http://thehill.com/opinion/op-ed/223191-action-needed-on-drilling-reform

By Bob Graham and William Reilly – 04/23/12 06:52 PM ET
Every few months we seem to read about yet another offshore oil or gas rig leaking. Some have presented significant risks to the safety of the crews and even, in the case of the Total gas rig in the North Sea, to nearby rigs. Those of us who investigated the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster, which occurred two years ago on April 20, shudder when we see these reports. The fundamental problem continues to be good people making bad decisions. Have we not learned anything since Deepwater Horizon?

It appears at least some people have – the seven commissioners from the National Oil Spill Commission have completed an assessment of how well the administration, industry and Congress are doing in implementing the recommendations in our report, “Deep Water: The Gulf Oil Disaster and the Future of Offshore Drilling,” released at the start of last year. A few days ago we released our review, “Assessing Progress: Implementing the Recommendations of the National Oil Spill Commission.”

Our assessment found that the administration and industry have made some significant advances. The Department of the Interior has issued new rules to improve the safety of offshore drilling and implemented a complete reorganization of their regulatory programs to separate, as we recommended, the conflicting functions of collecting revenues, leasing lands and regulating ongoing operations. The department is also beefing up its staff and has signed agreements with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Coast Guard to improve the quality of the government’s leasing, regulatory and spill response programs. These other agencies also are progressing with their own reforms.

The oil companies, too, have taken a number of important steps. The industry has established two organizations in the Gulf of Mexico that have equipment ready to deploy that would cap a well experiencing a blowout. Two years ago not only was there no such equipment ready to be deployed, but it did not even exist. Other industry organizations established to clean up spilled oil have reportedly doubled the amount and substantially improved the efficacy of their equipment and supplies. And, perhaps most important, industry has established a new Center for Offshore Safety focused intently on the challenge of continually improving the quality and safety of offshore operations.

These reforms are definitely works in process, and much more needs to be done. But both the administration and industry can take pride in what they have accomplished. They each have made a good start and seem to be progressing toward a goal of minimizing the safety and environmental risks associated with offshore drilling.

The same cannot be said for Congress. Two years have passed since 11 crew members were killed in the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig and the nation experienced one of its worst environmental disasters. The economic costs were immense – not just as measured by the billions of dollars that BP has paid out, but also in terms of the human and economic disruptions that many Gulf residents experienced and continue to experience. Congress has yet to enact any legislation, however, aimed at making offshore drilling safer. Bills have been introduced, but then largely ignored, in both houses. We do recognize that significant congressional reforms take time. The Oil Pollution Act of 1990 took 18 months to pass, even with bipartisan support. We intend, however, to keep the pressure on.

The Senate did pass the 2011 Restore Act as part of a transportation infrastructure bill. As the commission recommended, Restore would make 80 percent of any fines paid as a result of violations of the Clean Water Act available for long-term restoration of the Gulf Coast’s seriously damaged environment. The House passed its version of the bill last week. We hope that this signals that an agreement will be worked out to support this commitment.

Congress’s inaction is not a result of uncertainty about what needs to be done. A number of different studies documented what happened two years ago in the Gulf and why. Our report was one of the first, and all those that the National Academy of Engineering, administration panels, and other investigators issued since then confirmed the commission’s findings and are consistent with the commission’s recommendations.

This is not a situation in which disagreement among experts provides an excuse for inaction. Everyone agrees something should be done. All that is needed is for Congress to show leadership and the political will to adopt the actions everyone agrees are necessary, from codifying Interior’s new organizational structure to ensuring that arbitrary limitations do not restrict the nation’s ability to effectively manage offshore drilling and respond to spills that may occur – either as a stand-alone act, as part of a more comprehensive energy bill or, like Restore, embodied in legislation moving through Congress. The time is now.

