Category Archives: gulf of mexico clean-up

gulf of mexico clean-up, Gulf restoration, national ocean politics, natural resource management, oil pollution

AP: Gulf states get first $113M from oil spill pleas

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http://dfw.cbslocal.com/2013/11/14/gulf-states-get-first-113m-from-oil-spill-pleas/
By Jeff Amy, Associated Press
Updated 1:08 pm, Thursday, November 14, 2013

Gulf Oil Spill Begins To Reach Land As BP Struggles To Contain Leak
Birds fly over an island that was threatened by the massive Deepwater Horizon/BP oil spill on May 9, 2010 in Gulf of Mexico. (credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — The five states that border the Gulf of Mexico are getting $113 million to improve the environment.
The grants, announced Thursday by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, are the first small chunk of $2.5 billion that BP PLC and Transocean Ltd. were fined as a result of criminal pleas last year following the 2010 Gulf oil spill.

Louisiana is getting $67.9 million, Florida $15.7 million, Alabama $12.6 million, Texas $8.8 million and Mississippi $8.2 million.

Over the next five years, the foundation’s Gulf Environmental Benefit Fund will receive about $1.3 billion for barrier island and river diversion projects in Louisiana, $356 million each for natural resource projects in Alabama, Florida, and Mississippi, and $203 million for similar projects in Texas.

Thursday’s announcement spent only part of the first $158 million that the companies paid earlier this year. Another $353 million will be paid by February, but the largest payments will come in later years, said Thomas Kelsch, who leads the Gulf Environmental Benefit Fund for the foundation.

Louisiana will use its coastal restoration plan as a guide, foundation officials said. “There’s not a requirement that the funds go directly to the habitats that were affected by the spill,” Kelsch said. In Louisiana, the money will go for planning and engineering to restore coastal islands and divert Mississippi River water and sediment into vanishing marshlands, part of the state’s fight to stop its coastline’s erosion.

Environmental advocates applauded the $40.4 million for a diversion from the west bank of Mississippi south of New Orleans to the Barataria estuary. That diversion is supposed to be a pilot project that will guide the design of others in the future.
“The Barataria Basin has one of the highest rates of land loss in the world, and this large-scale wetland restoration project is crucial to reversing that trend,” the Environmental Defense Fund, National Audubon Society, National Wildlife Federation, Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana and the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation said in a joint statement.

Money in other states will generally go to improve natural areas and create better habitats for animals. For example, Mississippi will use $3.3 million to uproot invasive land and wetland plant species in its 26 coastal preserves, replanting with native species.

In Florida and Texas, foundation officials said they tried to choose projects closest to the spill zone. That means projects were generally in Florida’s western Panhandle and on the eastern part of Texas’ coast.
Follow Jeff Amy at http://twitter.com/jeffamy

Special thanks to Richard Charter

fossil fuels, gulf of mexico clean-up, offshore oil, oil pollution

WWLTV: Black Elk, contractors issued 41 violations following report & Forbes: Fail, Fine, Repeat: Business As Usual For Some Offshore Drillers

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http://www.wwltv.com/news/eyewitness/davidhammer/Black-Elk-issued-41-violations-following-report-231808061.html

black elk

GULF OF MEXICO – Commercial vessels spray water to extinguish a platform fire on board West Delta 32 approximately 20 miles offshore Grand Isle, La., in the Gulf of Mexico. First responders medevaced nine of the platform’s 22 personnel to nearby rigs. U.S. Coast Guard photo.

wwltv.com
Posted on November 13, 2013 at 4:34 PM
Updated yesterday at 6:00 PM

David Hammer / Eyewitness News
Email: dhammer@wwltv.com | Twitter: @davidhammerWWL

PLAQUEMINES, La. — Following up on a damning investigation report last week, federal offshore regulators issued 41 formal violations against Black Elk Energy and its contractors for their role in causing an explosion last year that killed three welders on a platform off Plaquemines Parish.

