Topic: Deepwater Horizon

[Nichi]

Some significant Breaking News for us who are watching the birds...

The National Wildlife Federation invoked the Freedom of Information Act to the US Fish and Wildlife Agency, per the impact on the Gulf Birds. Curiously, Fish and Wildlife's data-total only includes half of what the International Bird Rescue has been posting (cited here) number-wise, but their listing of species is more thorough. (Perhaps the totals are older than what IBR has been citing...)

http://www.fws.gov/home/dhoilspill/pdfs/Bird%20Data%20Species%20Spreadsheet%2009142010.pdf

The hardest hit have been the Brown Pelicans, Laughing Gulls, and Northern Gannets. There are many unmentioned-by-IBR species, and many surprises. For example:

~Loons and Mallards are already involved, whereas one might not have expected to see that until well into the Fall migration.

~There are Owls and a few songbirds on the list (Mourning Dove, Mockingbird, American Redstart, Pigeons, Swallows, Purple Martins, some types of Sparrow, Kingbird, and Common Nighthawk).

I'm waiting to see an explanation regarding the discrepancy between the 2 sources: IBR and US Fish and Wildlife. With the latter, being a government agency, one becomes accustomed to the "cover-up factor". Then again, IBR bases its data on BP's own reports, and who better to conceal the facts than them?

IBR's current count:

2070 captured alive
1208 rehabilitated and released
5939 collected dead


Of sporting interest, Canadian Geese are also involved. I'm curious to see if Canada comes forth regarding those numbers (which are low, at present). Technically, the US has an International Treaty with Canada to protect the Canadian Geese...
But hell, the US has hardly protected its own, so I'm absolutely fantasizing that any legal action will make any difference here. As a matter of fact, BP has announced it will not cover Alabama's oil spill claims. Why? Because, they said, Alabama sued them.

If you are interested in any of the truth regarding the chain of events in the whole saga, read the local websites - not the government- or BP-sponsored sites. For example, in the past couple of weeks, a couple of fish-kills occured, and except for the local sites and blogs, I can't find anything on them. The whole thing is swept under the rug.

[Nichi]

http://www.youtube.com/user/jamescfox#p/u/1/g0o-68fW5pY

[Nichi]

Third Fish Kill in Plaquemines Parrish, Louisiana in Recent Days

No oxygen in the water.

[Nichi]

Fighting a cover-up as it's evolving, and what goes into it:

This site, owned by a Louisiana lawyer (not on BP's payroll), has been keeping up with current events.

[Nichi]

Fighting a cover-up as it's evolving:

Federal agencies intimidate a Channel 3 News Reporter here..

[Michael]

Plenty of scope here for daring independent reporters.
Amazing tho - I expect this is all BP, and as it pays so much to the state, and it's people, you won't get far.

[Nichi]

Travel writers visiting beaches on BP dime
Louis Cooper
September 26, 2010

What does it take to get a half dozen travel writers to Navarre Beach?

This weekend, it took a check from BP and a white stretch limousine.
Six travel writers — chauffeured around in a limo — are on Navarre Beach this weekend to get the word out that this summer's BP oil spill is over, and the beach, along with the rest of Santa Rosa County, is open for tourism.

Using money from BP, the Santa Rosa County Tourist Development Council hosted a familiarization — or "fam" — tour for select out-of-town reporters, showing them the pristine beaches and other assets of the county.
"We've had travel writers come often, but this is an actual 'fam' trip, a planned package of events to show them the whole county," said Kate Wilkes, executive director of the council. "Having the money from BP enabled us to do this."

The tour was covered with part of $551,000 from BP, some of which also funded a voucher program which gave gift cards to tourists who stayed in local accommodations and this weekend's sand sculpture event on Navarre Beach.

The writers — who are staying at the Summerwinds condominium — come from media outlets like Baton Rouge Parents, the Houston Tribune, Southern Hospitality Magazine, www.Planet EyeTraveler.com, www.UPTake.com and www.JustSayGo.com, among others.
Ron Stern, editor of www.JustSayGo.com based in Colorado, said he will tell his readers that the oil hype has been overblown.

