http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-26/u-s-must-safeguard-environment-in-ocean-drills-activists-urge-court.html

By Laurel Brubaker Calkins and Allen Johnson Jr. – Apr 26, 2011 12:29 PM PT

Environmentalists urged a New Orleans appellate court today to require U.S. offshore-drilling regulators to enforce safeguards for wildlife and water quality that they claim were routinely ignored before last year’s BP Plc (BP/) oil spill.

Lawyers representing the Sierra Club, the Gulf Restoration Network,the Center for Biological Diversity and other activist groups asked the court to force the Interior Department to rescind several deep-water drilling permits regulators approved last April, just before and after the worst offshore oil spill in U.S.history.

The activists complain that the relationship between the oil industry and its regulators has been too cozy, resulting in lax oversight and environmental damage. They claim that five drilling permits were awarded last April without completion of the full environmental-impact assessments required by law.

“What the agency did was rubber-stamp the plans,” Monica Reimer, an attorney for Earthjustice, said during today’s hearing at the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans. “We believe they need to be reopened, and that those plans must come before the court after the agency has done a complete environmental assessment.”

Seeking Change

The activist groups sued Interior Secretary Kenneth Salazar and his agency seeking multiple changes to U.S. drilling regulations following the Deepwater Horizon disaster last April. The rig exploded while drilling a BP well off the Louisiana coast, killing 11 workers. The subsea gusher spewed more than 4.1 million barrels of crude into the Gulf of Mexico.

Much of the Gulf’s fisheries were closed, wildlife was injured or killed, and hundreds of miles of shoreline was fouled by the drifting oil.

The environmental groups challenged the agency’s actions directly at the appeals court, which is permitted under U.S. law. Related offshore-drilling policy lawsuits filed by some of the activist groups in lower federal courts were subsequently consolidated into the appellate actions. A three-judge appellate panel heard arguments on the challenges in back-to-back sessions today.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which regulates offshore drilling, awarded one of the five permits the activists have complained about six days after the Deepwater Horizon exploded. The groups say that permit was based on an exploration plan that didn’t take into consideration the possibility of a deep-water spill like the one then spreading across the Gulf.

Agency Decisions

Government lawyers today urged the appeals court not to interfere with agency decisions that regulators made according to rules that were in place at the time the permits were granted. Regulators notified oil companies in November 2010 that the agency would beef up existing environmental-impact assessment requirements “to consider the implications of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill,” government lawyer Ignacia Moreno said in a court filing.

“The petitioners’ attempt to have this court rule that the agency should have started that process within days of the Deepwater Horizon initial explosion should be rejected,” Moreno said in the filing.

Environmentalists told the judges the agency’s practice of using of so-called categorical exclusions, which let regulators arbitrarily exempt companies from fulfilling certain permit requirements, violated the law.

Risky Process

“There were all kinds of risks that were not being disclosed to the Department of Interior or by the industry,” Reimer said of the five permits the bureau approved in April 2010, during an interview after the hearing.

“Deep-water drilling is an inherently risky process, and the industry knows it,” she said. “There is major potential for significant environmental impact,” and regulators should be forced to factor that into their permit approval decisions, she said.

The lead cases are Gulf Restoration Network v. Salazar, 10- 60411, and Center for Biological Diversity v. Salazar, 10-60417, both in the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals (New Orleans).

To contact the reporters on this story: Laurel Brubaker Calkins in Houston atlaurel@calkins.us.com; Allen Johnson Jr. in New Orleans.

Share http://bloom.bg/dToyUoon Twitter

The URL http://bloom.bg/dToyUohas been shared 16 times.View these Tweets.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

(04/22/2011)

Paul Quinlan, E&E reporter

One word could describe U.S. EPA’s oversight of BP PLC’s decision to
pour 1.84 million gallons of oil-dispersing chemicals into the Gulf of
Mexico during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill: uncertain.

Responding to growing public unease last year over BP’s strategy of
fighting a massive chemical spill with more chemicals, EPA flexed its
regulatory muscle. The result was not confidence-inspiring: a shoving
match between the world’s largest environmental regulator and one of
the world’s largest oil companies that showed how little the regulators
understood about oil dispersants.

