http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_GULF_OIL_SPILL_MARINE_LIFE_FLOL-?SITE=FLPET&SECTION=HOME

June 17, 2010

By JAY REEVES, JOHN FLESHER and TAMARA LUSH
Associated Press Writers

GULF SHORES, Ala. (AP) — Dolphins and sharks are showing up in surprisingly shallow water off Florida beaches, like forest animals fleeing a fire. Mullets, crabs, rays and small fish congregate by the thousands off an Alabama pier. Birds covered in oil are crawling deep into marshes, never to be seen again.

Marine scientists studying the effects of the BP disaster are seeing some strange phenomena.

Fish and other wildlife seem to be fleeing the oil out in the Gulf and clustering in cleaner waters along the coast in a trend that some researchers see as a potentially troubling sign.

The animals’ presence close to shore means their usual habitat is badly polluted, and the crowding could result in mass die-offs as fish run out of oxygen. Also, the animals could easily be devoured by predators.

“A parallel would be: Why are the wildlife running to the edge of a forest on fire? There will be a lot of fish, sharks, turtles trying to get out of this water they detect is not suitable,” said Larry Crowder, a Duke University marine biologist.

The nearly two-month-old spill has created an environmental catastrophe unparalleled in U.S. history as tens of millions of gallons of oil have spewed into the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem. Scientists are seeing some unusual things as they try to understand the effects on thousands of species of marine life.

Day by day, scientists in boats tally up dead birds, sea turtles and other animals, but the toll is surprisingly small given the size of the disaster. The latest figures show that 783 birds, 353 turtles and 41 mammals have died – numbers that pale in comparison to what happened after the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska in 1989, when 250,000 birds and 2,800 otters are believed to have died.

Researchers say there are several reasons for the relatively small death toll: The vast nature of the spill means scientists are able to locate only a small fraction of the dead animals. Many will never be found after sinking to the bottom of the sea or being scavenged by other marine life. And large numbers of birds are meeting their deaths deep in the Louisiana marshes where they seek refuge from the onslaught of oil.

“That is their understanding of how to protect themselves,” said Doug Zimmer, spokesman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

For nearly four hours Monday, a three-person crew with Greenpeace cruised past delicate islands and mangrove-dotted inlets in Barataria Bay off southern Louisiana. They saw dolphins by the dozen frolicking in the oily sheen and oil-tinged pelicans feeding their young. But they spotted no dead animals.

“I think part of the reason why we’re not seeing more yet is that the impacts of this crisis are really just beginning,” Greenpeace marine biologist John Hocevar said.

The counting of dead wildlife in the Gulf is more than an academic exercise: The deaths will help determine how much BP pays in damages.

As for the fish, researchers are still trying to determine where exactly they are migrating to understand the full scope of the disaster, and no scientific consensus has emerged about the trend.

Mark Robson, director of the Division of Marine Fisheries Management with Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, said his agency has yet to find any scientific evidence that fish are being adversely affected off his state’s waters. He noted that it is common for fish to flee major changes in their environment, however.

In some areas along the coast, researchers believe fish are swimming closer to shore because the water is cleaner and more abundant in oxygen. Farther out in the Gulf, researchers say, the spill is not only tainting the water with oil but also depleting oxygen levels.

A similar scenario occurs during “dead zone” periods – the time during summer months when oxygen becomes so depleted that fish race toward shore in large numbers. Sometimes, so many fish gather close to the shoreline off Mobile that locals rush to the beach with tubs and nets to reap the harvest.

But this latest shore migration could prove deadly.

First, more oil could eventually wash ashore and overwhelm the fish. They could also become trapped between the slick and the beach, leading to increased competition for oxygen in the water and causing them to die as they run out of air.

“Their ability to avoid it may be limited in the long term, especially if in near-shore refuges they’re crowding in close to shore, and oil continues to come in. At some point they’ll get trapped,” said Crowder, expert in marine ecology and fisheries. “It could lead to die-offs.”

