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Nola.com Times-Picayune: Volunteers use airborne patrols, satellite photos to spot oil spills along Louisiana coast
Volunteers use airborne patrols, satellite photos to spot oil spills along Louisiana coast
The Lens
By Bob Marshall, Staff writer 8 HOURS AGO
Jonathan Henderson was shouting to be heard over the engine noise in the small plane as it circled above an oil rig just off the Louisiana coast. A ribbon of colored water extended from the rig for about 100 yards, and Henderson had asked the pilot for a closer look.
“Right there, that’s sheen,” Henderson yelled. “In fact, rainbow sheen tells us it’s oil, and it’s probably coming from that platform.”
He snapped a few pictures and jotted on a notepad.
“When we get back, I’ll make a report,” says Henderson of the Gulf Restoration Network, an environmental group based in New Orleans.
In the last three years, after 200 surveys by air, boat and foot, Henderson has made hundreds of oil pollution reports as part of the Gulf Monitoring Consortium. In what has developed into an almost 24/7 effort, members use private boats, planes and even satellite imagery to spot and evaluate insults to Louisiana’s coastal environment – all at no cost to taxpayers.
“They’re operating pretty much on the honor system out there. The Coast Guard has limited resources. If the amount is small, they are less likely to go out and take a look.”
-David Manthos, SkyTruth
Their effort would be noteworthy solely for its altruistic nature. But what may be more remarkable is that they are the only ones doing this work.
No state or federal agency has cops regularly walking this beat. Instead, state and federal governments, which collect billions in royalties from the permit holders each year, rely on companies to turn themselves in for violating environmental law or the terms of their permits.
“We don’t have people whose job it is to go out looking for spills; we rely on people to report things,” said Gregory Langley, spokesman for the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, which says its mission is to protect public health, safety and welfare “while considering sound policies regarding employment and economic development.
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The state Department of Natural Resources has 12 inspectors who check wells along the coast for compliance with regulations, a spokesman said. Though those checks are conducted without notice, the industry is so large that the department’s goal is to inspect each one every three years.
REPORTING REQUIREMENTS VARY
The federal Clean Water Act literally requires anyone who drops anything into the water that creates a sheen of any size, or falls as a solid to the bottom, to report it to the National Response Center, which is operated by the U.S. Coast Guard.
“That’s our gold standard because that’s what the law says,” said Michael Anderson of the Coast Guard’s Gulf Coast Incident Management Team, which is based in New Orleans.
If oil spills onto land, however, state law applies. Louisiana says permit holders only have to make a report if the amount spilled reaches a “reportable quantity,” designated as one barrel, or 42 gallons.
“Basically they get to pollute for free to a certain level,” said Andy Zellinger, an analyst for the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, a member of the monitoring group.
When the National Response Center receives a report, it notifies the proper state and federal agencies.
Typically, state agencies relay the information to a local first responder, which could be the State Police or sheriffs’ offices, which conduct on-site inspections. But if the polluter thinks there’s a risk to human health or a serious threat to the environment, the company must immediately notify the Coast Guard or the state agency as well.
SPILLS ROUTINE, UNDER-REPORTING COMMON
Records show there’s a lot to report each year in coastal Louisiana.
The Louisiana Oil Spill Coordinator’s Office estimates that about 330,000 barrels, 20 percent of all the oil spilled in the nation each year, leaks from Louisiana facilities. The agency says that amount comes from 1,500 reports each year – but that’s far lower than Coast Guard records show.
Anderson said his office responded to 23,371 reports in Louisiana over the last five years. Even taking out the 5,781 from 2010, the year of the Deepwater Horizon spill, that averages about 4,400 per year.
Most of that pollution takes place in the coastal zone – the interior wetlands and open Gulf – which is where most of the 290,000 oil and gas wells permitted over the years are located, according to a database at the state Department of Natural Resources.
The concentration of the industry in Louisiana means more spills are likely to happen here, but Henderson said that until the Deepwater Horizon disaster, even environmental groups were not fully aware of how routine spills are.