One year later, scientists say little has changed.

Decision making about the use of dispersants to combat the oil pouring
out of the Macondo well 5,000 feet below the Gulf surface were driven
more by politics, circumstances of supply and availability, and
educated guesswork than by informed science, experts say.

Some questions posed during the spill have been answered. For example,
the chemical constituents of the dispersant used has been published by
EPA and shown in rudimentary tests to be no more toxic or less
effective than competing alternatives.

But since the Obama administration has resumed issuing drilling permits
in the Gulf of Mexico, the most important questions remain unanswered:
How much did dispersants — as opposed to simple physics –contribute
to keeping oil underwater and out of Louisiana’s marshes? How effective
was underwater injection of the dispersants onto the wellhead? And what
long-term effects will the lingering chemicals and the dispersed oil
have on the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem?

“There are so many data gaps and uncertainties with the use of
dispersants and their effects,” said Carys Mitchelmore, an
environmental chemist and toxicologist at the University of Maryland’s
Center for Environmental Science and co-author of a 2005 National
Research Council report on oil dispersants. “Why hasn’t there been the
funding available to look into some of these things?”

After last year’s spill began, regulators seemed confused. Twenty days
after the rig explosion, on May 10, EPA told BP to monitor and assess
its use of oil dispersants. Ten days later, the agency ordered the oil
giant to switch from Corexit-brand dispersant to one of several others
believed to be “less toxic and more effective.” BP declined and
defended its choice. EPA criticized the company’s response as
“insufficient” and ordered BP to “significantly scale back” dispersant
use. BP did not (Greenwire, June 24).

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson now defends her agency’s call to allow
BP to fight the spill using dispersants. “The chemicals helped break up
the oil,” Jackson told The New York Times in a recent interview.”It
was the right decision to use them.”

If that is the case, then on what basis did EPA decide to order BP to
ramp down dispersant use on May 26, two months before the well was
capped? EPA officials declined to comment. But other experts have
speculated.

“My view is that I think EPA was responding a bit to public concern and
pressure,” said Ron Tjeerdema, an environmental toxicologist and oil
dispersants expert at the University of California, Davis.Tjeerdema
was one of 50 scientists, engineers and spill responders that the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration assembled during the
spill to decide whether to continue using dispersants. The panel
concluded that dispersant use should continue.

At that point, questions lingered over whether a better alternativet o
Corexit existed. A table listing 19 dispersants alongside crude
measures of the toxicity and effectiveness of each — part of the
National Contingency Plan (NCP) Product Schedule on file at EPA —
indicated that two Corexit formulas, 9500A and 9527A, might be among
the most toxic and least effective formulas in breaking up South
Louisiana crude oil (Greenwire, May 13).

The table became the basis of EPA’s decision, under pressure from
Congress and the public, to order BP to switch to one of the listed
alternatives. Mitchelmore said she later found problems and
inconsistencies in the testing methods that produced the data listed in
the NCP product schedule table’s toxicity and effectiveness ratings.

By then, EPA had already ordered BP to switch to something other than
Corexit. Upon BP’s refusal, EPA launched its own tests to see if a
better alternative existed. The results came back two months later on
Aug. 2, around the time the well was capped. To the agency’s chagrin,
BP was shown to be right. EPA’s tests showed Corexit 9500A was no more
toxic or less effective than any of the competing products, all of
which were stockpiled in vastly smaller and ultimately insufficient
quantities (E&ENews PM, June 30).

From the early days of the spill, BP’s purchase of Corexit represented
a third of the world’s supply. After the spill, in November, the
federal government’s Oil Budget Calculator report said of dispersant
use: “… were it a spill by itself, it would be one of the larger
spills in U.S. waters.”

But the scarcity of Corexit alternatives made the decision about
whether to switch to some other brand “a moot choice,” according to
Tjeerdema.

“The oil industry generally only stockpiles one at a time,” he said.
Tjeerdema recalled chuckling to himself over news reports that BP began
dispersing oil using Corexit 9527, an older formula that dates back to
the 1980s, before switching to 9527A.

