(06/10/2010)

 Some journalists trying to assess the effects of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill on wildlife and the environment have been turned away from public areas by BP PLC, cleanup contractors, local law enforcement officials and the Coast Guard, prompting concerns that officials are trying to filter the images that are ultimately seen by the public.

“I think they’ve been trying to limit access,” Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) said. “It is a company that was not used to transparency. It was not used to having public scrutiny of what it did.”

The Coast Guard and Federal Aviation Administration denied an ordinary permit to Belle Chasse, La.-based Southern Seaplane Inc. after the company said a staffer from The Times-Picayune of New Orleans would be shooting photographs from the plane. Reporters from the New York Daily News were told by a local sheriff in Grand Isle, La., that they needed to fill out paperwork and be accompanied by a BP employee if they wanted to visit an oil-soaked beach.

An FAA spokeswoman said flight restrictions are necessary to prevent civilian aircraft from interfering with those being used in the oil spill response. The agency has revised its policy to allow news media flights after case-by-case review.

“Our general approach throughout this response, which is controlled by the Unified Command and is the largest ever to an oil spill,” BP spokesman David Nicholas said, “has been to allow as much access as possible to media and other parties without compromising the work we are engaged on or the safety of those to whom we give access.”

Michael Oreskes, senior managing editor at the Associated Press, compared the situation to that of embedded journalists in Afghanistan.

“There is a continued effort to keep control over the access,” Oreskes said. “And even in places where the government is cooperating with us to provide access, it’s still a problem because it’s still access obtained through the government” (Jeremy Peters, New York Times, June 9). —

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2010/jun/10/hands-across-sand-protect-florida-coast-oil-spill/

The National Hands Across the Sand movement, which says “no” to oil and “yes” to renewable energy, will form a line on the beach by holding hands beginning at noon on Saturday, June 26. Candy Strafford welcomes all ages to join her as early as 11 a.m. near the Vanderbilt Beach Access located at the end Vanderbilt Beach Road, just west of the Ritz- Carlton Beach Resort. Get more information at (facebook.com/handsacrossthesand)
Event Details
        *       What: Hands Across the Sand
     *       When: Saturday, June 26, 2010, 11 a.m. to 12:15 p.m.
    *       Where: Naples Beach
     *       Cost: Not available
     *       Age limit: All ages
Full event details »
IF YOU GO
Vanderbilt Beach Parking Garage
Parking sticker required, or $8 parking fee; meters also available
100 Vanderbilt Beach Road, North Naples
Questions: 252-4000

For other locations, see Hands Across the Sand website: www.handsacrossthesand.com

Candy Strafford wants people to lend a hand to her – all in the name of protecting local beaches from off-shore oil drilling.

The Golden Gate Estates resident is a mother, and a grandmother, first and foremost. But she is now a pioneer in illustrating what peaceful environmental preservation is all about. Just using her one hand to reach out to others, as part of the National Hands Across the Sand movement, which says “no” to oil and “yes” to renewable energy.
Strafford, together with other Collier County residents, will form a line on the beach by holding hands beginning at noon on Saturday, June 26. Strafford welcomes all ages to join her as early as 11 a.m. near the Vanderbilt Beach Access located at the end Vanderbilt Beach Road, just west of the Ritz- Carlton Beach Resort.
Strafford is one of many community leaders spearheading an effort to reach out to thousands of local residents. She is asking all Floridians to take her up on the cause as part of the Hands Across the Sand movement, which originally started In Florida on Feb. 13 with a hand-holding chain of 10,000 people on nearly 100 beaches along the coastline.

“The message is simple. The images are powerful. We are drawing a line in the sand against offshore oil drilling along America’s beaches and in solidarity events across this great land,” the movement’s founder, Dave Rauschkolb, said.

Strafford agrees with Rauschkolb, and wants everyone to come together for the protection of pristine beaches in Naples, and beaches all over Florida.

