BY TIMOTHY O’HARA Citizen Staff
tohara@keysnews.com
The two vessels will run along paths north of the Tortugas in search of any weathered oil products such as light sheen or tar balls that potentially could threaten the Keys, and ultimately Florida’s east coast. They will be fitted with “Neuston nets,” large and relatively long nets used for sampling substantial volumes of water, said Joint Incident Command spokeswoman Diana Friedhoff-Miller.
The monitoring efforts are intended to provide a minimum of 48 hours’ notice so responders can maximize preparedness and response activities and notify the public, the Joint Incident Command said in a prepared statement.
One of the vessels will start looking 30 miles northwest of the Tortugas and the other will start 54 miles northwest of the seven-island chain. One of the vessels already is patrolling an area off the Tortugas, and the other is slated to leave Robbie’s Marina on Stock Island today. The patrols will run from four to 10 days, Friedhoff-Miller said.
Additional vessels and aircraft patrols may be implemented as necessary to provide early warning detection of any weathered oil products, officials said.
Some oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill has made its way to the Loop Current, which loops north from the Gulf Stream into the Gulf of Mexico, then down Florida’s west coast and through the Florida Straits.
While National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) projection maps show a clockwise spinning eddy has broken off the Loop Current and appears to be keeping oil sheens and tar balls away from the Keys, a University of South Florida computer model and satellite images show two small, but separate, patches of oil were in the Florida Straits south of Key West on Sunday.
The areas to be patrolled include a section off the Tortugas that the National Marine Fisheries Service briefly closed to fishing last week due to concerns of oil contamination.
The fishing was shut down for roughly 24 hours before the ban was lifted.
SITUATION REPORT
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the oil plume on Monday was less than five miles from Pensacola and 260 miles from St. Petersburg, with non-contiguous sheens and scattered tar balls closer. Southwest winds pushed sheen and tar balls toward the western Panhandle, with confirmed cases from Escambia to Walton counties.