The fish could also fall victim to predators such as sharks and seabirds. Already there have been increased shark sightings in shallow waters along the Gulf Coast.

The migration of fish away from the oil spill can be good news for some coastal residents.

Tom Sabo has been fishing off Panama City, Fla., for years, and he’s never seen the fishing better or the water any clearer than it was last weekend 16 to 20 miles off the coast. His fishing spot was far enough east that it wasn’t affected by the pollution or federal restrictions, and it’s possible that his huge catch of red snapper, grouper, king mackerel and amberjack was a result of fish fleeing the spill.

In Alabama, locals are seeing large schools hanging around piers where fishing has been banned, leading them to believe the fish feel safer now that they are not being disturbed by fishermen.

“We pretty much just got tired of catching fish,” Sabo said. “It was just inordinately easy, and these were strong fish, nothing that was affected by oil. It’s not just me. I had to wait at the cleaning table to clean fish.”

—

Lush contributed from Barataria Bay, La., Flesher from Traverse City, Mich.

 special thanks to Larry Lawhorn

http://www.newsweek.com/2010/06/17/the-environmental-legacy-of-the-oil-spill.html

What’s in store for the gulf? Lessons from previous disasters.

Saul Loeb / AFP-Getty Images
Oil mixes with sea grass off the coast of Louisiana. Experts predict damage to the grass will be worse than previous spills, thanks to the use of dispersant.

In 1974, the oil tanker Metula ran aground near the southern tip of South America. Almost 400,000 barrels of oil spilled along the coast of Chile. The Chilean government gave up on cleaning the land, deciding instead to spend its limited cash on removing the grounded ship to stem the source of the leak. The result was a layer of oil left floating in the area’s marshes and baking on its beaches for decades-a natural laboratory for testing oil’s long-term environmental impact.
Years later, the Metula site is showing signs of life. But some parts of the coast recovered far more quickly than others, an indication of the tangle of variables, from the chemical reactions in the oil to the millions of moving parts that make up every discrete ecosystem it touches, that determine a spill’s environmental impact. As these complex interactions play out in the gulf, where a hole beneath mile-deep water off the Louisiana coast continues to spew huge amounts of crude, the Metula site’s progress, as well as information gathered at the sites of other disastrous spills, offer valuable lessons about the long-term fate of the Gulf of Mexico.

Lesson 1: The longer oil floats, the less toxic it becomes.

Some of history’s most environmentally damaging oil spills have involved oil that hit the water near the shoreline. In 1986, a leaky storage tank of refined jet fuel in Puerto Rico annihilated six hectares (more than 12 football fields) worth of mangrove forest around a single bay. Crude oil that leaked from a refinery storage tank in Panama in 1976 killed an estimated 75 hectares of mangroves.

But at least one researcher says Louisiana’s mangroves-the trees that make up the backbone of life in saltwater forests like the ones in Barataria Bay-probably won’t face oil that toxic. That’s because the most poisonous components of crude oil (benzene, kerosene, or other relatively lightweight chemicals) evaporate as they are exposed to the sun. The longer the longer the oil floats on the surface of the ocean, the more those components dissipate, leaving the heaviest part of the oil behind in the form of tar balls. That “weathered” oil can still do damage, and it can stick around-after the Panama spill researchers could still detect significant levels four years later. But forests hit by oil that has floated over longer distances and spent more time in the sun will have a better chance to recover.

“There are people who are saying that if oil touches a mangrove, the mangrove is dead. That’s the doomsday scenario, that’s absolutely not true,” said Robin Lewis, who runs an environmental consulting firm in Florida and studied the Puerto Rican spill in 1986. Even if some trees die, “mangroves recolonize areas relatively rapidly, even if there’s oil present.”

Lesson 2: It’s the soil.

Much has been written about the dire situation in the Mississippi River Delta, where oil has entered fragile wetlands in places like Barataria Bay. The slick has already had lethal consequences for turtles, seabirds, and other animals that have come in direct contact with it. But for the mangroves and grasses that bind the marshes together, the results are more complicated.