“Because it is a national event, I was thinking it would be great to do it with my daughter and granddaughter,” said Strafford, as she strolls Vanderbilt Beach on a sunny morning with her 2-year-old granddaughter, Amaya, and her family, who is visiting Naples from England.

Those who cannot participate can take up their own “inland” cause by visiting handsacrossthesand.com, where they can check out the Hands Across the Sand interactive map to locate a beach nearby to link up.

“It’s so important for our future, and I became involved in the Hands Across the Beach’s movement just a short time ago,” said Strafford, who believes in promoting clean “green” renewable energy, and invites Naples, Marco Island and Bonita Springs residents to unite with her cause.

“This isn’t a protest, but it’s a gathering,” Strafford said, emphasizing the Hands Across the Sand movement as a community assembly, one without any political separations or age limits.
___________
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/virginiapolitics/2010/06/president_obama_may_have_put.html
Washington Post
June 10, 2010
Environmentalists plan offshore oil drilling protest on Virginia beaches

President Obama may have put an end to Virginia’s immediate offshore drilling plans, but that hasn’t stopped environmentalists from protesting any future possibility.

On June 26, activists will join hands on Virginia’s beaches to show their opposition to drilling on what is being dubbed as a National Day of Action. The event follows a similar one in Florida where 10,000 people locked hands on more than 80 beaches.
(Purell, anyone?)

“A spill or accident off the coast of Virginia, even at a fraction of the size of the Gulf Coast spill, would devastate our economy and our environment,” said Ari Lawrence, chair of the Virginia Beach Chapter of the Surfrider Foundation, one of the groups organizing the event. “The only option is to put an immediate stop to drilling off our coasts and seek sustainable energy solutions that do not pose such a significant threat to our future or the livelihoods of the American people.”

Earlier today, Virginia’s senators, Jim Webb and Mark Warner, urged federal authorities to coordinate with emergency preparedness officials with coastal states in the event that the oil spill reaches the Atlantic Coast. Several experts have indicated that it is possible that the oil could reach the Gulf Stream and be carried up the Atlantic coast to Virginia, they said.

Webb and Warner were joined on the letter by 20 other senators, including Barbara Mikulski and Benjamin Cardin of Maryland.

By Anita Kumar  |  June 10, 2010; 2:34 PM ET

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://ocean.si.edu/blog/invisible-loss-impacts-oil-you-do-not-see/

This is exactly what has been bothering me the most about the fact that MOST of the oil never makes it to the surface; we are destroying the very web of life in the Gulf of Mexico.  DV

Wed, 06/09/2010 – 9:23am — Chris Mah

Since late April, the world has watched a devastating oil spill from a BP drilling rig spread throughout the Gulf of Mexico and become one of the worst environmental disasters in the history of the United States.

CREDIT:   Dr. Allison J. Gong, UC Santa Cruz

We have all seen some of the impacts on large animals: birds, turtles, dolphins, and fishes have all been shown covered in oil with clogged gills, feathers and fins. Undoubtedly, the imagery of these familiar and normally photogenic animals is a powerful, heartbreaking reminder of the damage being done in the Gulf.

But, the effect of the oil on those organisms we do not see may be even more important.

I refer to the invertebrates—animals such as shrimp, crabs, sea stars, sea urchins, clams, snails, and worms, which lack backbones (or vertebrae). These species may not make the headlines as often as larger animals, but they are critically important to the ecosystem in the Gulf. In 1993, Dr. Thomas Suchanek, a researcher at the University or California, Davis published a scientific paper summarizing the effects of oil on invertebrate communities. The paper notes that very low concentrations of oil can produce dramatic changes in invertebrate populations.

Why is this important? Invertebrates comprise the majority of animals in the marine ecosystem. They include jellyfish that live throughout the water column (and are food for turtles and fish); sea stars, which live on the sea bottom; and more importantly the many clams, crabs, shrimps and other commercially important species that are fished in the Gulf. Oil, not to mention the more toxic dispersants being used in the clean-up, can have a wide range of harmful effects, including changes to reproduction, growth, feeding, movement, behavior, and breathing. Destruction of these animals will substantially change the food webs and interrelationships among the organisms that live in the Gulf.

