http://www.gfmag.com/latestnews/latest-news-old.html?newsid=9815285.0
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(Adds information from oil release at a nearby platform on Saturday in paragraph eight, additional comments from Coast Guard captain throughout.)
By Ryan Dezember
Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES
HOUSTON -(Dow Jones)- The U.S. Coast Guard and local government officials said an oil-like substance of unknown origin is washing ashore in parts of Louisiana that were among the hardest hit by BP PLC’s (BP, BP.LN) Deepwater Horizon oil spill last year.
The Coast Guard and a parish spokeswoman said they have mobilized oil-spill-response equipment and the Coast Guard has hired a contractor to lay containment booms in hopes of stopping the substance from penetrating inland waters and ecologically sensitive shorelines.
“We’re not clear where this is from,” said Coast Guard Capt. Jonathan Burton, who is based in Morgan City, La. “We don’t have an identifiable responsible party.”
Photos taken by Jefferson Parish officials show globs of reddish matter coming ashore on Elmer’s Island, a state wildlife sanctuary, that look very similar to the oil that washed on to northern Gulf beaches during last summer’s oil spill.
Other photographs, taken off Port Fourchon, depict vast stretches of the Gulf’s surface coated in a thin film and streaked with bright orange streams of thick matter.
The substance was first reported along Louisiana’s coast on Saturday, said Kriss Fortunato, a Jefferson Parish spokeswoman. On Sunday, however, the substance came ashore in greater amounts, coating miles of beaches, she said.
Jefferson Parish has no official estimate of how much of the material has reached land or lurks in near-shore waters, but “it’s a significant amount,” Fortunato said. Sheen believed to be associated with the goopy material reportedly stretches on the Gulf’s surface for miles, she said.
The Coast Guard said it does not suspect that the goopy matter is residual oil from BP’s 4.9-million-barrel spill. The agency is investigating whether the incoming oily substance could be related to crude released by a hurricane-damaged platform last Saturday, but so far there is no evidence that the two incidents are related, Burton said.
The platform, owned by Anglo-Suisse Offshore Partners LLC, leaked an undetermined amount of oil for between four and six hours during an operation to permanently seal it, Burton said. Executives with the privately held company were not immediately available for comment.
Burton added that the clean-up and containment effort is currently being paid for by the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund, a federal organization that holds oil royalties to cover spill-cleaning costs.
Both the local government and the Coast Guard have taken samples and of the matter and are performing tests independent of one another.
So far, the substance has washed ashore on Grand Isle, Fourchon Beach and Elmer’s Island. A sheen that is associated with oil spills has also been reported on the surface of Timbalier Bay, west of Grand Isle, the Coast Guard said.
Some 10,000 feet of boom has already been deployed on Grand Isle and an additional 19,000 feet of both hard and absorbent floating barrier has been ordered for the operation, Burton said in a news release.
The Coast Guard has hired environmental-response company ES&H to begin cleaning up the oily substance and has authorized the disaster-response contractor to buy whatever additional boom and equipment is needed to contain and clean up the substance.
In a separate investigation, the Coast Guard has determined that what was reported Saturday as potentially a miles-long oil slick is actually a plume of silt emanating from the Mississippi River.
Samples from the plume taken from a Coast Guard cutter have found only trace amounts of oil and grease in the murky cloud.
“At this point, the dark substance is believed to be caused by a tremendous amount of sediment being carried down the Mississippi River due to high water, possibly further agitated by dredging operations,” the Coast Guard said in a news release.
Some sightings relayed to the Coast Guard had the plume stretching from about six miles south of the Louisiana shoreline to 100 miles offshore.
-By Ryan Dezember, Dow Jones Newswires; 713-547-9208;
Ryan.Dezember@dowjones.com;
(END)
March 21, 2011 15:22 ET (19:22 GMT)
Special thanks to Richard Charter