“Many times if we don’t make a report, the company won’t – and I can say that because there are many times when they make a report after we do.”
-Jonathan Henderson, Gulf Restoration Network
It was during the months after the spill, as Henderson made almost daily flights to survey where oil was headed, that he realized there was a less dramatic but more widespread and persistent problem.
“I’d be going over the marsh to check on what was happening in the open Gulf and I’d look down and see sheen in places where we knew BP’s oil hadn’t reached – or at least hadn’t reached yet,” Henderson said. “That’s when I thought, ‘Hey, who’s keeping an eye on this?’
“And the answer to that, of course, is ‘No one.’ So we had to do something about that.”
Henderson began to make regular flights over the coast, becoming expert at recording the types of data that help the Coast Guard respond.
Meanwhile, other environmental groups were homing in on the same issue, including the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, the Lower Mississippi Riverkeeper and SouthWings, a group of private pilots who donate their time and aircraft for environmental monitoring.
Those groups often got help from SkyTruth, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that uses satellite photographs to analyze National Response Center reports and find unreported trouble spots nationwide.
Those environmental groups formed the Gulf Monitoring Consortium in 2011 to share information and plan events.
250,000
Gallons spilled in one year, according to companies
1.5-2.5 million
SkyTruth’s estimate
When a member of the consortium makes a report to the National Response Center, SkyTruth often quickly finds the location on a satellite image. Using a calculation accepted by oil spill experts, its analysis typically indicates that a spill is 10 times larger than the company’s report, said David Manthos of SkyTruth.
According to a consortium report, the companies that filed 2,093 spill reports from October 2010 through September 2011 estimated the total pollution at about 250,000 gallons. The SkyTruth evaluation put the figure between 1.5 and 2.2 million gallons.
“We have problems with non-reporting, but also with under-reporting,” Manthos said. “They’re operating pretty much on the honor system out there. The Coast Guard has limited resources. If the amount is small, they are less likely to go out and take a look.
“That’s where we try to focus our efforts.”
MAPS SHOW TROUBLE SPOTS
The consortium’s efforts have led to several regularly-updated websites that chart the widespread nature and frequency of oil spills in Louisiana’s coastal zone and the Gulf of Mexico.
The Louisiana Bucket Brigade’s iWitness Pollution Map and SkyTruth’s national Alerts Map show a series of red dots spreading across the Louisiana coast like a rash.
By clicking on the dots visitors see the NRC record, including the polluter’s original estimate of the spill and SkyTruth’s evaluation.
“Everything is right there,” said the Bucket Brigade’s Zellinger. “You don’t have to wade through the NRC site; these interactive maps take you right to the history of that report in your area, including what we believe is the real size of that release.”
The consortium has been especially effective in locating trouble spots during the tropical storm season. Henderson and Gulf Monitoring Consortium colleagues were in the air and on the water as soon as conditions were safe after Hurricane Isaac in 2012.
Their report, “Gulf Coast Coal and Petrochemical Industries Still Not Storm Ready,” catalogued the 341,044 gallons of oil, chemicals and untreated wastewater that were reported to have been leaked into wetlands. The group said the actual amount spilled likely was much greater because only 20 percent of the 139 reports included size estimates.
“HOW MANY SPILLS ARE WE MISSING?”
No one knows the efficacy of the monitoring alliance better than Henderson, who estimates he has taken more than 75 monitoring flights since attention turned from the Deepwater Horizon to the rest of the Gulf and the coastal wetlands in 2011.
Now 38, Henderson still makes each flight with the enthusiasm of a rookie because he believes the work is making a difference.
“Many times if we don’t make a report, the company won’t – and I can say that because there are many times when they make a report after we do,” he said.
“Sure, there’s a logistical problem for the companies. We’re talking about thousands of facilities spread out over tens of thousands of square miles. Most of those don’t have personnel on them, and most of them are not serviced on a daily basis. So sometimes, I just beat them to the spill.”