We immediately think about the damage affecting adult animals, but in fact, the more severe damage may be done to those animals we can’t even see—the larvae (baby forms) that live among the plankton.

Seawater is full of plankton—tiny organisms that drift on the currents. Many of these organisms are larvae, or immature animals, mostly invertebrates that grow up to become those jellyfish, crabs, and clams. In many ways, the tiny forms of these animals are the most vulnerable, which is why there are so many of them. In nature, no predator would be able to devour them all, so eventually a significant fraction of those animals grow up into adults. But what happens when you poison the environment where they live? Massive swaths of ocean containing these organisms will likely be obliterated. Some reports are already talking about “dead zones” that could affect species in the Gulf for years to come.

The ecological effects will be even more long lasting. As with the adults, these larvae are part of complex food webs and can play important direct and indirect roles in ecosystems.

The domino effect of wiping out those adults will be devastating not only to the ecology but to the economy. For example, what happens to the shrimp fishery when not only all the adults are poisoned, but the larval forms are wiped out or significantly weakened? The same question applies to almost any edible marine animal in the Gulf of Mexico.

The scope of the damage is sad even if we only see images of poisoned pelicans and other large vertebrates, but what we do not see that may be the most widespread and devastating legacies of the Gulf oil spill.

Editor’s Note: Our guest blogger, Dr. Chris Mah, is an expert in the evolution and biology of sea stars. He works in the Department of Invertebrate Zoology at Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and regularly shares his studies and adventures on the Echinoblog.

Special thanks to Erika Biddle

 

(06/11/2010)

Anne C. Mulkern, E&E reporter

An environmental group wanting reforms to offshore drilling and the petroleum industry’s biggest trade group launched dueling ads yesterday tied to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

Pew Environment Group is running an ad that shows an oil-soaked pelican with the message “Help stop this from happening again. Change the law.”

The ad — which appeared in Politico, Roll Call and CongressDaily — says, “The oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico could easily happen again unless we change the laws that allowed it to occur in the first place.”

The American Petroleum Institute’s ad will blanket the country for two weeks in papers that include The Washington Post, The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Gulf Coast newspapers and Beltway publications. There is a radio ad as well.

“The people of America’s oil and natural gas industry are working to help BP and the authorities respond to the spill,” the API print ad says. “Clearly, there will be lessons to be learned, and we are fully committed to doing everything humanly possible to understand what happened and prevent it from ever happening again.”

It also describes oil and natural gas as “vital domestic resources that power our way of life.”

Both ads come as the Obama administration and some in Congress consider policy changes because of the oil spill.

“We’re seeing the president grandstand on the spill. We’re seeing politicians push for [climate measures] because of the spill,” said Ken Green, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank that favors free market policies. “It’s become now more of a thing to lever in legislation.”

The campaigns also arrive as polls show declining support for increased offshore drilling. About one-quarter of Americans now back added offshore drilling, while 31 percent want fewer offshore wells and 41 percent want the number of wells to remain at current levels, according to a poll conducted June 3-6 by The Washington Post and ABC News.

Overall support for drilling fell from 64 percent last August to 52 percent now, with 49 percent of respondents describing the Gulf spill as a symbol of broader problems. A quarter of Americans now support increased offshore drilling, while 31 percent want fewer offshore wells and 41 percent want the number of wells to remain at current levels, according to the poll.

Because of the magnitude of the spill, the timing is right for Congress to make regulatory changes, said Chris Mann, senior officer at the Pew Environment Group.

“A lot of people we’re talking to on the Hill feel that Congress has to act on this, including committee and chamber leadership,” Mann said. “It’s a major challenge to the Obama administration. Politically it seems to have become a huge liability. They need to demonstrate that they are hitting this head-on.”

API supports and is assisting the ongoing investigations into the causes of the spill, said Linda Rozett, API’s vice president of communications. But any reforms now could have negative unintended consequences, she said.