Graham and Reilly co-chaired the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling appointed by President Obama. Graham represented Florida as a senator from 1987 to 2005, and Reilly served as Environmental Protection Agency administrator from 1989 to 1993.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/04/22/v-fullstory/2762927/exploratory-oil-drilling-off-cuba.html

Posted on Sunday, 04.22.12

Fears are renewed as a search for oil begins near Cuba. But some think chances of a spill hitting the Keys is low

BY CAMMY CLARK

CCLARK@MIAMIHERALD.COM
KEY WEST — In Cuba’s North Basin, the Spanish company Repsol has begun risky exploration for oil and natural gas on a semi-submersible rig, now just 77 nautical miles from Key West and even closer to the ecologically sensitive Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. In a month or so, Repsol expects its drilling through 5,600 feet of seawater and about 14,000 feet of layered rock will reach the reservoir.

That’s frightening for many who live and work along the island chain.

Here, the memory is still fresh of the psychological hysteria and economic havoc caused two years ago by the explosion of Deepwater Horizon – despite the reality: No oil from the 4.9-million-barrel spill reached the Keys. For just the scare, British Petroleum has paid out more than $200 million in claims filed by businesses and residents of South Florida, the bulk of them in Monroe County.

“I had actual visions of oil covering Florida Bay and the mangroves and all the fish being completely devastated,” said Richard Stancyzk, longtime owner of Bud N’ Mary’s Marina, where 45 fishing captains dock their boats in Islamorada. “We were hurt financially, but I’d really like to sue BP for pain and suffering. It actually made me sick and nauseous.”

That vision of oil-slicked beaches, coral reefs and marine habitat was shared by many after some scientists and government officials predicted strong currents would bring the toxic crude oil to the Keys, more than 450 miles from the site of the spill. The Today show aired a scary graphic provided by the federally funded National Center for Atmospheric Research that showed the oil traveling around Florida and all the way to the North Atlantic Ocean.

Fear set in. Keys residents and business owners took hazardous-materials classes, learned to clean oil off wildlife, picked up debris on beaches and complained there was not enough protective boom. They learned about the Loop Current and an eddy named Franklin. And they prayed.

The situation was made worse when national media broadcast the arrival of tar balls in Key West, leading to the misperception that the spill had reached the subtropical paradise. Visitors canceled weddings, conferences, fishing trips and diving vacations.

LESSONS LEARNED

Since then, many lessons have been learned from the devastating spill, whose true environmental effects will not be known for years.

Science has advanced. Coordination of federal, state, local and private agencies has improved. And communication of information will be a more critical part of future responses.

“We joke about it now, but even if we have the greatest response in the world, if we are not getting the word out accurately, it doesn’t matter,” said Capt. John Slaughter, chief of planning and force readiness for the U.S. Coast Guard’s Seventh District, based in Miami.

The Coast Guard has incorporated all the lessons learned into a comprehensive offshore response plan to deal with the new threat of a major spill in waters controlled by Cuba.
“We’re certainly more ready than a year ago,” Slaughter said. “We’re not as ready as we’ll be in six months and in a year. Planning for this will never end.”

Coast Guard Sector Key West also has spent the past two years updating its more than 1,000-page area contingency plan, which now includes responding to the potential near shore and landfall issues of a massive spill coming from Cuba. Before Deepwater Horizon and the exploration of oil offshore of Cuba, the worst-case scenario for the Keys’ emergency drill was an oil tanker grounding on a reef.

KEEPING CALM

Capt. Pat DeQuattro, commander of Sector Key West, agreed with Slaughter that communication is a huge part of the plan.

“Equally as challenging as anything we’ll do on the water or on the shorelines is trying to keep folks calm and let them know there is a plan – a very detailed organization we will be following with a very large group of responders,” DeQuattro said. “If we don’t communicate that well, we’ll run into a similar situation [to Deepwater Horizon], where folks are confused and angry.”

