http://www.orlandosentinel.com/business/os-florida-oil-spill-state-waters-20100507,0,1930576.story

Orlando Sentinel
Cannon, Haridopolos and drilling in Florida waters: Never say never

A chunk of tar sits on a beach Saturday on Dauphin Island, Ala. Tar balls have been sighted on the island after the explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. (PATRICK SEMANSKY FOR THE ASSOCIATED PRESS / May 8, 2010)
By Kevin Spear, Orlando Sentinel
6:26 p.m. EDT, May 8, 2010

PENSACOLA – State Rep. Dean Cannon of Winter Park spent part of the fall, winter and early spring steering a public inquiry into the profits and perils of offshore drilling.

Last week, he took off in a small plane on a different kind of fact-finding mission, piloting himself and state Sen. Mike Haridopolos of Merritt Island over the graveyard of the drilling rig Deepwater Horizon and the enormous carpet of crude oil now drifting across the Gulf of Mexico.

With such a vivid view of the disaster, did the two Republicans in line to lead the state Legislature next year respond like many Floridians – especially those in the Pensacola area – with disgust and rage toward the oil industry? No.

Will the two Central Floridians renew their efforts to lift a ban on exploring for oil and natural gas in the thin strip of state-controlled waters within 10 miles of Florida’s coast? Maybe.

“We are not going to rush to judgment,” Haridopolos said Thursday evening during a refueling stop in Destin after the flyover of the disaster area.

“I think Dean has done a masterful job in the House getting all the facts. Remember, a week before this incident happened, he tabled the bill [to lift the ban], saying, ‘Hey, let’s wait and find out more information,’ ” said Haridopolos, the Senate’s president-designate.

“The Senate wanted to take more time on it, and now we can find out what happened and why it happened,” he added, “because we had been assured by all the experts, and for that matter history shows, that this had not happened in American waters since 1969.”

That was the year an offshore well had a major blowout near Santa Barbara, Calif., causing what many consider to have been the most environmentally damaging U.S. rig accident to date.

As evidence that modern offshore drilling has become much safer, the 40-year-old Haridopolos often points out that he hadn’t been born yet when the Santa Barbara spill occurred, and there hasn’t been an accident like it in U.S. waters since.

Just last month, a British expert assessing the potential for a disaster reported to Cannon’s state House committee: “Oil spills from offshore exploration, development, production and the transportation associated with these activities are unlikely to present a major risk to Florida.”

The two lawmakers now concede that a “game changer” occurred when the massive Deepwater Horizon, drilling off the Louisiana coast for BP PLC, exploded April 20 and sank two days later, killing 11 rig workers.

But exactly what changed about the game remains to be determined. Both Cannon and Haridopolos said that, because it’s not yet known what caused the rig to blow up and trigger an ongoing spill of an estimated 210,000 gallons a day, any decision about drilling in Florida waters would be premature.

“This is something we have permanently tabled until we have all the facts,” Haridopolos said. “It might take a year, it might take two years, it might take five years. It’s where the facts take us, and we are going to leave politics on the sidelines.”

Both lawmakers, up for re-election in November, have just two years left in office under state term limits. Haridopolos’ last term in the Senate would likely be cut to two years from the normal four because of the upcoming redrawing of districts based on the 2010 census.

With the Deepwater Horizon’s final well only partly completed and now badly damaged – and still gushing oil – there is no end in sight for the cleanup, let alone an investigation of the accident’s cause.

“Given the magnitude of this, I expect that it will take the remainder of my time in the Legislature, and it may go well beyond that,” said Cannon, 41, the House speaker-designate. “I don’t foresee that issue coming up anytime soon.”

Cannon said that during the pair’s flight over the spill, they were able to make out the 40-foot-tall, 100-ton, concrete-and-steel containment dome that was about to be lowered 5,000 feet to the seafloor in an attempt to capture the spewing oil and channel it to storage vessels on the Gulf’s surface.

Flying high enough to avoid restricted airspace, Cannon and Haridopolos also spotted one of the large airplanes in use as flying tankers as it sprayed chemical dispersant on the oil slick.

They described the heaviest concentration of oil in the center of the slick as showing up in orange, brown and reddish colors.

The spill’s edge was a mottled sheen, Cannon said, and had spread to within about 50 miles of Florida’s coast – comparable to the distance between the two lawmakers’ home cities in Orange and Brevard counties.