He continued, “But then you have to ask, ‘How many spills are we missing? How much oil has been leaking into the wetlands that nobody knows about because they don’t find it until days after it’s begun?'”
And while proud of the job he and his peers are doing, he resents that nonprofits must “beg for money to do a job that government should be doing.”
Henderson pointed to a similar independent monitoring program that has been in place in Alaska since the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989. That program is funded by a fee on the users of the Alyeska Pipeline.
The independent monitoring is done by the Prince William Sound Regional Citizens Advisory Council, established by the federal Oil Pollution Act of 1990.
“Those councils were established only for Alaska. The Gulf was left out,” Henderson said. “I think it’s time for Congress to take a look at what we’re finding here – at the size of the industry and the risk to this valuable ecosystem – and do the same thing here.”
In the meantime he said, he’ll keep flying and looking.
Special thanks to Richard Charter
Metropolis: Why We’re Suing the Oil Companies. A former member of the flood protection authority in New Orleans explains why legal action is being taken against the petroleum industry operating in the Gulf of Mexico.
http://www.metropolismag.com/January-2014/Why-Were-Suing-the-Oil-Companies/index.php?cparticle=1&siarticle=0#artanc
John M. Barry
A leaking oil facility in the Pass-a-Loutre Wildlife Management Area. Production facilities like this, along with the barge traffic that they create, have helped degrade the wetlands of southern Louisiana. These protective wetlands are disappearing at a rate of about a football field-size area every 50 minutes.
Courtesy Gulf Restoration Project
Architecture fits human society into a place. In most instances, that “place” is at least relatively stable, although both it and the society that makes a home there may have to adjust to each other. In and around New Orleans, however, humans chose to develop a society and make homes in one of the most impermanent and environmentally dynamic places in the world. That society has not only failed to adjust to its environment, but has exacer-bated the place’s natural dynamism.
In essence, New Orleans is not much more than a mud castle surrounded by a roil of water, but only in the wake of Hurricane Katrina did people living there begin to recognize that reality. And only this past July did any public entity take a concrete step to address the problems that humans themselves created. That’s when the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East (SLFPAE)-the levee board responsible for protecting metropolitan New Orleans on the east bank of the Mississippi River-filed a lawsuit against ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, Shell, Marathon, and 92 other oil, gas, and pipeline companies. What’s at stake in this lawsuit is the future of much of coastal Louisiana, including its port traffic (18 percent of all commercial shipping in the United States passes through Louisiana) and energy infrastructure (roughly 20 percent of the nation’s oil refining capacity).
Until mid-October, I was vice president of the SLFPAE and one of the architects of the lawsuit, an action that is the culmination of geologic history, engineering, and law-and which has opened up great seismic faults that are shifting politics in Louisiana.
No serious person, including those in the fossil fuel industry, disputes that oil and gas operations have caused substantial land loss.
First, the geology: The Gulf of Mexico once reached north to Cape Girardeau, Missouri. As the sea level fell, the Mississippi River system built land from there to the present mouth of the river by depositing sediment into what had been water. In total, the river built approximately 40,000 square miles of land in seven states, including all of coastal Louisiana. There are no rocky cliffs on Louisiana’s coast; the entire shoreline is basically sediment held together by plant life. In Louisiana, the most densely populated areas are inland from the Gulf itself inland from the mix of water and earth that is called marsh. In the New Orleans metropolitan area, people live within a levee system as well.
Second, the engineering: Multiple human triumphs-at least they seemed so when accomplished-have been destroying this coast for decades. Approximately 1,900 square miles of land have melted back into the ocean, and land loss is continuing at the rate of about one football field-size portion every 50 minutes. Causes of the land loss include the construc-tion of the levee system, which prevents river sediment from replenishing the land it made by flooding; the decline of sediment in the river-the river now carries less than half its historic sediment load and just six dams built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on the upper Missouri River retain about half of all that missing sediment; various engineering works built to benefit the shipping industry, including the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, which runs from Texas to Florida; and jetties that extend two and a half miles out into the Gulf and escort half the sediment remaining in the river into deep water where it is of no use replenishing the land.