Despite the proximity of the Keys to the Cuban rig site, the statistical probability of significant oil reaching Keys shorelines is low, even in the event of a massive spill in Cuban waters, according to three scientists for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

They say geography is in all of Florida’s favor because of the powerful Gulf Stream, which flows between northern Cuba and the Keys, several miles from any land, before heading north.

“The currents are like a conveyor belt at the grocery store,” said Doug Helton, NOAA’s operations coordinator for the office of response and restoration. “Oil moves at 2 to 3 percent of the wind speed. It moves at 100 percent of the current speed. It would take a strong wind and a persistent wind to move oil out of the current.”

NOAA scientists recently completed new computer tracking models to evaluate the threat. They chose 20 potential drilling sites off Cuba and used 200 different spill scenarios based on six years of current information of water and weather conditions, including hurricanes, said Brad Benggio, a NOAA scientific support coordinator.

ONLY A DRILL

To create the scenario of oil reaching the shorelines of the lower or middle Keys for the recent Coast Guard-led tabletop drill, conditions included winds of 30 knots out of the southeast that continuously blew for “days and days and days.” That would mean the oil would take a week or more to reach land.

“That would allow for a lot of natural weathering,” said Jim Jeansonne, a NOAA scientific support coordinator. “We won’t have a lot of black oil coming ashore or threatening the resources of the reefs. What we will have are tar balls, which are of much less a threat, but not a zero threat.”

Although the chance of oil slicks reaching the Keys or the east coast of Florida was even more remote during the Deepwater Horizon disaster, that probability was not communicated well. Fears that the Keys were in for a big mess prevailed. The bigger unknown of what damage oil and dispersants to break it up would do if any of it did reach Keys fisheries and habitat also was a big concern.

THE SETTLEMENTS

On the same day Sector Key West held its tabletop oil spill drill, two lawyers from Miami were at the Harvey Government Center across town to solicit clients for the BP settlement, approved last week.

“You are going to have a floodgate of attorneys here, I promise,” attorney Gabrielle D’Alemberte told a handful of business owners in Key West.

Despite not having any oil arrive, the settlement includes all of the Florida Keys. Miami-Dade and Broward counties are not part of the settlement.

The oil spill that began as a nightmare for the Keys will end up having a silver lining, said Stancyzk, the marina owner.

“It rained oil up north but down here it ended up raining money,” he said. “BP threw money at everybody. There were some inequities, but it was an economic boom.”

Commercial fishermen, dive companies, vacation rental businesses and even a locals’ watering hole called the Brass Monkey sued BP and the other companies involved with the spill.

With a public relations disaster on its hands, BP set up three claims offices in the Keys and even paid law enforcement officers $40 an hour to guard them.

To date, BP has paid out nearly $181 million to nearly 11,000 claimants in the Keys, an average of about $16,450 per claim. One fishing captain based at Bud N’ Mary’s marina received $150,000.

BP paid $21.5 million for 1,895 claims in Miami-Dade County and another $15.7 million for 433 claims from Broward County.

DeQuattro, the Coast Guard commander, said the massive response to the spill, called the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history, still is vivid in his memory.

Deepwater Horizon also was a semi-submersible rig that was exploring in deep waters for oil, similar to the $750 million rig now being used by Repsol.

“That response employed 40 to 50,000 responders, over 200 aircraft, thousands of vessels and technical specialists from around the country if not the world,” he said. “To say that we are perfectly prepared for that today is not the case. Š But we’ve come a long ways and are progressing towards having a better plan.”

The Coast Guard now routinely patrols by boat and air in the vicinity of the Repsol oil rig, always keeping a lookout for any signs of oil despite a good relationship with the Spanish company.

Said DeQuattro: “We do have a good feeling it’s not leaking.”

Special thanks to Richard Charter

Published: April 19, 2012

TWO years after a series of gambles and ill-advised decisions on a BP drilling project led to the largest accidental oil spill in United States history and the death of 11 workers on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, no one has been held accountable.

