Joel is the former Educational Director for Reef Relief and a dear friend. His perspective is right on. DV

While government agencies and BP congratulate themselves on their “success,” we should not overlook
what happened. Even if most of us didn’t want to recognize it, during the Gulf Oil catastrophe we saw exposed the extent of corporate power over our government and our government agencies— agencies that were originally intended to protect us and our environment.

Throughout the unfolding of the drama, this was all too painfully apparent: How unprotected we the people are against corporate money. All of you, NOAA, the EPA, the DEP, The National Marine Park Program* the United States Coast Guard and all you other agencies directly or indirectly involved in this catastrophe, you have let us down. You did it when you looked the other way during the permitting process that allowed drilling in the first place, when what was then the Minerals and Management Service waived the required geological, ecological and economic surveys required by law. You did it by not monitoring BP, a company with an outrageous history of cost-cutting, infractions and disasters.

Incredibly, none of you were prepared for a worst-case scenario. You also let us down when you refused foreign vessels and help. One example of many was the three Swedish Coast Guard Skimmers that were refused, which could have removed 350 barrels of oil per hour. Instead of your constant underestimation, just think what those Swedish vessels could have meant to the Panhandle. Instead of removing oil at the source of the spill, using tankers and barges and reusing recovered oil to recover costs, you allowed unprecedented amounts of poisonous chemical dispersants to be poured into the Mexican Gulf to hide the oil, making it impossible to retrieve and causing oil plumes and unknowable damage for years to come.

Additionally, in hiding the extent of oil wasted, you aided and abetted BP by imposing media and public blackouts. According to many reports, you helped them dispose of uncounted numbers of murdered wildlife and wasted oil. In so doing, you robbed us of the true knowledge of the extent of what was done. You also robbed us of literally billions of dollars in fines that could have restituted families, businesses and the environment into the future.

The Environmental Protection Agency, in a preliminary hearing, said it allowed dispersants because there weren’t enough vessels to retrieve the oil. Yet many available vessels were refused by BP, the Coast Guard and the EPA.

One reason given by the EPA was its regulation that every vessel removing oily water from the ocean must meet EPA standards when the water is put back in. But EPA regulations are often overlooked in emergency situations such as when a hurricane hits and massive amounts of untreated farm runoff enters Shark River Slew and other outlets into Florida Bay and onto our reefs. Why weren’t these regulations eased in this case?

The EPA was protecting BP and not us. Now the Unified Command has declared the Gulf oil disaster virtually over, claiming that about 75 percent of the oil has been cleaned up or has disappeared. Independent scientists not on BP or the government’s payroll have a different opinion on the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

Researchers at the University of South Florida conclude that oil has settled at the bottom of the Gulf farther east than previously suspected and at levels toxic to marine life. A team from Georgia Sea Grant and the University of Georgia has released a report estimating 70 to 79 percent of the oil that gushed from the well “has not been recovered and remains a threat to the ecosystem.” Researchers at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute report a plume of hydrocarbons at least 22 miles long and more than 3,000 feet below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. The 1.2-mile-wide, 650-foot-high plume of trapped hydrocarbons provides a clue to where the oil has gone as oil slicks on the surface disappear.

All of us living here want to find solutions, we all want to help if tar balls and other threats come to our shores. But the sad fact is that we’ll have no real solutions if, in the end, it’s business as usual. Business as usual is not good enough. It’s up to each and every government agency to rid itself of the corporate influence that keeps it from doing its sworn duty. Only then will it be able to perform its true mission, to protect the environment and to protect us, the people of the United States of America. Otherwise, why trust anything any agency says?

Sources for this article include The Atlantic Monthly, Huffington Post,, CNN, Science and The New York Times.

* Joel may be referring to the National Park Service at Interior

Special thanks to Joel Biddle.