There is also one other major factor in land loss: the operations of the oil and gas industry. The industry has dredged about 10,000 miles of canals and pipelines through coastal Louisiana, every inch of which has allowed salt water intrusion, changed salinity, interfered with natural hydrology, and killed plant life-thus leading to the erosion of land.
No serious person, including those in the fossil fuel industry, disputes that oil and gas operations have caused substantial land loss. A U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) study in which industry scientists participated concluded that energy industry activities accounted for 36 percent of all the state’s land loss. Evidence is growing that oil and gas companies have extracted so large a volume of material that the land has actually sunk; the impact of Big Oil’s role in subsidence may not be entirely reflected in the USGS study.
Now, finally, the law: The SLFPAE filed suit because of this land loss. Its argument is simple-and essentially irrefutable. Even the suit’s opponents don’t dispute the reasoning. There is a slogan down here: “The levees protect the people, and the land protects the levees.” The lost land once served as a buffer, which protected metro New Orleans from hurricanes by cutting down storm surges; without that protection, more devastating storm surges pound against the levee system. The increased-and increasing-storm surges require the levee board to spend more money to protect lives and property. No one disputes this either.
The board’s case is further strengthened by two facts: Most industry operations were conducted under permits, and those permits required the companies to minimize the damage they caused and restore the land when they were done. Beginning in 1985, Louisiana law imposed virtually identical requirements. (No one in Louisiana ever bothered to enforce any of this language; however, the oil and gas companies did honor both the permits and the law in the breach.) In addition, Louisiana jurisprudence is based on civil law, as opposed to the common law tradition of the other 49 states. In civil law there is a doctrine called “servitude of drain,” which prohibits one party from altering the natural flow of water on another party’s property. To the extent they increased storm surge, oil and gas operations did just that.
The board is suing to get the industry to restore the land it destroyed or, in places where this is impossible-where what was once land is now open water and no sediment is available for restoration-to compensate it so it can augment the flood-protection system. That will likely cost billions of dollars.
More importantly, the SLFPAE’s area has suffered less damage from the oil and gas industry than has any other part of the Louisiana coast. If other entities farther south follow the board’s lead, the industry’s liability rises to several tens of billions.
Thus we get into politics. Not surprisingly, the lawsuit-and the very question of “place”-is shaking Louisiana politics. People used to say, “The flag of Texaco flies over the Louisiana capitol.” We’re in the process of seeing whether that’s still true. Hours after the lawsuit was filed, Governor Bobby Jindal- at the time, he happened to be at an event in Aspen with such donors (and defendants) as the Koch brothers demanded it be withdrawn.
If it wasn’t, he threatened, he would gut the board and seek legislation to kill the lawsuit when the state legislature meets in March of 2014.
The board refused to withdraw the suit, and he has tried to gut it. But the SLFPAE was created after Hurricane Katrina by reformers who insulated it from political pressure by making sure that, unlike nearly all other boards in the state, its commissioners do not serve at the governor’s pleasure. Jindal has nevertheless been able to replace three members, including me, because our terms expired, and the three new appointees passed a “litmus test” of opposition to the suit. But a 6-3 majority of the board still supports it. That majority has resisted tremendous pressure to cave in, and I am confident it will continue to resist that pressure. Now what happens to the lawsuit will be determined as much by state legislators as by the courts.
Initially, no elected official spoke up for the lawsuit. Many condemned it. It looked like we had no chance of surviving the legislature. But the logic of our arguments, and the illogic of the governor’s, seems to be eroding his position even faster than the sea is eating away at the coast.
Our lawsuit is designed to provide funding for the Master Plan, not to interfere with it.