Sure, there have been about $8 billion in payouts and, in early March, the outlines of a civil agreement that will cost BP, the company ultimately responsible, an additional $7.8 billion in restitution to businesses and residents along the Gulf of Mexico. It’s also true that the company has paid at least $14 billion more in cleanup and other costs since the accident began on April 20, 2010, bringing the expense of this fiasco to about $30 billion for BP. These are huge numbers. But this is a huge and profitable corporation.

What is missing is the accountability that comes from real consequences: a criminal prosecution that holds responsible the individuals who gambled with the lives of BP’s contractors and the ecosystem of the Gulf of Mexico. Only such an outcome can rebuild trust in an oil industry that asks for the public’s faith so that it can drill more along the nation’s coastlines. And perhaps only such an outcome can keep BP in line and can keep an accident like the Deepwater Horizon disaster from happening again.

BP has already tested the effectiveness of lesser consequences, and its track record proves that the most severe punishments the courts and the United States government have been willing to mete out amount to a slap on the wrist.

Before the gulf blowout, which spilled 200 million gallons of oil, BP was convicted of two felony environmental crimes and a misdemeanor: after it failed to report that its contractors were dumping toxic waste in Alaska in 1995; after its refinery in Texas City, Tex., exploded, killing 15, in 2005; and after it spilled more than 200,000 gallons of crude oil from a corroded pipeline onto the Alaskan tundra in 2006. In all, more than 30 people employed directly or indirectly by BP have died in connection with these and other recent accidents.

In at least two of those cases, the company had been warned of human and environmental dangers, deliberated the consequences and then ignored them, according to my reporting.
None of the upper-tier executives who managed BP – John Browne and Tony Hayward among them – were malicious. Their decisions, however, were driven by money. Neither their own sympathies nor the stark risks in their operations – corroding pipelines, dysfunctional safety valves, disarmed fire alarms and so on – could compete with the financial necessities of profit making.

Before the accident in Texas City, BP had declined to spend $150,000 to fix a part of the system that allowed gasoline to spew into the air and blow up. Documents show that the company had calculated the cost of a human life to be $10 million. Shortly before that disaster, a senior plant manager warned BP’s London headquarters that the plant was unsafe and a disaster was imminent. A report from early 2005 predicted that BP’s refinery would kill someone “within the next 12 to 18 months” unless the company changed its practices.

Such explicit flirtation with deadly risk was undertaken as part of Mr. Browne’s effort while chief executive to expand BP as quickly as possible. Mr. Browne relentlessly cut costs, including on maintenance and safety. Then he hastily assembled a series of acquisitions and mergers between 1998 and 2001 that added tens of thousands of employees, blurred chains of command and wrought chaos on his operations. His methods – and the demands of Wall Street – became overly dependent on quantitative measures of success at the expense of environmental and human risk.

After each disaster, Mr. Browne pledged to refresh his focus on safety, investment in maintenance and commitment to the environment. His successor, Mr. Hayward, followed suit, saying that BP’s culture had to change. But the Deepwater Horizon tragedy – which bears many of the same traits as the company’s past accidents – shows how difficult it has been for the company’s leaders to shift BP’s corporate values and live up to their promises.

The question becomes, did they try hard enough, and did the mechanisms of oversight, regulation and law enforcement work sufficiently to provide a recidivist organization the deterrent that could guarantee its compliance?

After its previous convictions, BP paid unprecedented fines – more than $70 million – and committed to spending at least $800 million more on maintenance to improve safety. The point was to demonstrate that the cost of doing business wrong far outweighed the cost of doing business right. But without personal accountability, the fines become just another cost of doing business, William Miller, a former investigator for the Environmental Protection Agency who was involved in the Texas City case, told me.