“I think the words Mike and I both used when we flew out and saw it were sobering and striking,’ ” Cannon said.

Just the threat of oil hitting Florida’s beaches has roiled the state’s tourism industry. But both legislators said they had confidence in the extensive and still-growing response to the spill.

Haridopolos noted that his Space Coast district has experienced enormous tragedy in recent decades with the loss of two U.S. space shuttles. The destruction of the shuttle Columbia in 2003 “took over a year to figure out what happened and to make sure it never happens again,” he said. “This probably falls into that same category.”

The two legislative leaders insisted that their decisions about drilling won’t be guided by polls, though Haridopolos twice emphasized that, before the Deepwater Horizon blowout, a majority of Floridians supported offshore drilling.

“I can’t stress enough that between two-thirds and three-quarters of Floridians felt, from the research that they had done and what they heard from the leadership of Dean Cannon, that it was a good idea,” he said.

Now, Floridians don’t appear to like the idea of drilling as much: A new Mason-Dixon poll released Friday found that 35 percent support offshore drilling, while 55 percent are opposed.

Kevin Spear can be reached at 407-420-5062 or kspear@orlandosentinel.com.
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http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2010-05-03/news/os-florida-oil-spill-tourism-20100503_1_oil-spill-crude-pensacola-beach
Orlando Sentinel:  Florida tourism waits and worries
May 03, 2010|By Kevin Spear and Sara Clarke, Orlando Sentinel
PENSACOLA BEACH – The huge oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico remained well away from Florida’s Panhandle on Monday, but the region’s tourism-based economy already is taking a hit that many fear will be worse than Hurricane Ivan in 2004 or the recent global recession.

“We are used to disasters, but this is epic,” said Julian MacQueen, chief executive officer of Innisfree Hotels, which owns a Hilton in Pensacola Beach and three other hotels in the area. He figures that as many as 40 percent of his reservations will be canceled once authorities put Florida on notice that oil is expected to hit shore within three days.
“March and April were the best months we have had since Hurricane Ivan,” said MacQueen, who is overseeing development of a $60 million Holiday Inn resort here. “We felt like the worst was over.”

A well that blew out April 20 while being drilled by BP PLC in 5,000 feet of water, killing 11 workers, continues to release about 210,000 gallons a day of crude oil into the Gulf about 40 southeast of the Mississippi River delta.

A light sheen of oil reached Louisiana’s wetlands during the weekend, and in Pensacola television stations now report the spill’s position and movement as if it were a hurricane. As of Monday night, the weather forecast for Tuesday was for wind from the north.

“That’s going to slow down the oil’s approach,” said Christian Garmin of WEAR-TV in Pensacola.

Florida authorities are investigating reports that some oil sheen already has drifted onto the state’s coastline. Gov. Charlie Crist on Monday extended a state emergency in the western Panhandle as far south as Sarasota County.

A commonly shared worry in Pensacola Beach is that the rusty-red sweet crude gushing from the damaged well will inevitably hit the area’s famous sugar-sand beaches.

That would mean the worst is yet to come – still, the damage already has begun, with out-of-state visitors making nervous calls to local hotels for a status report or to say they aren’t coming. Also worried are the owners of thousands of coastal condominiums who typically pay their mortgages with summer rental income.

But the threat of lost income doesn’t stop there.
“If there’s no beach and fishing, that’s at least 70 percent of my business,” said Dewayne Espy, 32, manager of the Waffle House in Gulf Breeze. Next door, Victor Wright, 39, general manager of Gulf Breeze Bait & Tackle, said the family-owned business has begun to feel the pinch.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/05/AR2010050504081.html?hpid=topnews

By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 5, 2010; 4:23 PM

The catastrophic oil spill unfolding in the gulf has provided the environmental community with a rare opportunity to shift public opinion on climate and energy issues, an opening on which it has been quick to capitalize.
National environmental groups — including the Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Fund and others — have rushed both volunteers and scientific experts to the Gulf of Mexico to help with the cleanup in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon rig’s collapse. But they are also holding news conferences, filming television ads and organizing protest rallies, all aimed at persuading lawmakers to block new offshore oil drilling and pass legislation curbing the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions.

“It’s very difficult, in our society, to cut through the din and get people to listen and pay attention,” said Friends of the Earth Managing Director David Hirsch, whose group is preparing TV ads on the issue. “Unfortunately, these are the times when it happens. These are the moments when you can be heard.”

Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute, questioned environmentalists’ tactics. “It’s unfortunate that some would seize on a tragic accident to push a political agenda,” Gerard said. “We don’t have the facts yet.”

While the exact cause of the blowout remains unclear, activists have used the spill to bolster their argument that the risks of offshore oil exploration outweigh its benefits, and that the United States would be better off focused on promoting alternative energy sources.
“This does serve as a wake-up call, to both the administration and Congress, to focus more effort on reducing the demand for oil,” said the Sierra Club’s Executive Director Mike Brune, adding that when it comes to drilling, “There’s increased enthusiasm for fighting it, and fighting it hard.”

Just over a month ago it appeared that environmentalists would have to accept the prospect of expanded oil drilling off America’s coasts, as President Obama identified new areas for exploration and the three senators working on a bipartisan climate bill — John Kerry (D-Mass.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) — inserted offshore drilling provisions into their draft. But now the administration has said it will review its proposal, and two GOP governors — California’s Arnold Schwarzenegger and Florida’s Charlie Crist — have reversed course and said they oppose any drilling off their state’s shores.

At least two Democratic senators, Robert Menendez (N.J.) and Bill Nelson (Fla.), have said they won’t support a climate proposal that encourages offshore drilling, and even some moderate Republican senators say they want to reexamine the role offshore drilling should play in the nation’s energy supply. “Whether it should be there in the future is an open question,” said Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.).

BP was one of three major oil companies prepared to endorse the compromise Senate climate bill last month — Lieberman described them to reporters in late March as “our new friends” — and on Tuesday Lieberman indicated that he did not think the senators would pull offshore oil drilling from the package before they formally introduced it.

But a Democratic Senate aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity said when it comes to the bill’s drilling language, “We will have to change things from where they were before, but we need to figure out what that is.” The aide that the bill’s sponsors are encouraged by the fact that the spill has “engaged and activated a large part of the environmental community. We feel like this is a really good opportunity for us.”

Reaching a drilling compromise that will attract Republican support without alienating Democrats such as Menendez and Nelson remains a challenge: Dan Weiss, who directs climate strategy for the Center for American Progress Action Fund, said “even with additional safety measures, proposals for new offshore oil drilling into formerly protected coastal areas could be as popular as Lady Gaga at a convent.”
Frank Maisano, a lobbyist with Bracewell & Giuliani who represents clients that could be affected by the spill as well as by climate legislation, said any attempts to retreat on offshore oil drilling could hamper a climate bill’s chances and make the accident “a political and economic disaster” in addition to an environmental one.

For the moment, however, environmentalists think they’ve got the upper hand. The Sierra Club has not only mobilized 2,000 people to volunteer in the Gulf States, it will hold a “Clean It Up” rally Saturday in New Orleans along with simultaneous “solidarity events” such as demonstrations at BP gas stations around the country and mock oil spills that will involve temporarily laying black trash bags on beaches. Dozens of green groups now participate in a daily “oil disaster war room call” to plot their strategy.

“I’m not crazy about what got it there, but we’ve got to take, advantage of it,” Ocean Conservancy President Vicki Spruill said of the spill’s moment in the media spotlight. “We’ve got to turn this crisis into an opportunity.”

But Obama and his top deputies have yet to talk about reducing the nation’s dependence on fossil fuels in connection with the oil spill, something that worries environmentalists like Brune.

“There’s no mention yet of how to get to the root of this,” he said. “If we’re not getting to the root problem — our addiction to oil — we’re going to see this problem repeated again and again.”

special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/oil-spill-map.htm

See how the oil spill has grown.

<http://www.washingtonpost.com>     Wednesday, May 5, 2010; A04
 
By Juliet Eilperin
The Interior Department exempted BP’s calamitous Gulf of Mexico drilling operation from a detailed environmental impact analysis last year, according to government documents, after three reviews of the area concluded that a massive oil spill was unlikely.
 
The decision by the department’s Minerals Management Service (MMS) to give BP’s lease at Deepwater Horizon a “categorical exclusion” from the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) on April 6, 2009 — and BP’s lobbying efforts just 11 days before the explosion to expand those exemptions — show that neither federal regulators nor the company anticipated an accident of the scale of the one unfolding in the gulf.
 
Now, environmentalists and some key senators are calling for a reassessment of safety requirements for offshore drilling.
 
Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), who has supported offshore oil drilling in the past, said, “I suspect you’re going to see an entirely different regime once people have a chance to sit back and take a look at how do we anticipate and clean up these potential environmental consequences” from drilling.
 
BP spokesman Toby Odone said the company’s appeal for NEPA waivers in the past “was based on the spill and incident-response history in the Gulf of Mexico. . . . Clearly, the Transocean rig accident was unprecedented. Once the various investigations have been completed, the causes of this incident can be applied to determine any changes in the regulatory regime that are required to protect the environment.”
 
“I’m of the opinion that boosterism breeds complacency and complacency breeds disaster,” said Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) on Tuesday, after six executives from the Deepwater project told lawmakers that the oil seepage could vastly increase if the leak can’t be stopped. “That, in my opinion, is what happened.”
 
Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute, said it is important to learn the cause of the accident before pursuing a major policy change. “While the conversation has shifted, the energy reality has not,” Gerard said.
“The American economy still relies on oil and gas.”
 
While the MMS assessed the environmental impact of drilling in the central and western Gulf of Mexico on three occasions in 2007 — including a specific evaluation of BP’s Lease 206 at Deepwater Horizon — in each case it played down the prospect of a major blowout.
 
In one assessment, the agency estimated that “a large oil spill” from a platform would not exceed a total of 1,500 barrels and that a “deepwater spill,” occurring “offshore of the inner Continental shelf,” would not reach the coast. In another assessment, it defined the most likely large spill as totaling 4,600 barrels and forecast that it would largely dissipate within 10 days and would be unlikely to make landfall.
 
“They never did an analysis that took into account what turns out to be the very real possibility of a serious spill,” said Holly Doremus, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley who has reviewed the documents.
 
The MMS mandates that companies drilling in some areas identify under NEPA what could reduce a project’s environmental impact. But Interior Department spokesman Matt Lee-Ashley said the service grants between 250 and 400 waivers a year for Gulf of Mexico projects. He added that Interior has now established the “first ever” board to examine safety procedures for offshore drilling. It will report back within 30 days on BP’s oil spill and will conduct “a broader review of safety issues,” Lee-Ashley said.
 
BP’s exploration plan for Lease 206, which calls the prospect of an oil spill “unlikely,” stated that “no mitigation measures other than those required by regulation and BP policy will be employed to avoid, diminish or eliminate potential impacts on environmental resources.”
 
While the plan included a 13-page environmental impact analysis, it minimized the prospect of any serious damage associated with a spill, saying there would be only “sub-lethal” effects on fish and marine mammals, and “birds could become oiled. However it is unlikely that an accidental oil spill would occur from the proposed activities.”
 
Kieren Suckling, executive director of the environmental group Center for Biological Diversity, said the federal waiver “put BP entirely in control” of the way it conducted its drilling. “The agency’s oversight role has devolved to little more than rubber-stamping British Petroleum’s self-serving drilling plans,” Suckling said.
 
BP has lobbied the White House Council on Environmental Quality — which provides NEPA guidance for all federal agencies– to provide categorical exemptions more often. In an April 9 letter, BP America’s senior federal affairs director, Margaret D. Laney, wrote to the council that such exemptions should be used in situations where environmental damage is likely to be “minimal or non-existent.” An expansion in these waivers would help “avoid unnecessary paperwork and time delays,” she added.
 
Lawmakers on Capitol Hill were talking Tuesday about curtailing offshore oil exploration rather than making it easier. In addition to traditional foes of offshore drilling such as Democratic Sens. Robert Menendez (N.J.) and Bill Nelson (Fla.), Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) and centrists such as Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.) said they are taking a second look at such methods.
“It’s time to push the pause button,” Baucus told reporters.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/environment/jan-june10/oil2_05-05.html
PBS Newshour
Dr. Sylvia Earle
Transcript
JUDY WOODRUFF: And now: the risks to marine life. There has been growing concern among some researchers about whether dispersants used at the bottom of the Gulf could be harmful. BP officials said today that it conducted two tests of the effect of the chemicals and it is assessing the effects.
For more now on the marine life underwater, we turn to Sylvia Earle. She is an oceanographer and explorer in residence at “National Geographic.” She was formerly chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And she has closely studied the Gulf of Mexico.
Sylvia Earle, thank you very much for talking with us.

