http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/07/27/bp.landfill.dispute/index.html?hpt=T2

By the CNN Wire Staff
July 28, 2010 5:16 a.m. EDT

(CNN) — What happens to all the tar balls, oily sand and vegetation, and soiled gloves and suits from the thousands of temporary BP workers who’ve been working to clean up beaches along the Gulf of Mexico?

It’s being dumped in nine landfills along the Gulf coast, under agreements involving BP, landfill operators and the Unified Command, the federal agencies overseeing the cleanup efforts.

But some communities are not happy about it, amid fears of soil and water contamination, and one local government is fighting back.

Supervisors in Harrison County, Mississippi, where the Pecan Grove Landfill is based, have been fuming over what the county estimates is 1,200 tons of oil-tainted byproduct dumped there.

The board of supervisors passed a resolution this summer not to accept BP waste.
That effort didn’t go far, because the landfill is owned and operated by a Mississippi company, Waste Management, which answers to the state.

But now, Waste Management has agreed not to dump more waste there, instead keeping it in huge bins in a nearby “staging area” pending further talks with local officials.

The company, BP representatives and federal and local officials are holding more talks Thursday, according to Tim Holleman, an attorney for the board of supervisors.

And the board has instructed Holleman to prepare an injunction to stop the dumping if the negotiations don’t end in an agreement.

Holleman said he couldn’t tip his hand on all the legal arguments that might be employed in an injunction.

But one argument is that dumping the waste in landfills is the “least preferred” option under a series of disposal methods outlined under the Unified Command’s waste management plan. It’s also one of the easiest.

“It’s sort of like throwing a can of trash in your front yard, then picking it up and throwing it in your backyard and saying you’re sorry,” Holleman said.

He said a far more effective method would be to incinerate the waste. And in fact, another company in Mississippi specializes in just that.

Waste Oil Collectors Inc. of Gautier, Mississippi, wrote Holleman several weeks ago, describing a process in which the waste is shredded into uniform bits and then incinerated at 2,500 degrees in a kiln.

That recovers energy from the waste and breaks it down into mineral components, some of which can be used in asphalt.

Waste Management says that all the oil waste that has been stored at the landfill is classified as “non-hazardous,” after being tested by the EPA and the Mississippi Bureau of Environmental Quality. It adds that there is a liner underneath the landfill, and groundwater there is monitored.

“You don’t bring anything to a landfill unless it’s been tested,” said Ken Haldin, director of communications for Waste Management. “We would not be bringing anything to a landfill unless it hadn’t been profiled.”

Waste Management also operates landfills that have been receiving oil waste in Mobile County in Alabama and Jackson County in Florida.

Haldin said he’s unaware of any local controversies at those other two landfills.
“All of our processes have been running smoothly,” he said.

But local officials in Harrison County aren’t easily assured. They point out that 250 homes are within a half-mile of the landfill.

And a supervisors meeting Monday didn’t go all that smoothly.

“That landfill is in Harrison County for our waste,” Supervisor William Martin said. “That’s why it was built there. And now to allow BP to put all this waste in it, it’s wrong.”
It didn’t help that a BP representative at the meeting did not have the authority to commit to anything. The representative was sent home.

“We have that landfill space available for municipal use and not for a company that’s been negligent,” said Connie Rocko, president of the board of supervisors.
Rocko dryly notes that although the waste is classified as not hazardous, the workers who collect it wear protective suits.

“We know that there are alternatives available, and we want BP and Waste Management to use those alternatives,” she said.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.readersupportednews.org/off-site-news-section/49-49/2590-questions-to-epa-on-gulf-and-dispersants-from-expert-at-epa

August 4, 2010

HUGH KAUFMAN

A noted expert at the Environmental Protection Agency, Kaufman today produced a list of questions for EPA Assistant Administrator for Research and Development Paul Anastas, whose testimony before the Senate Environment and Public Works Subcommittee is currently on C-SPAN:

1) Do you believe EPA had enough technical and scientific information, in April, to make a correct decision as to whether or not to use dispersants in this situation?

2) Did EPA authorize the use of dispersants by BP when the oil spill began in April of this year? If EPA did not, who did? Please give the name of the person who authorized this action. If you don’t know who did, who does know?

3) In your press conference on Monday, you said that EPA has not found dispersants in the water except at the well head where the oil was escaping. NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] has documented plumes of dispersed oil throughout thousands of square miles of the Gulf of Mexico. Has EPA — or anybody — tested these plumes of dispersed oil for the ingredients in the dispersants? If so, who and what are the results?