"What the national media has been saying is totally untrue, for the most part, and blown totally out of proportion," Stern said. "What they're going to get from me is the truth. You can come down here, and you're not going to get oil on your feet or tar balls on your shoes. ... I haven't seen anything in the sand other than sand, and I've been swimming in the water."
Apryl Thomas, a freelance writer from Athens, Ga., has written about the oil spill on the coast for several websites and publications, including Southern Hospitality.

"I knew the spill was kind of blown up. I had done many articles when this happened. The way it was first covered in the national media, you honestly thought, 'It's gone,' but once I did a little research and calling, I felt like it is important to let people know everything is good to go."

All of the reporters who are visiting have agreed to write something about the area. Although the trip is paid for by BP and is intended to combat the misconceptions created by the spill, Wilkes said she doesn't think oil will be a big part of the tour.

"From now on in, we're not going to mention oil, unless it comes back," Wilkes said. "In our advertisements, the message is that the beaches are beautiful, but, also, it's that there is more to do."

The writers arrived Friday and are scheduled to leave today. They visited the new Navarre Fishing Pier, the Gulf Breeze Zoo, Hidden Creek Golf Club in Navarre, Adventures Unlimited north of Milton and the Rufus Hayes Training Stables ranch in Milton.

http://www.pnj.com/article/20100926/NEWS01/9260329/1056/NEWS10/Travel-writers-visiting-beaches-on-BP-dime

There it is.

[Nichi]

Bird rescue experts kept on sideline after gulf oil spill

By Craig Pittman, St Petersburg, Florida Times staff writer
In Print: Sunday, September 5, 2010

The Deepwater Horizon disaster may have killed thousands of birds in the Gulf of Mexico and no one knows about it, say experienced wildlife rescuers. The reason: The experts were not allowed to go look for live oiled birds in the areas where they were most likely to be found.

Instead they were assigned to less urgent duties, or never called in at all.

Meanwhile the job of searching for birds in need of rescue went to inexperienced federal and state employees — fisheries biologists, firefighters, people who had never touched a bird before, much less one coated in oil.

One pair of federal employees spent two hours pursuing a single oiled-up pelican that eluded them every time. They gave up when night fell.

"This is the worst screwed-up response I've ever been on," said Rebecca Dmytryk, the founder of a group called WildRescue, who has worked on saving birds from oil spills in Louisiana, Ecuador and California.

"I'm just at a loss for why this was allowed to happen," said Lee Fox of Save Our Seabirds in Sarasota. "I thought these people were on the side of the wildlife."

To the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the assignment is called "wildlife reconnaissance and capture activity,'' said Jeff Fleming of the federal agency. Rescuing oiled birds is "one of the tasks our biologists typically perform in a response such as this. It's a common role our trained biologists fill."

He said the agency must handle the bird rescue duties itself, with an assist from other federal and state officials, because of "our migratory bird responsibilities under the law." Federal law has given special protection to migratory birds since 1918.

That leaves people like Jay Holcomb on the sidelines — even though Holcomb, president of the International Bird Rescue Research Center, has been saving birds from oil spills since 1971. During the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill, Holcomb oversaw the entire bird search and rescue program in Prince William Sound, the largest of its kind ever attempted, involving about 50 boats. He has also worked on spills in Africa, Spain and the Galapagos Islands.

Yet on this spill, instead of searching for birds in need of rescue, "we've been assigned to respond to hotline calls," Holcomb said. "We've been completely kept out of it."

BP hired a 4-year-old Texas company called Wildlife Response Services to oversee the rescue and rehabilitation of birds, turtles and any other animals hurt by the spill. The owner, Rhonda Murgatroyd, starred in a television ad for BP touting the oil company's response to the spill.

Murgatroyd said she has worked on spills across the gulf coast for the past decade. She said federal agency employees were assigned bird rescue duties because Holcomb and the other wildlife rehabilitation experts "didn't have the personnel to go out and rescue all the birds."

It was more important for those experts to oversee cleaning the oiled birds and helping them recover, she said, a position that Fleming echoed.

Murgatroyd is convinced the system she set up has worked well.

"I don't know why anyone would question that," she said.

As of Friday, the joint BP-Coast Guard task force reported they had collected 7,568 birds, 4,212 of them visibly oiled. More than 5,500 were dead. Not one was collected from offshore.

Dmytryk said she and her co-workers begged for permission to go out to the other offshore rigs in the gulf to look for sick and injured birds that were too weak to make it to shore. But they were turned down. Not even Holcomb could get permission.