And while we wait for the bulk of this oil to come ashore, tell us a little bit more about what is going on out in the water, on the surface and underneath. First of all, where is this oil going?

SYLVIA EARLE, oceanographer: A lot of people are focusing on the effects when the oil does eventually come ashore. But the real problem is for the ocean itself and the life that is out there.

And the dispersants, in a sense, compound that problem. They may help apparently get rid of the oil, but it really breaks it up into smaller pieces and adds additional toxins to the system. When you look at the water column, it isn’t just water. It’s filled with life, especially this time of the year, when a lot of the creatures are spawning, such as the little shrimp and other organisms that make the Gulf a living system.

I have been talking to some of my colleagues at the Harte Research Institute down in Corpus Christi. They focus on the Gulf of Mexico. And they’re really concerned about, not just the spill, but also the use of the dispersants, and I think, perhaps most of all, the complacency that so many people seem to have about what is happening in the ocean itself.

The ocean, of course, is where the action is. It is why there is life in the sea, that there — the fact that there — there is that big body of blue water. The blue heart of the planet in the ocean itself.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Take us into the — give us an understanding of what some of that marine life is underwater that is so vital, you were saying to us earlier today, for human life, whether you live on the seashore or anywhere.

SYLVIA EARLE: We’re all dependent on the sea. With every breath we take, every drop of water we drink, we’re connected to the ocean. It doesn’t matter whether you ever see the ocean or not. You’re affected by it. You — you’re life depends on it.

And it is that critical area from the surface down to about 300 feet where most of the action takes place, in terms of small organisms in the sea that take sunlight and generate oxygen, grab carbon dioxide, produce the beginnings of the great food chains in the sea, starting with the little microscopic organisms that then are consumed by the next level of small things, and so on up through the food chain, to creatures as large as dolphins and whales, and, of course, human beings.

The problem is that the toxins that are entering the sea and have been entering the sea from other sources now for decades, go up the food chain, concentrate the further up you go. The older and bigger fish are the ones that are accumulating the — the most of these toxins.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And I hear…

SYLVIA EARLE: Those are the ones, of course, that we target for eating.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And I hear you saying it is not just the oil itself. It is these chemical dispersants that are being used to make the oil — actually, to change the shape of the oil, the form of the oil, and to make it safer as it comes on land.
But you’re saying that may do more damage to what is underwater.

SYLVIA EARLE: Well, studies have been done on these dispersants. They’re like detergents, if you will, that break down the oils and make them seem to go away.
And what actually happens, of course, is that they take a different form, and they’re still in the ocean. And those studies that have been done in connection, for example, with the Exxon Valdez spill and elsewhere in the world, this doesn’t really the problem. It just makes the appearance of a place look better. And it keeps the oil from going into the beaches.
If the beaches are the focus of your concern, that’s a good thing. But if you’re looking at the state of the ocean and the health of the ocean, it’s not a good thing. And we all should be concerned about the health of the ocean, because our health, our lives depend on keeping the ocean in good shape.
Now, we have done so many things to the sea in the last 50 years or so, taking large quantities of wildlife out, putting large quantities of various trash and toxins into the sea. And, already, the ocean is stressed. This is just one more big insult to the injuries already felt.

JUDY WOODRUFF: I want to quote to you something that — we had an engineer, a man named Kenneth Arnold, on the program last night, who has worked for a number of oil companies. He’s been in the oil industry all his — throughout his career.
And he said, yes, this is a terrible accident, but, essentially, he said, accidents will happen. We learn from them. We move on, and it will be safer — drilling of all kinds will be safer in the future.

SYLVIA EARLE: Well, I think that is true. I think the oil industry has learned from past experiences. And a certain kind of complacency, I think, had begun to set in, because drilling, as such, has become safer over the years, so much so that the big problems that we have experienced in recent times have been from the transport of oil, not from the drilling.
I mean, there is not a — there is no such thing as a no-impact drilling activity, but they have minimized the — the effects, and really had come to believe, many of us had, that the attention should be focused elsewhere.
But you can never put down your guard when working in extreme environments, especially depths of the sort that we’re talking about here, a mile underwater. It is really hard to — as we now are discovering, people knew in advance that this was a tough environment to — if something should go wrong, how do you fix it?
Well, precautions were taken, but not enough.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Oceanographer Sylvia Earle, thank you very much for talking with us. We appreciate it.
SYLVIA EARLE: Thank you.

Special thanks to Richard Charter