Thread
and it continues.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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