Scientists know that oil tends to leave plants unharmed when it doesn’t directly contact them. In the months following the massive 1991 oil spill in the Persian Gulf, researchers observed that submerged sea grasses had fared well, in all likelihood because the oil floated over top of them. The toxic components of the oil hadn’t seeped into the water.

One reason some observers are concerned about BP’s use of chemicals to disperse the oil in the Gulf of Mexico is that oil treated with dispersant is more likely to sink, rather than float over sea grass as it did in the Persian Gulf. As Louisiana State University scientist Irving Mendelssohn pointed out earlier this month in a long but informative Youtube video, the larger danger to plants is the risk of oil penetrating the sensitive, sandy soil where they place their roots. When roots die, the soil further erodes. And as was the case after the Amoco Cadiz oil spill off the French coast in 1978, soil erosion can delay the recovery of vegetation. In addition, humans trying to clean the marsh-and perhaps using heavy machinery to do so-might cause damage. “People tromping around pushing the oil into the sediments Š makes it much worse,” Lewis said.

Like mangroves, marsh grasses can grow back as long as their roots stay untouched. But just how long that will take is difficult to predict. Five years after oil spilled from the Metula when untouched by clean-up crews in Chile, much of the marshes hadn’t grown back. Some areas, though, recovered within five months. The difference? Deader areas experienced heavier coats of oil.

Lesson 3: Get the oil off the beach, but don’t expect to remove it all.

Marshes and mangrove forests are just one ecosystem that BP’s spill will touch. Sand beaches, the other major environment where the oil will make landfall, require a much different approach.

There’s no question that it’s worth removing oil from a beach. In spills where the oil has not been removed, what remains is a layer of black, viscous tar with a cracked top layer of asphalt. Researchers returning to the site of the Metula spill in Chile two years later found what was essentially a paved roadway about two miles long and more than 500 yards wide. By 1997, 21 years after the spill, much of the asphalt had eroded, but portions remained, particularly in areas where seawater lapped up in low-energy waves.

Yet even when clean-up crews scrape oil off a beach, the impact of a spill can linger. For a study released this year, a team of Spanish researchers excavated the sand on a beach where, in 2002, the tanker Prestige had spilled oil off the coast of Spain. They found thick layers of oil-coated sand underneath the surface, sometimes three meters (about 12 feet) below ground. Oil from the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill has been found trapped underneath boulder-covered beaches in Alaska 10 years later. Scientists there have seen toxins from the oil seep into streams where salmon breed, while the populations of otters who dig on oiled beaches have recovered more slowly than populations elsewhere.
But Alaskan beaches are made mostly of gravel and boulders, not the fine grains of sand found on the gulf’s beaches. It’s known that oil can persist in finer sediments, too: researchers at a Massachusetts nonprofit found diesel fuel in the soil of marshes at West Falmouth in 2003, 30 years after a barge had spilled nearby. What happens in the gulf will be fodder for more study. Scientists there are already taking as many measurements as they can of the “before” picture of the spill. The nation nervously awaits the “after.”

Thanks to Richard Charter

The wildlife mortality / oiled wildlife ticker is live on the Defenders Blog and www.Defenders.org

 http://www.alaskadispatch.com/dispatches/energy/5683-gulf-spill-begich-proposes-citizen-oversight-of-oil-industry

I really really like this idea of local citizen oversight boards….DV

Patti Epler | Jun 16, 2010

The notion that citizens should help oversee oil industry operations is getting some traction as state and federal lawmakers scratch their heads over what to do next about the Gulf oil spill and the escalating economic and environmental problems.

Alaska Sen. Mark Begich has drafted legislation that would authorize citizen oversight commissions anywhere the industry operates, and other elected officials are considering similar measures.

The Prince William Sound Regional Citizens’ Advisory Council, established shortly after the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989, has been inundated with requests for information and guidance on how people who live and work in oil-producing regions can help ensure safer, more environmentally sound operations, according to Stan Jones, director of administration and external affairs for the group.