Three Filipino nationals – Ellroy Corporal, Jerome Malagapo and Avelino Tajonera – were killed by the explosion on Black Elk’s West Delta 32 E Platform on Nov. 16, 2012. The federal Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement issued its investigation report Nov. 4, finding that Black Elk and contractors Compass Engineering and Consultants, Grand Isle Shipyards/DNR and Wood Group PSN failed to follow their own basic safety plans.

The investigation concluded that Black Elk failed in its supervisory role and its contractors communicated poorly about whether flammable gas had been properly purged from tanks and pipes before the workers started cutting with blow torches.

The report states that Wood Group’s supervisor left a lower-level employee without proper training to sign and approve a welding permit to cover the entire platform, rather than each welding location as rules require. Then, that employee turned the job over to a Grand Isle Shipyards supervisor based on a faulty understanding from a Compass consultant that all areas had been purged and were ready for hot work.

In fact, nobody had cleared the areas for hot work. The report describes how gas detectors that were supposed to be used to check the hot-work areas were not functioning properly and were left in their charging stations, but when workers complained, their Grand Isle supervisor told workers not to forget about it.

“According to the DNR workers, the GIS/DNR supervisor instructed the construction workers to hang the non-functioning gas detector up like a ‘decoration’ so everyone could at least see that they had one,” the report says.

The most serious violations still were issued to Black Elk, which is the lease-holder and ultimately responsible. Black Elk got 12 violations, or Incidents of Non-Compliance. Wood Group received 11 INCs and Compass and Grand Isle Shipyards got nine each.

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http://www.forbes.com/sites/lorensteffy/2013/11/14/fail-fine-repeat-business-as-usual-for-some-offshore-drillers/

Forbes

ENERGY | 11/14/2013 @ 9:53AM |456 views
Fail, Fine, Repeat: Business As Usual For Some Offshore Drillers

300px-Deepwater_Horizon_offshore_drilling_unit_on_fire_20101
In the Gulf, an operator’s safety track record doesn’t seem to matter (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Every oil company operating in the Gulf of Mexico must be terrified today after the harsh crackdown on Black Elk Energy by federal regulators. The feds hit the Houston-based offshore oil producer and three of its contractors with 41 citations related to a rig explosion last year that killed three workers. The companies could face – that’s right could face – civil penalties. Don’t worry, though, Black Elk and its contractors have 60 days to appeal the citations for “incidents of noncompliance.” Such fines often are negotiated down.

Black Elk has plenty of experience dealing with these types of citations. While 41 may seem like a lot, at the time of last year’s fatal accident, Black Elk already had been cited 315 times in the previous two years for rules violations and risky procedures. As recently as one month before that accident, regulators found that Black Elk “showed a disregard for the safety of personnel” in another accident that sent six workers to the hospital.

In addition to Black Elk, the latest round of citations included its contractors, Grand Isle Shipyard of Galliano, La., which employed the workers who were killed, Compass Engineering & Consultants of Lafayette, La., and Wood Group PSN of Aberdeen, Scotland.

The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement found that the contractors didn’t clear pipes of flammable hydrocarbons before they began welding. As the operator, though, Black Elk is responsible for the overall safety on its rigs, and BSEE found that Black Elk’s safety procedures were lacking. One regulator described Black Elk as having “the antithesis of the type of safety culture that should guide decision-making” in offshore operations. The feds also told Black Elk to come up with a safety plan.

Shortly after the accident, Black Elk chief executive John Hoffman told me that BSEE’s investigation would vindicate his company and “shed light where it needs to be.” Clearly, he was wrong about the first part, but the BSEE investigation certainly sheds light on one of the dark realities of offshore safety – lax accountability. Federal regulators largely ignore the role of recidivism in safety violations. For all the talk of creating a “safety culture” the only consequences for not having one is being told to get one and, perhaps, some civil fines.

Even for small companies like Black Elk, the size of those fines is minimal. In 2011, for example, the average fine levied by BSEE for offshore safety violations was about $62,000. Black Elk, by comparison, had a fine last year that topped $307,000 after an inspection found a gas leak on one of its platforms that the company didn’t fix for more than 100 days. Black Elk has had three more civil penalties so far this year totaling more than $250,000.