“Right away, I understood they were getting rid of their old stockpile
that they hadn’t used for 20 years,” Tjeerdema said.”They’re kind of
efficient in wanting to get the most out of their stockpiled
dispersants.”

Breaking up is hard to do

Dispersants are frequently compared to dish soap — and in fact, share
some of the same ingredients. The chemicals break up oil — which
otherwise tends to cluster and float — into tiny droplets that can
sink and diffuse into the water column, so that bacteria and marine
organisms can more easily consume them.

Given the shortage of equipment available during the Deepwater Horizon
spill to burn, skim or otherwise dispose of the oil at the surface, the
question becomes one of environmental tradeoffs: Should the oil be
sunken with dispersants, at possible risk to deepwater marine
ecosystems, or be allowed to surface on its own and float onto beaches
and into marshes?

Tjeerdema, who served on the NOAA panel that recommended continued
dispersant use for the spill last June, stands by the group’s consensus
that dispersing the oil was “less environmentally harmful” than
allowing crude to migrate into the coastal marshes and wetlands along
the Louisiana coast, which act as nurseries for economically important
fish and shellfish and can be almost impossible to clean.

“If you take dish detergent and squirt it to your aquarium, it will
certainly kill your fish,” Tjeerdema said. “If you can put 2 million
gallons of dispersant into the environment in a way that it will mix
and bind with the oil to reduce overall toxicity, maybe that’s nots uch
a bad thing.”

But the chemicals do not just disappear. In the most comprehensive
study on the fate of oil dispersants used in the Gulf spill, Liz
Kujawinski, an associate scientist of marine chemistry at the Woods
Hole Oceanographic Institution, found that a key ingredient in the
dispersants — dioctyl sodium sulfosuccinate, or DOSS — remained
trapped in the underwater plume of oil that had spread 180 miles from
the well by September, even as it became almost undetectably dilute.

“There was sort of a public perception that the dispersant was just
going to go away,” Kujawinski said. “We concluded that dilution was
really the primary process.”

But Kujawinski reserves judgment on whether or not dispersing the oil
was a good idea. For one, she says, not enough data exists to show what
effect, if any, dispersants sprayed deep underwater had on breaking up
the oil gushing from the wellhead. She and other researchers note that
simple physics may have done more to keep the oil trapped in underwater
plumes.

Rather than second-guess the response, Kujuawinski says research should
be devoted to answering the most important questions: Did dispersants
play a significant role in breaking up the oil at the wellhead and
should sinking the oil have been the goal at all?

“We need to take a step back and say it’s happened and then say whether
or not it did what it’s supposed to do,” she said, noting that
responders had limited equipment for skimming and burning oil that rose
to the surface.

“The known negative impact of swamping the marsh with oil –that’s a
known problem,” Kujawinski said. “The big question is whether or not
they caused a different problem.”

Answers may not be forthcoming soon. As dolphins and sea turtles
continue to wash up mysteriously on the Gulf Coast, only $40 million of
the $500 million BP has committed to Gulf research has been disbursed
so far because of organizational delays. EPA has proposed additional
research into oil dispersants toxicity and effectiveness in 2012,
although the agency has come on the chopping block and already faces
$1.6 billion in cuts under the budget deal approved last week –likely
the first of many such spending fights.

For now, the puzzle surrounding dispersants remains unsolved, said Lisa
Suatoni, senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council.

“In the end, we would hope that the government and BP would have a will
to put together that puzzle, and it’s not all clear from the research
that’s coming out that they do have that will,” she said. “It’s a
little discouraging if the interest in oil spill response research
lasts only as long as the oil spill response.”

Special thanks to Richard Charter

So glad to see this finally happening; some things move at a snail’s pace at the federal level. I hope the funds actually improve the Gulf instead of lining the pockets of the well connected. DV

Washington, DC – Under an unprecedented agreement announced today by the Natural Resource Trustees for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill (Trustees), BP has agreed to provide $1 billion toward early restoration projects in the Gulf of Mexico to address injuries to natural resources caused by the spill. The Trustees involved are: Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, the Department of the Interior (DOI), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The Department of Justice provided assistance in reaching the agreement.