4) At your press conference Monday, you said NOAA and FDA [Food and Drug Administration] found that the food chain in the Gulf was not affected by the oil and/or the dispersants. Have NOAA and the FDA done testing of food chain marine life for the presence of the ingredients of dispersants?

5) Has the air been tested for dispersant ingredients in the areas where workers, including personnel from the Coast Guard, are conducting cleanup of the oil and dispersant mixture on the surface of the water? If so, who tested it, what instruments were used? What were the results?

6) At your press conference Monday, you stated that the temperatures of the water used in doing your toxicity tests on living shrimp were not the same temperatures as those to which the oil/dispersant mixtures are being exposed in the Gulf. Why did you not do this testing at the actual temperatures that the oil/dispersant mixture is in, in the Gulf of Mexico?

7) Congressman Edward Markey provided documentation over the weekend that two to three times the amount of the dispersant Corexit was spread over the floating oil than was reported to have been spread by EPA and the Government. Do you agree or disagree with Congressman Markey’s documented allegation? If you agree, what actions will you take to correct the record?

8) At your press conference Monday, you stated that biodegradation of the oil spilled in the Gulf was 50 percent faster when dispersants were used. This assertion is in direct conflict with evidence of a report describing the Amoco Cadiz oil spill in France in 1978, in which dispersed oil is still not biodegraded. What scientific basis do you have for your conflicting assertion?

9) Did EPA do any ambient air pollution testing for the ingredients of the dispersant Corexit in the communities adjacent to the Gulf? If the answer is yes, which ingredients were tested for and what were the results?

10) Did EPA use wet chemistry in analyzing the ambient air pollution in the communities adjacent to the Gulf?

11) Did EPA use gas chromatographs and mass spectrometers in analyzing the ambient air pollution in the communities adjacent to the Gulf?

12) Does anyone at EPA, to your knowledge, disagree with the use of dispersants in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster? Who? Do you know why?

Background: Kaufman “led the investigation for the EPA’s Ombudsman that uncovered Environmental Protection Agency and Occupational Safety and Health Administration cover-up[s] of the environmental effects of the 9/11 World Trade Center attack at the behest of the Bush White House.”

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Hugh_Kaufman

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020

Special thanks to Richard Charter

From the Coral-list August 9, 2010
Dr Goreau wrote: They’re saying it’s disappeared, gone, evaporated, bugs ate it
up, “nobody” knows “where” it is! But of course the “missing” oil is just
floating dispersed in the water column (killing the larval fish and plankton)
and on the bottom, killing the shrimp and the benthos. 40 years after the
Buzzard’s Bay oil spill every strong storm mixes up oil buried in sediments and
causes new invertebrate mass mortalities.

*************************************
Dr. James M. Cervino
Visiting Scientist
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute
Contact Information:
NYC Address: 9-22 119st
College Point New York, 11356
Cell: 917-620*5287
************************************

http://www.aolnews.com/gulf-oil-spill/article/bp-may-go-back-to-ruptured-gulf-well-for-more-oil/19584376

This is the height of arrogance; BP should just walk away from this one. Their greed is showing when they should be showing their green. DV

Updated: 11 minutes ago

(Aug. 6) — BP may eventually try to tap the oil in its Macondo well, which spewed 4.1 million barrels of crude into the Gulf of Mexico in the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history.

“There’s lots of oil and gas here,” Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles told reporters today. “We’ll have to think about what to do with that at some point.”

Suttles made the comments as BP waited for tons of cement it pumped into the blown-out well to dry. Assuming it holds, there is little chance of future leaks.

The reservoir of oil thousands of feet below the surface could contain almost $4 billion worth of crude, Bloomberg News reported.

That’s a huge asset for any company to just sit on, especially one that is facing a cleanup bill of tens of billions of dollars. BP is in the process of selling assets in Colombia, the U.S., Canada and Egypt to raise funds.

The national incident commander, retired Adm. Thad Allen, skirted the topic of any future drilling, saying BP had not discussed any such plans with him

“I’d assume that’s a policy issue,” Allen told reporters.

BP plans to test the cement on the well with a burst of pressure today. The company has resumed drilling a relief well that should represent the ultimate solution to the busted well.

Once completed, the relief well will pump mud and cement into the bottom of the 13,000-foot-long bore. This so-called bottom kill technique will seal the reservoir from the bottom.

BP had left it ambiguous as to how the two relief wells it has been drilling would be used. If the bottom kill wasn’t carried out, the relief wells could theoretically have been used to extract oil and gas.