“To decide what to change in order to prevent something from happening before we know what caused it” could lead to the wrong solutions being enacted, Rozett said.

Seeking changes

Pew’s ad kicks off a new campaign calling for changes to the law governing offshore oil and natural gas exploration, as well as the rules covering oil spills that were enacted after the 1989 Exxon Valdez incident.

“In the early weeks of the spill, the concern was about the loss of life, the environmental impact,” Mann said. “More and more people are turning to what can we do to address not just the symptoms of this but the root causes.”

While human error and technological failures were probably factors, “the ultimate cause of the spill, ultimately we believe is a failure of governance.”
The Pew print spot asks Congress to take four measures in response to the spill. The first is a more thorough review of environmental impacts “at every stage of offshore oil and gas leasing and development.”

Environmental analyses done before as part of leasing for offshore drilling are insufficient, Mann said. The pre-lease reviews of the well involved in the current spill “didn’t seriously consider the possibility of a blowout,” or “how to deal with a blowout.”

Congress is likely to approve additional environmental reviews, Green said.

Pew wants a separation of government offices that collect revenues from offshore drilling from those that enforce safety regulations. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar in May split the Minerals Management Agency into three divisions: energy development, enforcement and revenue collecting (E&ENews PM, May 19).

Mann said that if Salazar’s revision is the correct overhaul, it should be made law so a future administration does not reverse it.

Pew wants an end to the current $75 million liability cap for economic damages connected to an oil spill. Two Democratic senators are pushing legislation that would eliminate that limit (E&E Daily, June 9). Companies should pay all of the costs associated with spills, Mann said.

Congress probably will lift that $75 million limit, Green said, although it might consider language to protect the smallest companies.

Pew also is looking for a national ocean policy that would coordinate with regional plans in helping guide places for offshore drilling. It wants to “identify which areas are appropriate for energy development and which are too ecologically sensitive.”

Identifying which areas are too ecologically sensitive for drilling could be difficult, Green said.

API response

API’s ad strives to highlight the rarity of a spill like the one in the Gulf.

“Nothing like the Deepwater Horizon spill has ever occurred in more than 60 years of oil and natural gas exploration in U.S. waters of the Gulf of Mexico,” the ad says. “We have already assembled the world’s leading experts to conduct a top-to-bottom review of offshore drilling procedures, from routine operations to emergency response.”

The API ad “is just part of the conversation,” about the spill and what to do next, Rozett said.

“It’s important for the industry to stay involved in the conversation as it moves forward,” about the spill, she added.

Any regulatory changes passed because of the BP spill could affect all oil and natural gas companies, AEI’s Green said.

“They’re just trying to in some way salvage some of their reputation,” Green said of the API ad. “They don’t want to be tarred with BP’s brush.”

The oil industry likely will succeed in “fending off what they consider particularly onerous,” changes, Green said, especially because offshore drilling plays a major role in the economies of Gulf states.

Go to link to see the API ad.

Go to link to see the Pew ad.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

“Three energy industry trade associations – the National Ocean Industries Association, the Independent Petroleum Association of America and the American Petroleum Institute – announced Thursday they were forming task forces to review the spill response and make recommendations on how to improve future cleanup and containment efforts.”
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/deepwaterhorizon/7047151.html

Anger rises along with spill size estimate

By JENNIFER LATSON and JENNIFER A. DLOUHY
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
June 10, 2010, 11:24PM
Oil is flowing from a blown-out well in the Gulf of Mexico almost twice as fast – at minimum – as estimated previously, although some of it is now being captured, federal officials said Thursday.

Their estimates now range from 20,000 to 40,000 barrels per day, said U.S. Geological Survey Director Marcia McNutt – well above the most recent estimate of 12,000 to 19,000 barrels per day, and vastly higher than BP’s original reckoning of 1,000 to 5,000 barrels in the days after the April 20 blowout.

The high end of the estimate, 40,000 barrels, would represent almost 1.7 million gallons a day.
The new numbers estimate the rate before underwater robots cut a bent riser pipe that once connected the Macondo well, a mile below the Gulf’s surface, with the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig that exploded after the blowout, killing 11 workers.