This early restoration agreement, the largest of its kind ever reached, represents a first step toward fulfilling BP’s obligation to fund the complete restoration of injured public resources,including the loss of use of those resources by the people living,working and visiting the area. The Trustees will use the money to fund projects such as the rebuilding of coastal marshes, replenishment of damaged beaches, conservation of sensitive areas for ocean habitat for injured wildlife, and restoration of barrier islands and wetlands that provide natural protection from storms.

The agreement in no way affects the ultimate liability of BP or any other entity for natural resource damages or other liabilities, but provides an opportunity to help restoration get started sooner. The selection of early restoration projects will follow a public process, and will be overseen by the Trustees.

The full natural resource damage assessment process will continue until the Trustees have determined the full extent of damages caused by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. At the end of the damage assessment process, the Trustees will take into account any benefits that were realized from these early restoration projects. In addition to funding early restoration projects, BP will continue to fund the damage assessment and, together with the other responsible parties, will ultimately be obligated to compensate the public for the entire injury. BP is providing the early restoration funds voluntarily, and is not required to do so at this stage of the damage assessment process. The agreement will speed needed resources to the Gulf in advance of the completion of the assessment process.

To read the agreement, go to:

“This milestone agreement will allow us to jump-start restorationprojects that will bring Gulf Coast marshes, wetlands, and wildlifehabitat back to health after the damage they suffered as a result ofthe Deepwater Horizon spill,” said Secretary of the Interior KenSalazar. “This agreement accelerates our work on Gulf Coastrestoration and in no way limits the ability of all the NaturalResource Trustees from seeking full damages from those who areresponsible as the NRDA process moves forward.”

“One year after the largest oil spill in our history, we take amajor step forward in the recovery of the Gulf of Mexico, for theenvironment and the people who depend on it for their livelihood andenjoyment. Today’s agreement is a down payment on our promise toprotect and restore the Gulf,” said Jane Lubchenco, Ph.D., undersecretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and NOAAadministrator.

“This agreement is a great first step toward restoring ournatural resources destroyed by the BP oil spill,” said LouisianaGovernor Bobby Jindal. “We are eager to continue working withpublic, state and federal co-trustees and BP to quickly convert thisdownpayment into projects to restore our damaged coast and replace ourlost wildlife. We encourage BP to continue to address the damages fromthis spill through early restoration efforts.”

“Alabama’s natural resources are environmentally diverse and aneconomic engine for our state and nation. Ecosystem restoration isvital to the economic vitality of the Alabama Gulf Coast,” saidAlabama Governor Robert Bentley. “Obtaining funding for theserestoration projects is a major step forward in addressing the oilspill’s damage to our precious natural resources. I have the utmostconfidence that the Alabama trustees will consider and identifyprojects and use these funds toward restoring our naturalresources.”

“Since the day of the oil spill, our goals have been to makeMississippi whole and to assure that our coastal areas completelyrecover. Today’s unprecedented agreement is an important firststep but it is only the first step. Mississippi will continue thiswork and will count on our many interested citizens to contributetheir ideas and input as we all work to define the scope of theseearly projects and develop other restoration projects. Our goals havenot changed. We will remain actively engaged in these and otherprojects until the Gulf is restored and our state is made whole,”said Trudy D. Fisher, Mississippi Trustee, Executive Director,Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality.

“I’m pleased that after a year of uncertainty and concerns aboutenvironmental damages which occurred as a result of the DeepwaterHorizon explosion, Florida will be able to use this early restorationmoney to initiate greatly needed environmental restoration projects,”said Florida Department of Environmental Protection Secretary HerschelVinyard. “Because we have worked diligently to assess theenvironmental damage resulting from the spill, we are well positionedto be able to quickly begin performing important restoration projectsand use Florida’s share of the early restoration funds to assist ourcoastal communities with their continued recovery from thespill.”

“While the Texas coast was not as visibly impacted by this spill,our wetlands, bays, beaches and coastal waters were affected, and itmakes sense to invest in places that can help jumpstart and maximizerecovery of the entire Gulf,” said Carter Smith, Texas Parks andWildlife Department executive director. “There will be a publicprocess in Texas and throughout the Gulf to consider and identifyprojects that make the best use of these funds for our coastalhabitats and the fish, wildlife and people who depend uponthem.”

