Tomorrow marks the 2-year anniversary of the largest oil spill in U.S. history, BP’s Deepwater Horizon explosion.
It killed 11 people and over 87 days, spewed over 200 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico, wreaking havoc on coastal communities, commercial fisheries, tourism destinations and wildlife across the region.
Although BP has pronounced the clean-up is complete and the Gulf restored through lots of television ads and announcements, that’s not the case at all.
Breaking news today: another BP offshore rig suffered a nearly identical blow-out two years before, but the company concealed it from US regulators.
Today, lawyers from both sides of the case submitted a proposed settlement with a US District Judge. In March, BP agreed to pay $7.8 billion to resolve private plaintiffs’ claims for economic loss, property damage and injuries. It doesn’t cover federal or state government claims.
The settlement of private cases raises the question whether the government prosecutions will be resolved without a trial and without jail time for executives.
Is the Gulf Healthy?
On the occasion of the anniversary of the spill, scientists gathered at 17th annual Tulane Environmental Law Summit.
They showed recent photographs depicting alarming deformities in marine life: shrimp without eyes, fish with oozing cancerous tumors, eyeless crabs lacking claws with holes in their shells … in areas declared as "safe" for fishing and human consumption. Coral life is steadily being depleted.
Crabs have holes in their shells, shells with all the points burned off so all the spikes on their shells and claws are gone, misshapen shells, and crabs that are dying from within … they are still alive, but you open them up and they smell like they’ve been dead for a week," says Darla Rooks, a lifelong fisherperson in Louisiana.
As in the Exxon Valdez spill, where long-term impacts are still being felt, impacts on wildlife take time to emerge.
After the spill, testing was done on fish and the water beneath the surface, but the chemical dispersants, which contain a slew of toxic heavy metals, sank into the sediment, slowly affecting the ecosystem.
It can take several years as species go through reproductive cycles to see the impact. Embryos are taking longer to develop or don’t hatch at all, and those that are born often have malformed hearts.
Fisherman report that the 2010 oyster harvest was the worst in 40 years with catches down as much as 75%. Crab catches are small, the brown shrimp catch is down two-thirds and white shrimp is the "worst in memory" … "nonexistent." The region has historically supplied 40% of the seafood consumed in the US.
Furthermore, "The heavy metals known to be present in crude oil are being ignored in the testing of seafood," says Dr. Patricia Williams, PhD, Diplomate of the American Board of Toxicology, Associate Professor, Coordinator of Toxicology Research Laboratories, Pontchartrain Institute for Environmental Sciences, University of New Orleans. "Only very low amounts of chemicals are needed to disrupt the normal endocrine balance of both humans and animals," she says. "Heavy metal testing in BP Oil clean-up workers has documented increased arsenic levels in 24 hour urine specimens."
"The future chronic health effects from consumption of contaminated seafood and biomagnification along the food chain are yet to be realized in both sea life and humans. Chronic effects may take years to present and may elude an analysis of their causal origins," she warns.
Read the full article.
Last October, the Gulf Coast Ecosystem Restoration Task Force, released a strategy for reversing the decline of the region’s ecosystem.
Drilling in the Arctic
Meanwhile, new safety recommendation have yet to be approved by Congress.
And the Obama Administration has approved exploratory drilling in the Arctic starting this summer for the first time in decades.
While Republicans complained that Gulf oil drilling didn’t resume fast enough after the BP spill and that Obama’s 5-Year Offshore Drilling Plan goes nowhere near far enough, Shell has won approval to drill in the Arctic.
Every scientist and expert says there is absolutely no knowledge of how to clean up a spill in the Arctic.
U.S. Coast Guard officials have repeatedly explained the resources to clean up an oil spill in the Arctic Ocean simply don’t exist. Commandant Admiral Robert Papp told Congress the federal government has "zero" spill response capability in the Arctic."
"….Shame on the Obama administration for allowing politics to trump science by approving such an unrealistic plan to drill in the Beaufort Sea," says Cindy Shogan, Executive Director, Alaska Wilderness League.
Send a letter to President Obama asking him not to allow drilling to proceed:
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