The problem then (and perhaps now) is that it is the slow pileup of factors that causes an industrial disaster. Poor decisions are usually made incrementally by a range of people with differing levels of responsibility, and almost always behind a shield of plausible deniability. It makes it almost impossible to pin one clear-cut bad call on a single manager, which is partly why no BP official has ever been held criminally accountable.
Instead, the corporation is held accountable. It isn’t clear that charging the company repeatedly with misdemeanors and felonies has accomplished anything.

At more than $30 billion and climbing, the amount BP has paid out so far for reparations, lawsuits and cleanup dwarfs the roughly $8 billion that Exxon had to pay after its 1989 spill in Prince William Sound in Alaska. And BP will very likely still pay billions more before this is finished.

And yet it is not enough. Two years after analysts questioned whether the extraordinary cost and loss of confidence might drive BP out of business, it has come roaring back. It collected more than $375 billion in 2011, pocketing $26 billion in profits.

What the gulf spill has taught us is that no matter how bad the disaster (and the environmental impact), the potential consequences have never been large enough to dissuade BP from placing profits ahead of prudence. That might change if a real person was forced to take responsibility – or if the government brought down one of the biggest hammers in its arsenal and banned the company from future federal oil leases and permits altogether. Fines just don’t matter.

Abrahm Lustgarten, a reporter for Pro Publica, is the author of “Run to Failure: BP and the Making of the Deepwater Horizon Disaster.”

Special thanks to Richard Charter

Two Years After the BP Spill, Gulf Oysters Are Full Of Heavy Metals

-By Alyssa Battistoni
| Fri Apr. 20, 2012 1:40 PM PDT

On the second anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon explosion, evidence of the spill’s ongoing impacts on Gulf people and ecosystems continues to mount. As if eyeless shrimp, toxic beaches, and dead dolphins weren’t bad enough, a new study suggests that Gulf oysters are also in trouble.

A team of scientists led by Dr. Peter Roopnarine of the California Academy of Sciences says that oysters in the Gulf contain higher concentrations of the heavy metals found in crude oil now than they did before the spill. Using a method known-awesomely-as “laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry,” the scientists vaporized oyster shells and superheated them, causing different elements to radiate light at specific, known frequencies so they could be identified. They measured higher concentrations of vanadium, cobalt, and chromium-three heavy metals present in oil-in the oysters sampled after the spill. Even more worrisome, the team found that 89 percent of post-spill specimens displayed the signs of metaplasia, a condition in which tissues are transformed in response to stress. Oysters suffering from the condition often have trouble reproducing, which could have worrisome implications for oyster populations and the species further up the food chain that depend on them.

Scientists don’t yet know how trace metals like those found in the oysters move through food chains, or what effects they could have on high-level consumers, including people. This study is just the start of a broader effort to understand the impacts of heavy metals on Gulf ecosystems: the team is planning to conduct a similar analysis of mussels, and hopes to model the potential impacts of the spill on the Gulf food web. For now, though, the study provides more evidence that the oil spill’s effects are still being felt, and are likely to continue long into the future. The findings are particularly troubling in light of past studies indicating that the combination of heavy metal pollution and warmer temperatures is especially deadly for oysters-a fact that doesn’t bode well in an age of warming seas.

It’s yet another piece of bad news for Louisiana’s oystermen, who are still struggling to recover from the double whammy of Katrina and the BP spill, and faced with consumers afraid to eat the oysters they do manage to harvest. For many, particularly in the African-American, Cajun, and Croatian communities, oyster fishing is a tradition stretching back generations; for them, the long-term effects of the spill threaten to put an end to a way of life with a proud heritage. It’s also bad news for the state’s economy, which reaped around $300 million from oyster sales in good years before the spill. And of course, it’s bad news for lovers of the region’s iconic sandwich, the oyster po’boy.