"They said for safety reasons we couldn't do it," Holcomb said. "There was not a lot of interest in using our expertise."

Instead, Dmytryk was assigned to scour beaches and marshes to collect birds that were dead already, which she regarded as a waste of her experience and knowledge. Holcomb gave up and instead oversaw the cleaning and rehabilitation of birds brought in by the federal employees.

The same thing happened to Heidi Stout, a veterinarian who is director of Tri-State Bird Rescue.

"I'm part of the rehab effort," she said. "I'm not involved in rescue work. That's being overseen by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service."

Some wildlife rescue experts didn't even get to do that much.

In April, when BP first began hiring people to deal with the spill, Murgatroyd called Fox, a Wimauma resident who oversaw the rescue of seabirds during the 1993 tanker spill in Tampa Bay and then wrote a manual for how to handle oiled-up birds.

Fox said she was told to get her gear ready to roll to the Florida Panhandle at a moment's notice. She packed up a van with everything she would need: medical equipment, towels and tubs, plus 75 cages and lots of Dawn dish washing liquid. She also trained volunteers from different Florida wildlife groups so they too would be ready to step in and help.

Four months have passed and "I've never heard another word," Fox said.

The same thing happened to Sharon Schmaltz of Wildlife Rehab and Education in Texas, who has spent 26 years working spills around the gulf.

"We never did get mobilized anywhere," she said. "We were told to stay put."

Instead the Fish and Wildlife Service sent its own employees into the field to capture oiled birds. One of those assigned to the job: Kayla DiBenedetto, a fisheries biologist who had been studying sturgeon.

Although she took some training classes on how to deal with oiled birds, it didn't really prepare her for the challenge.

"With the oiled birds that could walk and swim, I'd make a quick run at them to take them by surprise," DiBenedetto wrote in a first-person account posted on the Defenders of Wildlife website. "If they saw me coming, they'd run into the water and start swimming away. I found myself imagining it from the bird's perspective: If some large creature in a white suit was chasing me, of course I'd run, even if that large creature was saying, 'I'm here to help, I promise!' "

But wildlife rescue experts say chasing the birds with a net is the wrong way to catch an oiled bird. It adds to the stress the birds are already feeling.

The right way, the way that causes the bird far less stress, is to lure it in close enough to grab. An experienced rescue expert can lure a pelican close with just about anything. Fox once caught one by fluttering a $20 bill at it.

After seeing photos of how the Fish and Wildlife Service employees are chasing down the birds, Fox said, "I'm up to my nostrils drowning in frustration." Because of the way the rescue was mishandled, she said, "there are probably hundreds of thousands of birds dead already out there."

http://www.tampabay.com/news/environment/wildlife/article1119315.ece

[Nichi]

There's a story afoot about seabirds and swans turning up dead, sick, and paralyzed at Tampa Bay and Longboat Key, Florida ... The scientist examining them "wonders" if it's connected to the corexit and other toxins connected to the oil spill...

I got to read the article once, and since then cannot pull it up on any of the many sites the item is coming up on, per Google search. Likewise, the article did not make it to a conventionally-recognized news site (and those are easy to download, I may add.) So until I can find a conventional site, can't offer the direct quotes.

[Nichi]

IBR's current count:

2070 captured alive
1208 rehabilitated and released
5939 collected dead

5 days later:

2075 captured alive
1225 rehabilitated and released
6050 collected dead

I don't believe these numbers - the dead are probably into 6 or 7 figures.
But it's all cloaked, and per the post included, it's apparent that US Fish and Wildlife is indeed dealing with International Treaties.  Frankly, it seems like perfect karma for Canada to sue the US.   Geaux Canada, and any other country that invested in their wildlife!

Bird rescue experts kept on sideline after gulf oil spill

By Craig Pittman, St Petersburg, Florida Times staff writer
In Print: Sunday, September 5, 2010

The Deepwater Horizon disaster may have killed thousands of birds in the Gulf of Mexico and no one knows about it, say experienced wildlife rescuers. The reason: The experts were not allowed to go look for live oiled birds in the areas where they were most likely to be found.

Instead they were assigned to less urgent duties, or never called in at all.