The $1 billion in early restoration projects will be selected andimplemented as follows:

· Each state -Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas – will select andimplement $100 million in projects;

· The FederalResource Trustees, NOAA and DOI, will each select and implement $100million in projects;

· The remaining $300million will be used for projects selected by NOAA and DOI fromproposals submitted by the State Trustees.

All projects must meet the other requirements of the FrameworkAgreement and be approved by the Trustee Council comprised of all thenatural resource trustees.

To read the early restoration agreement, clickhere.

# # #Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0411/53452.html

I’d say the time passed a long while back, but that’s just me. DV

By: Sen. Lisa Murkowski

April 20, 2011 04:51 AM EDT

It’s now one year since the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. Eleven lives were lost in that tragic disaster, and oil gushed uncontrollably for the next 87 days. These terrible events transfixed our nation – highlighting failures within industry and government.

Even before the well was capped, the need for a substantive legislative response was obvious. Instead, many reactions were just that – reactionary. Finger-pointing, counter productive ideas and harsh rhetoric flooded Capitol Hill. Some early suspicions and later conclusions reported by the media – whether about Gulf beaches or seafood – proved off the mark and added to the economic damage.

Meanwhile, an additional challenge has now emerged. As oil skyrockets above $105 a barrel, the emotional shock we felt last summer has been replaced by pain at the pump – and real damage to our economy. Americans now wonder what Congress will do to increase the domestic supply of oil – if not to bring prices down, then to at least keep them from rising further.

These challenges may appear to demand conflicting solutions, but they offer Congress a unique opportunity to pass meaningful energy legislation.

There are clear needs to improve the safety of offshore operations and produce more of our own tremendous oil and gas resources. Those priorities are in the same sentence because they must be part of the same policy. We need to address them together – the sooner the better.

For my part, I am committed to working with the members of the Senate Energy Committee, including Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.), to advance just that type of legislation. It is my hope that we will build on two bills that passed our committee last Congress – each with strong bipartisan support – to develop a better package.

The first set of provisions, in the Outer Continental Shelf Reform Act, creates a number of important worker safety and spill-prevention measures. That bill passed our committee unanimously last June, only to die at Majority Leader Harry Reid’s desk.

It was frustrating and a waste. But we now have the opportunity to revisit the bill, cut unnecessary or obsolete sections from it and add new provisions based on lessons learned.

One positive to emerge is the opportunity to make our regulations more cost-effective. We’ve learned that chartering helicopters to and from offshore rigs consumes the majority of our regulators’ expenditures. Other nations simply send their inspectors to rigs via empty seats on industry helicopters. Overly stringent rules about “traveling on private aircraft” have led to unintended consequences. Meanwhile, budgets have been needlessly consumed by transportation costs, rather than with more and better inspections. It’s time to fix this and use the money on safety.

And there is no point ensuring offshore safety if companies aren’t allowed to drill there. That’s why legislation outlining new rules for the oil and gas industry must move concurrently with a serious effort to increase offshore production.

The need for greater supply is achingly obvious with prices now above $100 a barrel. We have to reduce our oil consumption. But under even the rosiest scenario, we’re going to need a lot of oil for a long time. For the sake of our economy, it has to remain affordable.

Domestic production keeps our money here – circulating in our own economy, instead of sending it to countries that are not our friends.This increased domestic production could fund research and development of renewables and also help pay down the deficit.

The U.S. is still competitive among major oil-producing regimes. The immense size of our resource base and our current fiscal structure combine to attract hundreds of billions of dollars in oil and gas-related commerce each year. But this will all go away if companies cannot access U.S. resources or if they can’t rely on stable taxes and regulations.

I’m committed to eliminating the growing uncertainty in those areas and cutting down the risks that drilling can pose to our safety and the environment.

We can honor the lives of those lost on this anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon explosion by putting aside the partisan talking points and passing legislation that ensures the offshore oil and gas industry grows safely, competitively and sustainably.