Federal authorities have been adamant that the bottom kill was the solution to the spill and that the “static kill” — filling the well from the top with mud and cement — was merely a step on the way.

Still, BP does not discount drilling elsewhere on the oil field.

“What we’ve stated is, the original well that had the blowout and the relief wells will be abandoned,” Suttles said, according to Agence-France Presse.

The disaster began back on April 20, when the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, killing 11 workers. The ruptured oil well then began to spew out enormous quantities of crude, defying several attempts by BP to seal it. It took BP nearly three months to halt the flow of oil, which was accomplished when the company was finally able to cap the well on July 15.

Nearly three-quarters of the oil that was released has been removed, dispersed or naturally broken down.

Suttles declined to comment when asked if BP would consider donating the proceeds from the sale of oil from the well to compensate victims of the disaster.

“We just haven’t thought about that,” Suttles said. “”What we’ve been focused on is the response right now.”

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.oceanleadership.org/2010/much-gulf-oil-remains-deeply-hidden-and-under-beaches/

Oil in a core sample taken from Pensacola Beach, Florida, in early July. (Photograph by Chris Combs, National Geographic)

Posted by Will Ramos on Friday, August 6th, 2010 at 11:34 am
Filed under: Discovery,Gulf Oil Spill,News & Resources

(Click to enlarge) Oil in a core sample taken from Pensacola Beach, Florida, in early July. (Photograph by Chris Combs, National Geographic)

(From National Geographic / by Christine Dell’Amore) — As BP finishes pumping cement into the damaged Deepwater Horizon wellhead Thursday, some scientists are taking issue with a new U.S. government report that says the “vast majority” of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill has been taken care of by nature and “robust” cleanup efforts.

In addition, experts warn, much of the toxic oil from the worst spill in U.S. history may be trapped under Gulf beaches-where it could linger for years-or still migrating into the ocean depths, where it’s a “3-D catastrophe,” one scientist said.

The U.S. government estimated Monday that the Deepwater Horizon spill had yielded about 4.9 million barrels’ worth of crude.

On Wednesday a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) report said that about 33 percent of the spilled oil in the water has been burned, skimmed, dispersed, or directly recovered by cleanup operations. (See “Gulf Oil Cleanup Crews Trample Nesting Birds.”)

Another 25 percent has evaporated into the atmosphere or dissolved in the ocean, and 16 percent has been dispersed via natural breakup of the oil into microscopic droplets, the study says. (Read more about how nature is fighting the oil spill.)

The remaining 26 percent, the report says, is still either on or just below the surface, has washed ashore or been collected from shores, or is buried along the coasts.

Oil Spill Report “Almost Comical”?

For all their specificity, such figures are “notorious” for being uncertain, said Robert Carney, a biological oceanographer at Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge.

That’s in part because the fluid nature of the ocean means that it’s “exceedingly hard” to track oil.

“Water is always moving-if I go out to the spill site tomorrow and look for hydrocarbons, I might not find much, because the oiled water is already gone.”

But to accurately figure out how much oil is left, you need to know how much went into the Gulf to begin with, he said.

“Once you start off with that fundamental measure”-the total amount of oil spilled-“being an educated guess, then things aren’t that great.”

To University of South Florida chemical oceanographer David Hollander, the NOAA estimates are “ludicrous.”
“It’s almost comical.”

According to Hollander, the government can account for only about 25 percent of the spilled Gulf oil-the portion that’s been skimmed, burned off, directly collected, and so on.
The remaining 75 percent is still unaccounted for, he said.

For instance, the report considers all submerged oil to be dispersed and therefore not harmful, Hollander said. But, given the unknown effects of oil and dispersants at great depths, that’s not necessarily the case, he added.
“There are enormous blanket assumptions.”

Oil Trapped Deep in Gulf Beaches

The new report comes after days of speculation about where the Gulf oil has gone. After the damaged well had been capped July 19, U.S. Coast Guard flyovers didn’t spot any big patches of crude on the water.

But oil cleanup is mostly getting rid of what’s on the surface, Carney said. There’s a common perception that “as long as you keep it off the beach, everything’s hunky dory,” he added.

In fact, scientists are still finding plenty of spilled Gulf oil-whether it’s bubbling up from under Louisiana’s islands, trapped underneath Florida’s sugar-white beaches, or in the ocean’s unseen reaches. (See pictures of spilled Gulf oil found just under Florida beaches.)

This week, biological oceanographer Markus Huettel and colleague Joel Kostka dug trenches on a cleaned Pensacola beach and discovered large swaths of oil up to two feet (nearly a meter) deep.