Meanwhile the job of searching for birds in need of rescue went to inexperienced federal and state employees — fisheries biologists, firefighters, people who had never touched a bird before, much less one coated in oil.

One pair of federal employees spent two hours pursuing a single oiled-up pelican that eluded them every time. They gave up when night fell.

"This is the worst screwed-up response I've ever been on," said Rebecca Dmytryk, the founder of a group called WildRescue, who has worked on saving birds from oil spills in Louisiana, Ecuador and California.

"I'm just at a loss for why this was allowed to happen," said Lee Fox of Save Our Seabirds in Sarasota. "I thought these people were on the side of the wildlife."

To the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the assignment is called "wildlife reconnaissance and capture activity,'' said Jeff Fleming of the federal agency. Rescuing oiled birds is "one of the tasks our biologists typically perform in a response such as this. It's a common role our trained biologists fill."

He said the agency must handle the bird rescue duties itself, with an assist from other federal and state officials, because of "our migratory bird responsibilities under the law." Federal law has given special protection to migratory birds since 1918.

That leaves people like Jay Holcomb on the sidelines — even though Holcomb, president of the International Bird Rescue Research Center, has been saving birds from oil spills since 1971. During the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill, Holcomb oversaw the entire bird search and rescue program in Prince William Sound, the largest of its kind ever attempted, involving about 50 boats. He has also worked on spills in Africa, Spain and the Galapagos Islands.

Yet on this spill, instead of searching for birds in need of rescue, "we've been assigned to respond to hotline calls," Holcomb said. "We've been completely kept out of it."

BP hired a 4-year-old Texas company called Wildlife Response Services to oversee the rescue and rehabilitation of birds, turtles and any other animals hurt by the spill. The owner, Rhonda Murgatroyd, starred in a television ad for BP touting the oil company's response to the spill.

Murgatroyd said she has worked on spills across the gulf coast for the past decade. She said federal agency employees were assigned bird rescue duties because Holcomb and the other wildlife rehabilitation experts "didn't have the personnel to go out and rescue all the birds."

It was more important for those experts to oversee cleaning the oiled birds and helping them recover, she said, a position that Fleming echoed.

Murgatroyd is convinced the system she set up has worked well.

"I don't know why anyone would question that," she said.

As of Friday, the joint BP-Coast Guard task force reported they had collected 7,568 birds, 4,212 of them visibly oiled. More than 5,500 were dead. Not one was collected from offshore.

Dmytryk said she and her co-workers begged for permission to go out to the other offshore rigs in the gulf to look for sick and injured birds that were too weak to make it to shore. But they were turned down. Not even Holcomb could get permission.

"They said for safety reasons we couldn't do it," Holcomb said. "There was not a lot of interest in using our expertise."

Instead, Dmytryk was assigned to scour beaches and marshes to collect birds that were dead already, which she regarded as a waste of her experience and knowledge. Holcomb gave up and instead oversaw the cleaning and rehabilitation of birds brought in by the federal employees.

The same thing happened to Heidi Stout, a veterinarian who is director of Tri-State Bird Rescue.

"I'm part of the rehab effort," she said. "I'm not involved in rescue work. That's being overseen by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service."

Some wildlife rescue experts didn't even get to do that much.

In April, when BP first began hiring people to deal with the spill, Murgatroyd called Fox, a Wimauma resident who oversaw the rescue of seabirds during the 1993 tanker spill in Tampa Bay and then wrote a manual for how to handle oiled-up birds.

Fox said she was told to get her gear ready to roll to the Florida Panhandle at a moment's notice. She packed up a van with everything she would need: medical equipment, towels and tubs, plus 75 cages and lots of Dawn dish washing liquid. She also trained volunteers from different Florida wildlife groups so they too would be ready to step in and help.

Four months have passed and "I've never heard another word," Fox said.

The same thing happened to Sharon Schmaltz of Wildlife Rehab and Education in Texas, who has spent 26 years working spills around the gulf.

"We never did get mobilized anywhere," she said. "We were told to stay put."

Instead the Fish and Wildlife Service sent its own employees into the field to capture oiled birds. One of those assigned to the job: Kayla DiBenedetto, a fisheries biologist who had been studying sturgeon.

Although she took some training classes on how to deal with oiled birds, it didn't really prepare her for the challenge.