Garret Graves, Jindal’s point man on the issue, has warned that the suit will cost jobs, end cooperation with the industry, and interfere with the state’s Master Plan to restore the coast-a plan with a $50 billion price tag for a bare-bones effort and $100 billion to do it right. But everyone knows the oil industry will operate in Louisiana as long as there’s oil in Louisiana, and the Master Plan has one great weakness: there is no funding for it. Our lawsuit is designed to provide funding for the Master Plan, not to interfere with it. True, the industry is cooperating in many areas and, true, that cooperation is worth millions of dollars a year. But with liability in the tens of billions, that amounts to letting the industry off for less than one-tenth of a penny on the dollar. Even in Louisiana, that’s a sweet deal.
Meanwhile, not only do the state’s arguments against the suit make no sense, Graves himself has been making our case for us. First, he conceded by telling local newspaper the Advocate, “I’m the first one to admit there’s liability there. The scars are on the land.” Then, a couple months later, he said, “Businesses should be operating in compliance with existing regulations.” Exactly what our lawsuit demands. Remind me, Mr. Graves, why the state opposes the suit?
Soon after we filed our lawsuit, James Carville told me that we had permanently changed the political conversation in the state. As I write this today, Jefferson and Plaquemines parishes filed their own lawsuits against oil companies. Both parishes are heavily Republican, and Jefferson has the second largest popu lation in the state with the best-organized delegation in the legislature. I expect more parishes to file lawsuits in the future. This place may have a chance to survive after all.
John M. Barry is the author of Rising Tide and the former vice president of the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East (SLFPAE).
Special thanks to Richard Charter
New Orleans.legal examiners.com: 42 lbs of Deepwater Horizon oil product removed from Florida beaches
http://neworleans.legalexaminer.com/toxic-substances/bp-oil-spill-beach-report-december-31-2013/
The Legal Examiner
BP Oil Spill Beach Report: December 31, 2013
Posted by Tom Young
January 2, 2014 5:40 PM
The following is a summary of a daily beach oiling report issued by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP). We will endevour to publish this summary each day the FDEP issues such a report. While the media and public believe that the effects of BP’s Deepwater Horizon Blowout and Oil Spill have been largely eradicated, this data suggests otherwise.
It is important to note that these reports of daily oil discoveries come at a time when BP is attempting to renege on its oft-stated “Commitment to the Gulf.” The company is repudiating the Contract it made with area businesses and individuals that compensates them for economic losses associated with BP’s spill.
Now BP claims that it is the victim. You be the judge.
Florida Department of Environmental Protection Oiling Report December 31, 2013
Today FDEP personnel conducted post-response monitoring surveys along parts of Escambia County, Florida beaches.
Numerous Surface Residue Balls (SRBs) were found throughout the area. A significant amount was collected during the first 20 meters surveyed, and it was immediately clear that there were too many SRBs to fully mitigate. The team continued into other parts of the beach and found similar levels of oiling. As such, the team met with United States Coast Guard personnel in the field later that morning. The USCG decided to deploy an oil spill response team to clean the area.
As a result of today’s activities, 42 lbs of Deepwater Horizon oil product was removed from the beach. See below for an image of some of the collected oil.
Special thanks to Richard Charter
NPR: For BP Cleanup, 2013 Meant 4.6 Million Pounds Of Gulf Coast Oil
http://www.npr.org/
by DEBBIE ELLIOTT
December 21, 2013 5:14 AM
As we near the end of 2013, NPR is taking a look at the numbers that tell the story of this year. They’re numbers that, if you really understand them, give insight into the world we live in. On a breezy December morning, a work crew is scouring the surf line on Grand Isle, La., scooping up tiny tar balls and collecting them in a basket. Foreman LeRoy Irving keeps track of what the 14-person team has collected as in a half day. “If I had to guess, maybe 10 pounds,” he says.
These patrol and maintenance teams as they’re called are out four days a week, combing Grand Isle and nearby beaches on this stretch of south Louisiana that continue to be a trouble spot for oiling, now approaching four years since the BP oil spill.