One bright spot amidst the often-bleak Gulf Coast news comes in the form of the RESTORE Act, which has been slowly winding its way through Congress over the past year. If enacted, it would deliver much-needed funds-80 percent of BP’s Clean Water Act fines-to coastal communities and coastal restoration projects; fingers crossed that the bad news about ongoing ecosystem and social impacts will have a silver lining in the form of greater impetus for the act’s passage.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/apr/19/deepwater-horizon-aftermath-dolphin-worth?intcmp=122

Two years after the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster, BP and US authorities wrangle over how much should be paid in damages

Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
Follow @suzyji
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 19 April 2012 09.59 EDT

A dead dolphin marked with spray paint on Queen Bess Island at the mouth of Barataria Bay in 2010. Photograph: Gerald Herbert/AP

The dolphins are preserved in giant freezers in marine labs across America. Tagged, catalogued, carefully guarded – and suspended in liquid nitrogen for the moment when they will determine BP’s final bill for the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster, which started two years ago this Friday.

The dolphins, among more than 700 that have washed up on Gulf shores since the last two years, are a crucial component of the investigation now underway to decide the cost to BP of restoring the wildlife and environment damaged by the biggest offshore spill in US history.

The carcasses were collected – on at least one occasion by armed federal officials, and generally with witnesses from BP – from marine science facilities on the Gulf coast and transported to labs across the country. Scientists are evaluating their tissue for evidence of exposure to hydrocarbons from the runaway well, as part of the lengthy process of accounting for environmental damage to the Gulf.

At its most basic, the process now consuming teams of BP and government scientists and lawyers revolves around this: How much is a dolphin worth, and how exactly did it die?
How much lasting harm was done by the oil that still occasionally washes up on beaches, or remains as splotches on the ocean floor near the site of BP’s broken well? What can be done to turn the clock back, and restore the wildlife and environment to levels that would have existed if there had not been a spill?

Wednesday’s proposed $7.8bn settlement between BP and more than 100,000 people suing for economic damages due takes the oil company a step closer to consigning the spill to the past. BP is moving towards a settlement with the federal government and the governments of Louisiana and Mississippi. It could also face criminal charges.

But arguably the most difficult negotiation still lies ahead as BP and the federal government try to establish how much damage was done to the environment as a direct result of the oil spill, and how much the company will have to pay to set things right.
“It is extraordinarily difficult to monetise environmental harm. What dollar value do we place on a destroyed marsh or the loss of a spawning ground? What is the price associated with killing birds and marine mammals? Even if we were capable of meaningfully establishing a price for ecological harm, there is so much that we do not know about the harm to the Gulf of Mexico – and will not know for years – that it may never be possible to come up with an accurate natural resource damage assessment,” said David Uhlmann, a law professor at the University of Michigan and a former head of the justice department’s environmental crimes section.

“The best the government can do is negotiate for a sum that is large enough – in the billions of dollars – to cover all possible restoration costs.”

Those familiar with the process say compiling the Natural Resources Damage Assessment, setting the price tag and strategy for restoring the Gulf environment, will continue at least throughout 2013.

“Everything about this case is more challenging due to the scale and due to the uncertainty about the long-term effects,” said Tom Brosnan of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency, which is leading the federal government’s damage assessment effort.

So far there are more than 100 NRDA investigations, or work plans, trying to assess the ecological damage done when more than 4 million barrels of oil entered the Gulf of Mexico.

The first step is to establish cause, Brosnan said. “The onus is on us to prove that if an animal is sick or dies that the oil actually caused it.”. Then BP and the government must agree on the value of what was lost – an exercise that is routinely conducted with sea birds killed by oil spills but never before for dolphins.

“That’s one of the most vexing aspects,” said a lawyer familiar with the process, calculating the value of a creature beyond its direct role in the human economy. He acknowledged a charismatic mega fauna, like the dolphin, is probably worth more than a humbler animal, but he declined to offer a dollar figure.

Nobody is seriously suggesting that BP pay a dollar amount for each dolphin lost, Brosnan said. But the numbers are important in determining how to restore dolphin populations to levels they would have reached had there never been a spill in the first place. “You need to analyse what you have to do to get the dolphins back,” said Brosnan.