The council has become something of an international success story in the past 20 years, working to put in place safety measures like double-hulled tankers and tug escorts for tankers. It has acquired a hefty institutional knowledge — not to mention a library’s worth of studies and white papers — on the oil industry, its business practices and operations, and, perhaps more importantly, how to get the companies to work effectively with citizens and local communities.

Funded largely by the oil industry — a requirement of the federal law that created the council and a similar group in Cook Inlet — PWSRCAC sponsors its own scientific research projects, including some that have resulted in improved radar technology and pollution-control systems for tankers and terminal facilities in Valdez. The group also is closely involved in monitoring oil-shipping operations in Valdez and providing recommendations and advice to Alyeska Pipeline Service Co. and tanker operators.

It has no enforcement authority but has managed to steer much of the tougher policy and procedures relating to tanker and terminal operations through public pressure on the industry.

Now, the Deepwater Horizon blowout that continues to spread millions of gallons of crude along Gulf Coast communities is prompting a national effort modeled after the Alaska oversight program.

Jones said he has been spending much of his time responding to requests from lawmakers, community groups and the media. “We got calls from Al-Jazeera and the Rachel Maddow Show on the same day,” he said.

Staff and board members from PWSRCAC traveled to the Gulf soon after the April 20 spill to help folks there figure out how to handle the community impact. The board is made up of representatives from the people who were most affected by the Exxon Valdez spill, including fishermen, local officials and environmental advocates.

Besides Begich, Jones said his group has been working with Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida and a congressional subcommittee headed by Rep. Maria Cantwell of Washington state, as well as some state lawmakers.

One point of contention PWSRCAC has been trying to help out on is the public release of daily action plans — Coast Guard reports that essentially detail what the agency and other spill-response entities plan to tackle on the coming day, where they will be deploying boom, for instance, or sending clean-up crews.

“It’s an invaluable amount of information … very useful to communities,” Jones said.

Yet reporters and community members are being told they have to submit federal Freedom of Information Act requests for the documents, a process that often takes several days, sometimes even months or worse.

The plans are routinely released, without a formal public records request, during a spill in Alaska, including in 2006 when officials handled the major North Slope spill.

“When we have a spill here, a ton of those documents are made available immediately,” Jones said. “So we’ve been doing a little advocacy on that, and we’re starting to make some headway just by elevating it in the public consciousness.”

Begich, who has in the past pushed for an RCAC-type organization for the North Slope, thinks the notion of citizen involvement is critical to keeping oil companies, as well as government regulators, from becoming complacent. Engaged citizens ensure that operators and producers are more transparent and that means better safety standards and greater confidence in the entire system, Begich said Wednesday.

His legislation, which is included as part of a more comprehensive prevention and response package, would authorize the creation of regional commissions similar to the Cook Inlet and Prince William Sound groups. But it stops short of mandating them.

“I don’t want to prescribe how to set them up, but just give them a framework,” he said. Then states or regions could decide if they wanted the councils and how they might work best; several states might join together, for example.

The measure does include a requirement that the industry provide the cash the groups need to monitor and advise the companies.

“We’re giving them the lessons learned from the Exxon Valdez,” he said. “Give them some tools, and how they use them would be their determination.”

Begich said the response from fellow lawmakers and others has been positive. He thinks the fact that he is from an oil-producing state and advocates continued development has blunted some criticism that the citizen commissions might be seen as anti-industry.

“I think people kind of go, OK, this guy isn’t one side or the other and understands the need for balance,” he said.

Thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/17/AR2010061703756.html?hpid=topnews
Washington Post

GOP leaders forced Rep. Barton to retract apology to BP

By Aaron Blake and Paul Kane
Thursday, June 17, 2010; 5:11 PM

Under pressure from Republican leaders who threatened to remove him from a ranking committee position, Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex.) late Thursday retracted his apology to BP CEO Tony Hayward for the way his company has been treated by the U.S. government — a comment that had drawn heavy criticism from both parties.