Gulf Coast Cleanup In Numbers
4.6 million pounds – oily material collected from Gulf Coast shoreline in 2013
106,465 tons – total oily material collected from Gulf Coast shoreline since Deepwater Horizon exploded in 2010
55 miles – shoreline in active cleanup response in Dec. 2013
4,377 – miles of shore surveyed since 2010
40,096 – holes and pits dug and sampled to look for buried oil in 2013
47,000 – total personnel working on cleanup at the peak of the response
420 – terabytes of electronic data generated (including: 10 billion pages of textual records, 12 million maps and charts, 25 million still photos and graphs, 300,000 reels of motion picture film, 400,000 video and sound recordings)
$14 billion – amount BP says it has spent on cleanup and response activities*
70 million – personnel hours BP says it has put in on cleanup and response*
Source: U.S. Coast Guard Gulf Coast Incident Management Team
*Source: BP
This year, crews have collected 4.6 million pounds of oily material from the Gulf Coast shoreline. Coastal residents are asking how long they’ll be living with the effects of BP’s 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. “A lot of people don’t realize that the Deepwater Horizon response is still going on,” says Coast Guard Petty Officer 1st Class Michael Anderson with the Gulf Coast Incident Management Team. “It’s been a marathon, not a sprint.”
Oil In The Breaches
The active cleanup is now down to 55 miles here in south Louisiana – out of more than 4,300 in the immediate aftermath of the spill. Tar balls still wash ashore on beaches in Alabama and Mississippi but now only get cleaned up when a report is called in to the National Response Center. Anderson says the active cleanup is now focused on harder-to-find oil. Tropical storms have buried it under layers of sand and sediment, both on beaches and in marshes. On Fourchon Beach, just west of Grand Isle, a fleet of trucks and front-end loaders work removing heavy oily muck that was recently uncovered here. Anderson says crews were surprised to find giant tar mats buried deep in breaches after Tropical Storm Karen in October. “The breach is actually an area that’s been worn away by the water so you have an open channel or trench between the ocean and the marshes behind,” Anderson says. More than 1.5 million pounds of oily material have been recovered in the breaches.
BP officials declined to be interviewed for this story, but in a statement, the company says it’s confident that contractors have “located substantially all the material that is feasible to recover in Louisiana.” To date, BP has spent more than $14 billion on response and cleanup activities.
‘They Killed The Fish And They Put Oil On The Beach’
But environmentalists say the fact that 4.6 million pounds was collected this year – more than three years after the disaster – is telling. “You put that much oil into an ecosystem, and you’re going to be living with the consequences of it for a long, long time,” says David Muth with the National Wildlife Federation in New Orleans.
On Elmer’s Island, a state-owned spit of land on the Gulf, Muth spots a host of shorebirds: pelicans, cormorants, terns, even the endangered piping plover. “We’re watching birds all along this beach throughout the marches, throughout the bays, in the open gulf, that are actively feeding, and the question is how much of that residual oil, oil byproduct, are they picking up?” Muth asks.
Jonathan Henderson of the Gulf Restoration Network documents the ongoing impacts of the BP oil spill. On Elmer’s Island, he’s armed with a specimen jar and blue latex gloves – and picking through tar balls in the tide line. “You can look in this line, you can see they’re everywhere. So there’s literally thousands and thousands and thousands of them,” he says. He filled his jar in about three minutes with tar balls ranging from the size of a dime to a silver dollar. “You crack them open and you can see they’re kind of brownish and sandy on the outside, but open, they’re black in the middle. You can smell it right away once you crack it open, the fumes start coming out of them,” Henderson says. Henderson also does regular flyovers of the Gulf’s oil production platforms, looking for evidence of leaks that might not make the headlines that BP did. “Any time could turn into something bigger. Clearly one of the dangers of deepwater drilling like this is once you have a blowout the damage is really going to be done and it’s going to stick with you for a long time,” he says.
That’s been a hard lesson for Dean Blanchard, a shrimp processor on Grand Isle. “Basically they turned us into a ghost town,” Blanchard says. “The thing to do down here was to fish and to lay on the beach. They killed the fish and they put oil on the beach.” There’s no reason for people to come now, he says, unless they work on an oil cleanup crew.
Special thanks to Richard Charter