Oil gets trapped underground when tiny oil droplets penetrate porous sand or when waves deposit tarballs and then cover them with sand, said Huettel, of Florida State University in Tallahassee.

Whether microbes munch the oil-the most common way oil breaks down-depends on how much oxygen is available for the tiny organisms to do their work. (See marine-microbe pictures.)

“So far, we haven’t seen any rapid degradation in these deep layers,” Huettel said, though he noted oil at the top of the sand has been disappearing within days.

With little oxygen, the buried oil may stay for years, until a storm or hurricane wipes away the upper sand layers.

Previous oil spills suggest that the buried beach oil may continuously migrate not only out to sea but also into groundwater, where it can harm wildlife, Huettel said.

Oil-laden groundwater in Alaska following the Exxon Valdez spill, for instance, led to “significantly elevated” death in pink salmon embryos between 1989 and 1993, he said. (Related: “Exxon Valdez Pictures: 20 Years on, Spilled Oil Remains.”)

Gulf Oil Microbe Cleanup “Total Bull”

Microbes are not an oil-cleanup panacea either, LSU’s Carney cautioned.
For instance, oil-eating bacteria can’t stomach asphalt, the heaviest part of an oil molecule and the same material used to pave roads, he said.

The leftover asphalt falls to the seafloor, where another kind of microbe may chew on it-making the molecule shorter and thus more toxic, according to Carney.

“The sentimentality that bacteria turn everything into fish food and CO2 is total bull,” he said.

What’s more, microbes cherry-pick whatever piece of oil is easiest to process-and on their own time, said Christopher Reddy, a marine chemist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.

Counting on microbes to quickly clean up an oil spill is “like asking a teenager to do a chore. You tell them to do it on a Friday, to do it when it’s most advantageous, and they do it on a Saturday,” Reddy said.

“It can be frustrating that you can’t constrain the role of microbes and overall natural cleanup.”

Deep-Sea Oil Spills are “Unchartered Territory”

Another “open question” remains, FSU’s Huettel noted: What is happening to the oil deep in the Gulf?

For the first time during an oil-spill response, officials used chemical dispersants to break up oil at ocean depths between 4,000 and 5,000 feet (1,200 and 1,500 meters). The dispersant-treated oil bits may have sunk to the seafloor, Huettel said.

In the cold, dark ocean, this mixture of oil and chemical dispersants may be suspended and preserved, causing long-term problems for deep-sea animals, Texas Tech University ecotoxicologist Ron Kendall said during August 4 testimony before the U.S. Congress.
“We have very limited information on the environmental fate and transport of the mixture of dispersant and oil, particularly in the deep ocean,” Kendall said.

Some oil fragments are so tiny they can’t be seen with the human eye, said the University of South Florida’s Hollander. Others are big enough to be gobbled up by baby fish that mistake the oil for food. (See pictures of ten animals at risk from the Gulf oil spill.)

Predicting what will happen to the deep-sea ecosystem is “uncharted territory,” said Hollander, who’s studying what the oil is doing to deep-sea creatures during a series of research cruises this summer and fall.

“Could be a bottom-up collapse, could be nothing happens,” he said. But he suspects a “real large chunk of food chain is being disrupted.”

“We’re getting into something different than the 2-D petroleum spill” on the Gulf’s surface, he added. “All of the sudden you’ve taken this 2-D disaster and turned it into a 3-D catastrophe.”

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0810/40680.html

By: Darren Samuelsohn

August 5, 2010 04:30 AM EDT

Environmentalists went with an all-or-nothing strategy for the 111th
Congress. Nothing won.

Now, green groups licking their wounds after spending tens of millions of dollars to pass a cap-and-trade bill must answer serious questions about whether they are capable of playing another round of hardball.

But D.C. environmental groups aren’t looking to clean house. Activists at the Natural Resources Defense Council, Environmental Defense Fund, Union of Concerned Scientists and Clean Energy Works said leading officials won’t be fired because Obama isn’t signing a climate bill into law.

Steve Cochran, who ran EDF’s national climate campaign, actually got a promotion to run the entire global warming team, including state and international efforts.

“The reason why I’m not looking around, hearing a lot of people scared for their jobs, I think the general view within the environmental community is consistent with mine: We ran a very effective, well-coordinated effort,” said Dan Lashof, director of NRDC’s climate center.

“We fell victim to much broader politics that were beyond our control that really didn’t have to do with the specifics of either the issue or the campaign,” Lashof added.

After Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) last month scrapped
plans for a vote, the White House made clear it wasn’t impressed with the environmentalists’ effort.

“They didn’t deliver a single Republican,” an administration official told POLITICO just hours after Reid pulled the plug on the climate bill. “They spent like $100 million, and they weren’t able to get a single Republican convert on the bill.”

How much money was spent is difficult to pin down. NRDC, the Sierra Club and Clean Energy Works declined to open up their books to show how much they spent on the climate campaign. EDF had spent $20 million on
climate legislation since October 2008. Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate
Protection pledged in 2006 to spend $300 million, but it’s unclear how much it ended up using.

Enraged environmentalists flooded the White House with phone calls
after the quotation appeared in publication. Publicly, they decried the finger-pointing and insisted they aren’t alone in deserving fault, saying President Barack Obama failed to use his bully pulpit and moderate Senate Republicans weren’t allowed by their leaders to fully negotiate.

“The Washington environmental community did absolutely everything they possibly could,” said Bill McKibben, a Vermont-based environmental author and co-founder of the advocacy group 350.org.

“All the rest of us owe them a great debt of gratitude,” he added. “But
they demonstrated you can make every possible compromise, and it’s still not enough to get you anywhere with these guys.”

Some activists acknowledge missteps that undercut their pro-climate spending during the past two years.

“My sense is we did fail,” said Kevin Knobloch, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists. “I think there’s no sugarcoating it.”

At the beginning of 2009, everything seemed lined up: a Democratic president with large majorities in Congress, leaders committed to bringing a bill to the floor and seemingly no shortage of money and staff.

But after the House passed cap-and-trade legislation last summer, the subsequent anti-Obama, anti-Big Government protests – led by the tea party movement and several industry-funded groups – caught the environmentalists off-guard by attacking “yes” votes in the House.

Opponents led an effective bumper-sticker-style campaign denouncing the Democrats’ “national energy tax.” The environmentalists’ response was
too wordy, too complicated and too late.

“We tapped out a lot of donors getting to that point,” said one
official from a major group. “We didn’t have a bigger war chest waiting to support their vote.”

“We really got our ass kicked in August during the town halls,” EDF
spokesman Tony Kreindler said.

The response to the tea party attacks was to create Clean Energy Works, a coalition staffed by environmental, labor, national security and religious interest groups that numbered about 45 people at its peak. Paul Tewes, Obama’s 2008 Iowa field chief, led the campaign.

“Anywhere there was a senator who was not squarely on the side of passing a climate bill, we were there,” said David Di Martino, a Clean Energy Works spokesman.

Once they began talking to senators, however, activists said, they got their wires crossed with Reid’s office over who was in charge of counting votes.

“We were stuck in a Catch-22,” Kreindler said. “There was an
expectation by the environmental community to deliver a certain amount of votes. There was an expectation in the environmental community that leadership would deliver a certain amount of votes. But there never was a clear understanding of how those two efforts would work together.”

Reid’s office would not comment for this story but pointed to past
statements from the majority leader that Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) were tasked with collecting 60 votes on the carbon cap measure. A White House spokesman declined comment on its climate bill whip operations.

Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) defended the greens’ efforts. “This became a very hot political issue,” he said. “They’re trying hard to help us. And we’re working with them. We’re going to have our day. I wish we’d have it sooner, rather than later. But we’re going to have our day.”

Durbin insisted that environmental groups also still garner plenty of
sway in the Senate. “A lot of us pay attention,” he said.

But there’s a difference between paying attention and action.

GOP senators targeted as possible swing votes said the
environmentalists offered little incentive for them to change their
minds during an economic recession and with little threat of political payback if they didn’t go along.

“They don’t have much infrastructure on the Republican side,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). “So when you hear the environmental community
is mad at you, everyone says, ‘Tell me something new.’ It’s not like a
support group you’ve lost.”

The environmental movement needs a radical overhaul if Congress is ever going to pass a climate bill, McKibben said. That means lawmakers need
to be aware of the political consequences if they don’t side with the greens.

“We weren’t able to credibly promise political reward or punishment,” McKibben said. “The fact is, scientists have been saying for the past few years the world might come to an end. But clearly that’s insufficient motivation. Clearly, we must communicate that their careers might come to an end. That’s going to take a few years.”

Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), whom environmentalists once considered as a possible vote on climate, never got the message. “I hate to tell you, I just don’t wake up thinking about it,” said Corker, who questions the complexity of cap-and-trade systems. “I’m aware and all that. But I think it’s the wrong message.”

Special thanks to Richard Charter