Barton made that apology to Hayward in his opening statement Thursday morning before Hayward’s testimony to the House subcommittee, in which Barton decried the Obama administration for pressuring BP to open a $20 billion escrow account and to suspend dividend payments for the rest of the year.

The ranking Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee said such arrangements have no legal basis, and that the political pressure exerted on the corporation in the midst of an investigation is a “tragedy of the first proportion.”

“I’m ashamed of what happened in the White House yesterday,” Barton said in the morning. “I apologize.”

Barton called the escrow account, which will be distributed independently, a “slush fund” and said the situation amounted to a “shakedown” by the White House. He said if he, as a congressman, asked for something similar from a corporation he was investigating, he could go to jail.

Later Thursday, when House Republican leaders called his statement “wrong,” Barton first said he was sorry for the “misconstruction” of his comments, then later put out a statement retracting his apology to BP.

According to a GOP leadership aide, Barton met with House Minority Leader John Boehner (Ohio) and Minority Whip Eric Cantor (Va.) Thursday afternoon, and was told, “Apologize, immediately. Or you will lose your [subcommittee] position, immediately. Now that he has apologized, we’ll see what happens going forward.”

Another aide said Barton would now not be removed unless he goes on “the TV circuit” and causes further controversy. The aides requested anonymity to discuss the private discussions of the Republican leaders.

In his statement, Barton said, “I apologize for using the term ‘shakedown’ with regard to yesterday’s actions at the White House in my opening statement this morning, and I retract my apology to BP…I regret the impact that my statement this morning implied that BP should not pay for the consequences of their decisions and actions in this incident.”

BP’s Hayward said in testimony at the hearing that he doesn’t think the $20 billion escrow account amounts to a “slush fund.” Pressed by Rep. Bruce Braley (D-Iowa), Hayward repeatedly declined to give a yes-or-no answer about whether he thought the situation represented a “shakedown.”

Almost immediately following Barton’s morning comments, the liberal blogs and Democratic campaign operatives sprang into action and the White House denounced Barton. Even before Barton’s comments, Democrats had been attempting to connect Republicans to BP, noting the many contributions GOP congressmen have received from it and other oil companies.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said in a statement that Barton was taking the side of corporations over the American people.

“Congressman Barton may think that a fund to compensate these Americans is a tragedy, but most Americans know that the real tragedy is what the men and women of the Gulf Coast are going through right now,” Gibbs said. “Members from both parties should repudiate his comments.”

Jim Manley, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), said: “Republicans should get their priorities straight: Are they going to keep protecting and apologizing for Big Oil or will they finally stand up for families and businesses whose lives have been upended by the BP oil spill?”

Republicans hoping to pin the problems of the Gulf Coast on Obama were immediately put on the defensive.
Later Thursday, Boehner, Cantor (Va.) and Conference Chairman Mike Pence (Ind.) issued a statement denouncing Barton’s comments.

“Congressman Barton’s statements this morning were wrong,” the Republicans said. “BP itself has acknowledged that responsibility for the economic damages lies with them and has offered an initial pledge of $20 billion dollars for that purpose. The families and businesspeople in the Gulf region want leadership, accountability and action from BP and the administration. It is unacceptable that, 59 days after this crisis began, no solution is forthcoming.”

Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) spent much of his speaking time at the hearing attacking Barton.

“This is not a shakedown of the company,” Markey said. “This is, in my opinion, the American government working at its best.”

Democrats point out that Barton, represents a district just south of Dallas, has a history of defending the energy industry and making controversial and colorful comments.

Rep. Jeff Miller (R-Fla.) who represents the Gulf Coast area, called on Barton to step down as ranking member of the committee.

Barton has some company in his position. Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.) also said in a statement Wednesday that the fund amounted to a shakedown.

“These actions are emblematic of a politicization of our economy that has been borne out of this administration.   ####

 Special thanks to Richard Charter