The citations pile up like traffic tickets on the windshield of an abandoned car while lives continue to be lost.

Nuisance fines allow lax safety to persist in the Gulf because operators can engage in their usual tactics of denial – blaming contractors and complaining about burdensome regulations. What we have seen, though, both in shallow water operations like Black Elk’s, and deepwater disasters like BP’s Deepwater Horizon accident in 2010, is a steadfast refusal of regulators to consider an operator’s safety track record in allowing them continued access to the Gulf. That’s the one thing they care about most.

Until there’s stiffer consequences for major safety violations, business as usual will continue in the Gulf: fail, fine, repeat.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

BP Spill, gulf of mexico clean-up, Gulf restoration, marine pollution, oil pollution

Chron.com: Study: Tar balls found in Gulf teeming with ‘flesh-eating’ bacteria

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http://www.chron.com/

By Carol Christian | November 12, 2013 | Updated: November 12, 2013 4:31pm

Half-dollar size tar balls found washed ashore, Monday, May 20, 2013, at Bermuda Beach. Small, thick, wet oil masses were also visible in the seaweed over a roughly 2.5-mile span. (AP Photo/The Galveston County Daily News, Chris Paschenko)

The number of people contracting the warm-water bacteria that can cause illnesses ranging from tummy upsets to potentially fatal skin lesions has increased in recent years, according to federal data. Records kept by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that the number of cases of Vibriosis nearly doubled between 2008 and 2012 – rising from 588 to 1,111. Vibriosis includes “Vibrio vulnificus,” the bacteria commonly dubbed “flesh-eating.” It’s rare but tends to be underreported, the CDC says on its website.

The CDC data on vibriosis includes all vibrio species except cholera, so it’s unclear how much of the increase in the past five years is due to infection by the flesh-eating bacteria that can cause death. One researcher who studies Vibrio vulnificus found it highly concentrated in tar balls that appeared along the Gulf Coast after the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Covadonga Arias, a professor of microbial genomics at Auburn University in Alabama, found that Vibrio vulnificus was 10 times higher in tar balls than in sand and up to 10 times higher than in seawater.

Her research, conducted with colleagues Zhen Tao and Stephen Bullard, was published Nov. 23, 2011, in EcoHealth. It marked the first analysis of bacteria found on the large amounts of “weathered oil” (such as tar balls) from the BP Deepwater Horizon spill that ended up on the shoreline, the researchers said. For the study, samples of sand, seawater and tar balls were collected from July through October, 2010, from a beach in Alabama and two beaches in Mississippi. The authors said their findings have epidemological relevance since many people have stepped on tar balls or picked them up on the beach.

However, in a June 2012 letter to BP, Dr. Thomas Miller, the deputy director for medical affairs at the Alabama Department of Public Health stated, “There is no epidemiological evidence to indicate increased rates of Vv (Vibriosis vulnificus) infections. Analysis of current and previous years’ Vv case numbers indicates there is no increase in the number of cases for years 2010 – 2012.”

BP spokesman Jason Ryan said in an emailed statement: “The Auburn study does not support a conclusion that tar balls may represent a new or important route of human exposure for Vibrio infection, or that the detection of Vibrio in tar balls would impact the overall public health risk, since there are other far more common sources of Vibrio, such as seawater and oysters.
“This is a naturally occurring bacteria found in the Gulf of Mexico. Neither the Alabama Department of Health nor the Centers for Disease Control have reported any significant increase in cases in the last three years and no individual case of vibrio infection has been linked to tar ball exposure.”

While there is no proof that tar balls can infect humans, Arias said it’s a concern because the bacteria concentration is so high in the samples her team studied. “At a concentration as high as 1 million Vibrio vulnificus cells/g (per gram) of tar ball, I think the potential risk is there,” she said by email. Concentrations in oysters and seawater are typically much lower, she said. To prove that tar balls can infect humans will require more study, which takes a lot of money, she said.