Cutting the riser pipe on June 3 temporarily increased the total flow, but BP now is catching more than 15,000 barrels a day through a new pipe that was attached to the severed riser the next day.
BP is preparing in the next few days to siphon more oil from the spewing wellhead.

And as it tries to slow down the amount of oil surging into the Gulf, the company agreed to speed up payments to businesses and residents affected by the spill, responding to public outcry and government pressure.

BP also promised to take into account that many of the industries most affected by the spill – including fishing and tourism – make the bulk of their income in the summer months.

“We wanted to make sure they are calculating the damages to those individuals based on the earnings they would get in that short period of time, not dividing an annual salary by 12,” said Tracy Wareing, with the National Incident Command coordinating spill response.

Mounting frustration

BP officials also will meet with President Barack Obama next week to discuss the company’s financial responsibility. So far, it has paid more than $57 million to fishermen, deckhands and other workers who have lost wages and business because of the spill.

BP and the Obama administration faced mounting frustration and anger Thursday as lawmakers and Gulf Coast officials complained that efforts to clean up the crude are being stalled by a Byzantine response operation

“We’re at war here,” said Billy Nungesser, the Republican president of Plaquemines Parish, La. “I have spent more time fighting the officials of BP and the Coast Guard than fighting the oil.”
David Camardelle, the Democratic mayor of Grand Isle, La., said his hands are tied while he waits for BP and the Coast Guard to sign off on cleanup plans. “Please send us some help,” Camardelle pleaded, his voice breaking, as he testified in an emotional Senate homeland security subcommittee hearing.

The pair described sluggish decision-making, with it taking more than five days to navigate cleanup requests around layers of approval and other hurdles and get them to the top Coast Guard officials coordinating the response.

Disputes over control

Lawmakers on Thursday drew fresh comparisons to the government’s widely criticized response when Hurricane Katrina hit the New Orleans area in 2005.

“The people that are on the ground, either up to their chin in water or up to their knees in oil, in this case, don’t seem to have the resources or authority to get the job done,” said a teary Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La.

Juliette Kayyem, an assistant Homeland Security secretary, said the Coast Guard is working to make sure local officials have control over some issues in their backyards, such as decisions involving boom being deployed to trap floating oil.

Forty miles off the Louisiana coast, meanwhile, BP engineers continued to draw oil through the pipe installed last week, and worked on systems they expect will capture more of the oil.

BP engineers have been working on another pumping system that would be able to draw as much as an additional 10,000 barrels per day from the well.

That hardware is the same used unsuccessfully to pump drilling mud into the well in an earlier effort to plug it, now reversed to work as a vacuum. At the surface, it will separate crude and natural gas from the well and burn both since it cannot store them.

No room to add tanker

“To capture it, we’d have to bring in another tanker, and having all that in this small space would make it too congested,” BP Senior Vice President Kent Wells said Thursday.

BP engineers are also working on a system that could lift oil to tankers in rough seas, and could be disconnected temporarily if a hurricane threatened.

The new flow estimates announced Thursday were the work of three teams of scientists employed by the federal government, universities and independent research institutions.

The estimates varied widely, from as low as 12,600 barrels per day to as high as 50,000 barrels. But McNutt said the scientists generally agreed that the mid-range figures, from 20,000 to 40,000 barrels per day, were the most likely.

Reviewing the response

The problem that has plagued scientists and engineers from the start is that the Macondo well sits a mile beneath the surface, where only robots can work, and that they’ve never dealt with a blowout that deep.

Three energy industry trade associations – the National Ocean Industries Association, the Independent Petroleum Association of America and the American Petroleum Institute – announced Thursday they were forming task forces to review the spill response and make recommendations on how to improve future cleanup and containment efforts.

Latson reported from Houston and Dlouhy from Washington.
jennifer.latson@chron.com
jennifer.dlouhy@chron.com

special thanks to Richard Charter