That’s the job of Congress. We need to do it.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) is the ranking member on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://abcnews.go.com/US/fishermen-sick-gulf-oil-spill-cleanup-abc-news/story?id=13399130

ABC NewsInvestigation

BP Hired MoreThan 10,000 Fishermen to Help After Deepwater Horizon

BY MATT GUTMAN,MARK ABDELMALEK AND BEN FORER

April 19,2011

In the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oils pill, an army of fishermen, 10,000 strong, joined the cleanup effort. Today, almost a year after the spill, many say they are suffering from debilitating health effects that studies suggest are consistent with prolonged exposure to chemicals in oil.

An ABC News investigation found that many workers were told they did not need respirators, advice BP received from the government, and that no government agency tested the air the workers were breathing out at sea until a month after the spill.

BP continues to insist that “no one should be concerned about their health being harmed by the oil.” In fact, BP says, “The monitoring results showed that the levels generally were similar to background conditions – in other words, concentrations that would have been expected before or in the absence of thespill.”

Tell that to Todd Rook, age 45, who says he had pneumonia four times in the last eight months and never once before the oil spill.

Or to Malcolm Coco, 42, who says he has had blood in his urine and suffered from chest pains and memory loss.

Or ask Reba Burnett, whose husband Levy’s job was to find oil, ride through it and disperse it. Reba says her husband is just”different” from the fit person he was a year ago.
“I think sometimes he’s just blank. I don’t know if people understand what I mean when I say just blank.”

BP hired fishermen as part of the Vessels of Opportunity Program, where they took their own boats out to sea to stop the oil before it hit the shore. There were more than 3,000 of these boats out there- that’s more than 10,000 proud fishermen riding through the oil, burning it, skimming it, laying down those booms, for hours and days- sometimes weeks out at sea without coming home-all to save their precious waters and livelihood.

And now they’re speaking out for the first time, but they may just be the latest victims of oil spills. Only two weeks ago, a major study in the New England Journal of Medicine reviewed 26 studies from the eight biggest oil spills around the world. And in a recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Gina Solomon,co-director of the Occupational and Environmental Health Program at the University of California, San Francisco says, “The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico poses direct threats to human health from inhalation or dermal contact with the oil and dispersant chemicals.”

“Always coughing — wake up in the middle of the night coughing.”That’s how Mike Fraser, who captained his own boat during the relief effort, describes his life after the spill.
His wife Wendy says she is worried. “When you look at him he’s never smoked a day in his life. Someone who doesn’t smoke should not have respiratory problems that he has now. He didn’t have it before.”

Respiratory symptoms aren’t surprising to medical experts contacted by ABC News. In a 2002 spill off the coast of Spain, cleanup workers were twice as likely to have breathing problems as non-cleanup workers were. In another study, workers who worked more than twenty days on the oil were four times as likely to have breathing problems.

Solomon says, “These are the kind of symptoms that are being reported across the Gulf coast. This is very consistent with what we’ve seen reported after the Exxon Valdez oil spill and other oil spills around the world.”

How Can Oil Make You Sick?

Turns out there are over 200 chemicals in oil, some more dangerous than others.
One of them is benzene — a Group 1 carcinogen according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer. It is in the same class as radioactive iodine, arsenic, and asbestos.

Dr. Michael Harbut, anoncologist who sees Gulf patients said, “I think there’s a fairly high likelihood that we’ll see some increase in some cancers in some of the populations with exposure to the chemicals.” Harbut is Director of the Environmental Cancer Program at the Karmanos Cancer Institute.

But there’s also particulate matter — tiny particles carrying dangerous oil components that can get in the lungs and cause serious breathing problems.

“This is nothing new,”said Harbut. “These are well-known health effects and the science is very strong.”

For fishermen like Levy Burnett the prospect of not remembering their past torments them more than the possibility of cancer. Memory loss has been associated with exposure to chemicals in oil like toluene and xylene.

Burnett said he started forgetting important details about his life. He called his pastor and in the middle of conversation forgot whom he was talking to. Burnett said he needed to call his wife, Reba, to put it all together. She thought he was playing a joke on her.

“I said, ‘No, Reba I’m serious. Who’s Matt Dickinson?’ And shesays, ‘Well, he’s our pastor,'” Burnet told ABC News. “And I should know who Matt Dickinson is because I’m a deacon at my church.”