The immediate task, however, is establishing what was lost. “You start to put together a story, that given these factors what do we think the adverse impacts on dolphins could be. Is it inhalation of the oil fumes? Is it eating contaminated goop? Is it skin exposure? Is it that their prey gets taken out?”

Aside from the dolphins, government scientists, closely shadowed by experts working for BP, are studying the effects on creatures as tiny as zooplankton and as massive as manatees. They also hope to draw on the findings of more than 150 other studies into the effects of the spill.

The scientists are starting at a tremendous disadvantage, however. Conservationists worry that a dearth of data about the Gulf before the spill will work in BP’s favour when it comes time to figuring out the bill.

Arriving at a mutually agreed figure for damages may come down to the dolphins. “They do make a sentinel species,” said George Crozier, recently retired as the director of the Dauphin Island Sea Lab. “They are not only at the top of the food chain, but they eat all of the fish that they eat. That means they have greater potential to be exposed.”

As large marine mammals, they also broke through the surface of water coated with a thick scum of oil and they inhaled the fumes from the giant fires used to burn off the oil.
But figuring out how many dolphins died or how they did so is bound to be a subject of contention between BP and the federal government. It’s hard to even agree on a number.

Scientists do not know how many distinct dolphin populations there were in the Gulf before the spill. They generally agree that the 700 dolphins that have stranded in the last two years represent only a fraction of the animals that have died in the same period of time. But what fraction? Wildlife biologists often work on the premise that for every carcass that washes ashore, there are more than 10 dolphins whose bodies are never recovered.
However, a study published last month of earlier dolphin strandings in the Gulf of Mexico said the true figure for dolphin deaths due to the oil spill could be 50 or even 250 times higher. So 700 dolphin carcasses, now stored at freezers awaiting analysis, could represent a true death toll of up to 175,000 of the animals.

Then there is the matter of conclusively linking the deaths to BP oil. The current dolphin die-off – the longest yet – began a few months before the oil spill, and scientists have speculated that some deaths may have been caused by a dolphin version of measles, or by a one-time flush of cold water down the Mississippi after a freak snowstorm.

Noaa released preliminary findings last month that appeared to strengthen evidence of a link between dolphin deaths and BP oil in an area off coastal Louisiana.

They drew urine and blood samples and conducted ultrasounds on 32 live dolphins from Barataria Bay, an area that was heavily oiled in the spill, and concluded the animals were underweight, anaemic and had low blood sugar.

Campaigners say the findings plus two other studies underway of coastal dolphin populations are critical to establishing the long-term effects of the oil spill.

“It’s circumstantial but it’s as circumstantial as finding a room full of dead people and a guy holding a canon,” said Michael Jasny, who works in the marine mammal programme of the Natural Resources Defence Council. “The circumstantial evidence is very, very strong.”

However, the preliminary studies failed to convince BP – especially when there are billions involved. A BP official said there were “multiple potential causes” for the dolphin deaths.
“Recent reports about the health of dolphins in Barataria Bay appear to be based on NRDA data that has not been fully analysed and is still undergoing important quality assurance and validation procedures,” the official said.

For the moment, however, the company and the federal government are working co-operatively on the damage assessment. BP paid $14bn to clean up oiled marshes and beaches. It pledged $1bn for immediate use on restoration projections, and $500m for environmental research.

The co-operation makes it likely BP and the federal government can avoid a law suit. It could also help unlock money for full-scale restoration projects sooner. Officials on both sides were hopeful the damage assessment could be complete some time in 2013.

The joint effort is troubling for some campaigners, who fear that BP and the federal government are working to wrap things up before the full impact of the spill is truly understood. “So much of what is going on is really black box. It’s just negotiations between scientists and lawyers,” said Aaron Viles of the Gulf Restoration Network.

Special thanks to Richard Charter