BP Spill, fossil fuels, gulf of mexico clean-up, Gulf restoration, oil pollution

Alabama13.com: Flesh Eating Bacteria Tied to BP Oil Spill Tar Balls

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http://www.alabamas13.com/

Posted: Nov 07, 2013 12:02 PM EST Updated: Nov 07, 2013 2:25 PM EST
By Peter Albrecht – bio | email

The Alabama Gulf Coast attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors every year, and since the 2010 BP Oil Spill, tens of thousands of tar balls.

A couple hundred miles away at Auburn University, Dr. Cova Arias, a professor of aquatic microbiology, conducts research on the often-deadly and sometimes flesh-eating bacteria Vibrio Vulnificus. Arias’ research at Auburn, and through the school’s lab at Dauphin Island, has focused on Vibrio’s impact on the oyster industry which was brought to a standstill three years ago by the BP Oil Spill. In 2010, out of curiosity, Arias set out to discover if Vibrio were present in the post-spill tar balls washing up on the Alabama and Mississippi coasts. She was highly surprised by what she found.

“What was clear to us was that the tar balls contain a lot of Vibrio Vulnificus,” said Arias. Arias can show an observer Vibrio in the lab as it appears as a ring on the top of the solution in a test tube. Vibrio is not something, though, that a person can see in the water, sand, or tar balls. But, Arias’ research shows it there, especially in the tar balls, in big numbers. According to Dr. Arias’ studies, there were ten times more vibrio vulnificus bacteria in tar balls than in the surrounding sand, and 100 times more than in the surrounding water. “In general, (the tar balls) are like a magnet for bacteria,” said Arias. Arias’ theory is that Vibrio feeds on the microbes that are breaking down the tar.

She and researchers looked at tar balls that washed in to the same areas they had previously studied so they could therefore make valid comparisons to before the oil spill. “What we also found was in water, the numbers were about ten times higher than the numbers that have reported before from that area,” said Arias. So the water alone had ten times as much Vibrio as before the oil spill, and the tar balls themselves had 100-times more Vibrio than the water.

Dr. John Vande Waa , an infectious disease specialist at the University of South Alabama Medical Center in Mobile says a person can get Vibrio two ways, by eating infected seafood, usually raw oysters, or by being in infected waters, either salt water or brackish. In this form, Vibrio is a fast-acting flesh-eating bacteria.

“The destruction in arms and legs, the flesh eating component, it’s two parts ,” said Vande Waa. “One is that the organism itself can destroy the tissues. The other is sepsis. The bacteria is in their bloodstream, it affects all the organs. Within my own experience of cases, the mortality has been approaching 40-50 percent.”

When entering through the skin, Vibrio is contracted thru some sort of cut or abrasion. The young or old, or someone with a compromised immune system, is more likely to get Vibrio. Dr. Vande Waa says exposure to Vibrio should be taken seriously by everyone in marine environments, due to the random, but deadly, nature of bacteria. “It can be very little exposure,” he said. “Just the wrong place at the wrong time.” It’s not a way anyone would want to die.

“I hope and pray to God I never have to see something like that again in my life,” said David Cox. His stepfather Wayne Anderson of Irvington was killed by Vibrio in September. Anderson was a life-long fisherman. It was something in the water where he spent his life that took his life. Cox says it started as a small bump on Anderson’s leg. “It spread very quickly,” said Cox. “The pain was unbearable. You could just see the redness getting darker, the blisters getting bigger.” Anderson was dead in less than 48 hours. “He wasn’t one to complain about pain and to see him there begging for someone to do something, it was very helpless,” said Cox. “Honestly, it was the hardest thing I’ve done in my life.”

There have been almost two dozen cases of Vibrio in Alabama over the last five years, according the Alabama Department of Public health. Florida recorded 160 Vibrio cases from 2007-20012, with 54 of them being fatal. There have been more than 30 cases in Florida this year. An Escambia County man died in October. A 43-year-old Milton woman, Tracy Lynn Ray, died on November 1st. Relatives tell News-5 she was a frequent beach goer.