Fisherman Malcolm Coco also suffers from memory loss.

“For me it’s more like a short term memory loss, you forget what you’re doing when you’re doing things and going about your daily routine,” said Coco.

Breathing problems, fear of cancer, memory loss – these are among the symptoms reported by fisherman despite months of reassurances from the government and BP that workers were safe.

What were BP and the government doing to protect the workers out at sea?

ABC News has been told that workers did not receive respirators from BP to protect them from breathing possibly-toxic air because the company was following advice from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The agency in charge of worker safety did conduct some air quality tests, but said it thought the respirators might do more harm than good.

“They pull very much on the heart, on the lungs; they are physical burdens if workers are already sick, if they’re smokers in many cases it would be dangerous to give them respirators,” said David Michaels, Assistant Secretary of Labor for OSHA, on C-SPAN in June 2010.

Coco was part of a team that lit fires to burn the oil off the surface of the water. “I was with the burn team,” Coco told ABC News. “It was just spewing black and black everywhere.”

“Those small boats that the fishermen were operating were much closer to the water surface. Much closer to the oil surface,” said Dr. Solomon.

How Did The Government Know Whether the Air Was Safe?

After sifting through hundreds of pages of government data, we ultimately found that no government agency tested the air the workers out at sea were breathing until a month after the spill. Yet most of the fisherman charged out within the first few days following the accident.

While the Environmental Protection Agency conducted extensive air quality tests onshore, the same cannot be said offshore. The first offshore EPA air quality test was not performed until May 17, nearly a month after the spill, and the EPA conducted offshore air quality tests on four days over a six-day period.

Technically, the EPA does not have jurisdiction over the air quality in the Gulf and released a statement on its website that said it would let the Coast Guard and OSHA handle offshore safety. The statement said, “EPA does not anticipate conducting additional off-shore sampling but will continue its sampling and monitoring efforts on land.”

Although OSHA did conduct offshore tests for a variety of oilcomponents, OSHA didn’t start testing until nearly 5 weeks after the spill. The Coast Guard arrived even later on the scene to test air quality — nearly 2 months after the spill.

Most worrisome to experts today is the fact that the government did no offshore testing for small, dangerous particles called particulate matter, and if BP has done any such testing, it has not published its findings.

In the first month after the accident, every government agency was relying on BP for offshore air quality testing. It turns out data released by BP one month after the spill reveals BP apparently only tested for two oil contaminants offshore. And small particles or oil aerosols apparently were not tested.

“We do know from previous studies that these kinds of oil aerosols can cause a powerful inflammatory reaction in the airways and can make people very sick,” Dr. Solomon told ABCNews.

Offshore Testing Timeline, Date Started:
Deepwater Horizon Accident: April 20
BP: April 28
EPA: May 17
OSHA: May 24

Coast Guard: June14

ABC News confronted Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson hoping to find answers. When asked whether the EPA should have taken more of a lead in testing the air offshore in the days after the spill instead of five weeks later, Jackson disagreed.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “[The] EPA is not an expert in occupational safety and worker safety, that’s OSHA’s job.”In fact, Administrator Jackson is correct. The EPA does not have jurisdiction over air quality on the Gulf of Mexico.

OSHA declined ABC News’ numerous interview requests and BP’s chief operations for Gulf cleanup, Mike Utsler, said he didn’t know whether anyone had become ill due to the spill.

Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, who led the cleanup effort in the gulf, says that if it happened again he would be more judicious in employing Vessels of Opportunity.
“I think I’d be very judicious in employing Vessels of Opportunity in the future,” Allen said. “I think they can be used effectively, but I think we need to understand the environment they’re operating in, the impact on the people and the impact on the boats and I would say do we have this right before we take a step forward.”

One-year later and with nowhere to turn in the gulf, these fishermen simply wait to see if they’ll be among those contacted to be part of the government’s study on cleanup workers.
But for now these fishermen and their families move forward with only each other to count on, in search of closure and afraid of what the future may bring.

“What I would like the outcome to be is for us to be told the truth,” said Burnett. “Just tell us what happened to us and then we can move on, seek whatever we have to do to try to get better. Move on with our lives.”

Special thanks to Richard Charter.