Arias recommends that people at the beach not touch the tar balls with their bare skin. “You may have micro-abrasions so you don’t even know you have a cut,” said Arias. “So, I would stay away from the tar balls.” But the results of Arias’ research have not been widely reported. As Tropical Storm Karen last month washed in a new batch of tar balls at Orange Beach, sunbathers and beach walkers were oblivious to the dangers. “No, not really, it doesn’t seem to be a concern,” said Mike Hadley of St. Louis Mo. “I don’t think that a tar ball that has sand and shells on it is going to impact my health or me enjoying the beach at all,” said another beach goer.

The bacteria-filled tar balls are an object of beach goer curiosity.”I was just looking for shells in the sand and came across it,” said Tara Hadley of St. Louis. “Just looking, I picked it up thinking it was a shell.” Martha Ellison of Prattville, walking the beach with her teenage daughter, admits to handling tar balls on a routine basis. “Yeah. I’ve gotten them all over our fingers, stepped on them, gotten them on our feet.”

So far, there has been no documented case of someone getting the flesh-eating disease from tar balls. Still, Arias urges caution.
“We don’t know if you can get infected with Vibrio Vulnificus by touching a tar ball, but the possibility is there,” she said.
BP stresses that there has been no human case of Vibrio attributed to contact with tar balls. A BP statement sent to News Five read: “The Arias study does not support a conclusion that tar balls may represent a new or important route of human exposure for Vibrio infection, or that the detection of Vibrio in tar balls would impact the overall public health risk, since there are other far more common sources of Vibrio, such as seawater and oysters.”

BP says it asked the Alabama Department of Public Health in 2012, if its beach clean-up workers were at risk. Dr. Thomas Miller, ADPH Deputy Director for Medical Affairs, replied in a letter that there was no evidence of increased cases of Vibrio since the oil spill. Miller indicated, however, that could have been a result of fewer tourists being at the beach.
Arias says the only other significant study of Vibrio and tar balls was conducted following a spill off the coast of Nigeria and showed similar results. Arias has not done any follow-up work since 2010, citing a lack of funds, but says she would like to do further research.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

BP Spill, gulf of mexico clean-up, Gulf restoration

Justice News Flash.com: BP Oil Spill Cleanup Workers Still Searching for Answers & UGA researchers help continue Gulf oil spill research, community

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http://www.justicenewsflash.com/
BP Oil Spill Cleanup Workers Still Searching for Answers
2013-10-17 19:11:08 (GMT) (JusticeNewsFlash.com – Health & Law, Press Release)
10/14/2013 // BP Oil Spill Claim Website (Press Release) // Greg Vigna // (press release)

Court hearings continue over the financial responsibility of oil giant BP for damages caused by the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. In a recent news report it was stated that the attorneys for the company and the federal government remain at odds over methods used to estimate how big the massive spill was. Estimates from both sides show that over three million barrels were leaked into the Gulf during the nearly three months it took to stop it.

The outcome of the recent court matter could lead to BP having to shell out hundreds of millions of dollars in fines under the Clean Water Act. This is in addition to other sums set aside for the compensation of those who were injured or sustained property damage as a result of the spill.

Those who worked as response workers for cleanup efforts following the oil spill are also now being considered in the group of those with potential damage claims against BP. Although many injured cleanup workers are still waiting for answers regarding their eligibility to pursue damages, a proposed settlement is being discussed by attorneys and others to compensate injured response workers for medical expenses. A number have experienced respiratory, skin, and other health conditions due to crude oil contaminant exposure and toxic chemical exposure to dispersants sprayed during cleanup efforts.

Injured BP oil spill response workers can contact the BP Gulf Oil Spill Help Desk for information regarding the status of the proposed settlement, and what their available medical and legal options may be. The help desk is now open for those who would like to request a free case review.

http://www.redandblack.com/

UGA researchers help continue Gulf oil spill research, community
By Jeanette Kazmierczak @sciencekaz | Posted: Thursday, October 17, 2013 1:00 pm

When millions of barrels of oil spilled out of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig and into the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010, researchers and coastal communities braced themselves for a long haul recovery. University of Georgia researchers at the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography in Savannah are conducting continuing research on the potential effects of oil on the life cycles of economically important blue crabs and shrimp.

Richard Lee, a professor emeritus at Skidaway, and his team studied the effects of emulsified oil, and initial results show exposure reduces the production of eggs and embryos in female shrimp and alters immune-related blood cells in blue crabs.
“Emulsified oil is produced when oil is vigorously mixed with seawater to produce a water-in-oil emulsion which is much more viscous than the original crude oil,” Lee wrote in an email to The Red & Black. “The catalysts are metal compounds in the crude oil that produce the emulsion. We have found that emulsified oil remains on the sediment when washed ashore and thus because of its persistence is more toxic to marsh animals, such as crabs.”

Observations made on blue crabs were done in conjunction with Anna Walker, a professor of pathology at Mercer University in Macon. “We looked at tissues from control blue crabs and then blue crabs that had been fed emulsified oil over a period of various numbers of days,” Walker said. “And it did appear that those animals that had consumed the emulsion for seven days, they had some kind of material in their hemocytes.” Hemocytes are the invertebrate equivalent of human white blood cells. “The suggestion that we had – because this is all very preliminary – is that the hemocytes were not functioning properly. And if they can’t function properly, they can’t remove any type of infectious organism from the hemolymph therefore the blue crab would be at a greater risk for the development of an infection.”

Walker stressed these are extremely preliminary results, based on one set of observations. She also said she and Lee are trying to avoid coming across as “Chicken Little.” While the immediate consequences of the spill were dire for many animals, the long-term consequences are proving to be less horrible than was expected. She said the key point to take away was that studying both types of consequences is important for understanding the repercussions of not only this, but future oil spills.

Researchers working with Lee have also been looking at the effects of dispersed oil, which is different from emulsified oil in that dispersed oil is treated by a chemical to break it up into droplets to prevent slicks. Lee said to imagine using oil-cutting soap to clean dishes – the oil isn’t destroyed, just broken up. He wrote in his email that the idea was that in this form the oil would be more quickly degraded by marine bacteria.

“This point is still in some disagreement by scientists, particularly in the case of a large oil spill,” Lee wrote. “We have determined that these dispersed oil droplets can be taken up by plankton, the small organisms that make up much of the biomass of the ocean. This is work we did with Marion Koshland at the University of Griefswald in Germany and Gustav Paffenhoeffer at [Skidaway]. Fish and other larger organisms can consume plankton containing dispersed oil and thus this oil enters the marine food web.”

Lee wrote the overall effect of the oil spill on population numbers of crabs and shrimp is hard to determine because population will vary from year to year anyway.

Lee and his team have also collaborated with researchers at the University of Southern Mississippi to provide outreach for affected communities. Jessica Kastler, the coordinator of program development at USM’s marine education center, said much of their work was with the Vietnamese-American fishing community in Ocean Springs, Miss.

“Our goal in this project was to talk to people about the role of science because science is going to be coming up with answers about the oil spill for at least another decade,” Kastler said. “And it would be nice if people were listening for those answers when they come up and then we can keep that information available for making decisions about future things. But working within the community – there’s a real, strong interest within the Vietnamese-American community to work with scientists and to be part of the data collection and interpretation effort.”

Kastler said discussion wasn’t always easy, both because of the language barrier and the emotions tied up in the ramifications of the oil spill, but she said the Vietnamese-American community was more interested even than some of the charter boat captains because their livelihoods are so intricately tied to the water.
“They got to learn how science works, they got to practice some of the things Dr. Lee was doing in his lab,” she said. “Then they got to share some of the messages from the project – this is the role of science, this is not, this is what science can tell us and we’re going to be waiting a long time for all of the answers.”
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Special thanks to Richard Charter