"With the oiled birds that could walk and swim, I'd make a quick run at them to take them by surprise," DiBenedetto wrote in a first-person account posted on the Defenders of Wildlife website. "If they saw me coming, they'd run into the water and start swimming away. I found myself imagining it from the bird's perspective: If some large creature in a white suit was chasing me, of course I'd run, even if that large creature was saying, 'I'm here to help, I promise!' "

But wildlife rescue experts say chasing the birds with a net is the wrong way to catch an oiled bird. It adds to the stress the birds are already feeling.

The right way, the way that causes the bird far less stress, is to lure it in close enough to grab. An experienced rescue expert can lure a pelican close with just about anything. Fox once caught one by fluttering a $20 bill at it.

After seeing photos of how the Fish and Wildlife Service employees are chasing down the birds, Fox said, "I'm up to my nostrils drowning in frustration." Because of the way the rescue was mishandled, she said, "there are probably hundreds of thousands of birds dead already out there."

http://www.tampabay.com/news/environment/wildlife/article1119315.ece

[Nichi]

This is from one of the local-focused Facebook pages regarding the spill. This page is one of the more moderate ones. I just thought it interesting to observe what the locals are saying.


Save the Gulf of Mexico ‎"What’s been happening in our community is what happened in Valdez." - Press-Register

Stress of oil spill still lingering in Orange Beach
blog.al.com
Councilman Jeff Silvers receives phone calls in the middle of the night. The citizens on the line tell him that BP is spraying oil dispersant over Perdido Pass “from an airplane with no lights,” he said, or that workers on boats are covertly dumping it into the water.
3 hours ago ·

Valerie Sargent Martin  What I don't get is how helpless the leadership is. It's like they're afraid to test their own soil, water, and air to confirm their suspicions. If there's any good use of taxpayer money, making sure you're not living in toxic conditions would be one.

Cathy Jones They are all afraid of the truth.
3 hours ago ·

Elaine Silva   and what about the news blackout about all of this? I see NOTHING on Canuck news at all, WTF is wrong? They've probably been told NOT to REPORT on it as people from other states and countries might see and get upset!
3 hours ago ·

Johnny Robinson   An emergency survey conducted door-to-door in coastal Alabama confirmed elevated levels of depression and stress following the oil spill and also detected possible effects, such as respiratory ailments, according to a preliminary report. ~ ...In the same write up, Councilwoman Pattisue Carranza, a pharmacist, said that she had seen more and more people seeking prescriptions and medications this summer for “thick throats.”...You want to be honest with people and tell them this is what’s going on, but you don’t want to alarm them.” Does anyone else see something VERY wrong with this??!!

Shannon Riley   this DOES not surprise me at all.... and the fact that they are doing it from an airplane with no lights. omg!!... WHAT'S DONE IN THE DARK SHALL COME TO THE LIGHT!!!!! this company is ridiculous. ACCOUNTABILITY ..where is it??!! why isn't any one enforcing it?

Wayne Cameron   Many of the cleanup workers from the Exxon Valdez spill are dead now from cancer. Exposure to the benzene in crude dramatically increases your risk of cancer. The mix of Corexit and crude is way worse because the Corexit acts as a transport to allow the crude to penetrate deep into tissue. The folks down there who took the bait "big money" to join the cleanup crews have traded 20 to 30 years of their lives for a few thousand dollars. I'm sure they had to sign waivers, too. Very sad, indeed.

Susan Cox    We need our leaders to be diligent and NEVER WAIVER from finding out the answers, the truth, and listening to ideas and demand action for the sake of our people and our precious environment.

Judy Thompson Who now is doing the beach clean ups?

Ronni Taylor Remember this is all because of Corporate-Dominated Capitalism. We are being poisoned because we won't stand up and demand an end to the Corporations controlling our society! Wake up Sheeple, Corporate Capitalism must end!

Pete Leoni    Oh Big yeah, then we get government communism, no thanks

Dana Barnum   This will have lasting repercussions who will be responsible for that? Who will monitor that? It is far from over.

Sue Smith   I can't stress enough, especially before the elections, that you research how YOUR state representatives have voted over the years for gas and oil legislation and who's leading in lobbying monies. The TV ads tell one story, but how they voted is FACT. Unfortunately, I think many of you will be very amazed who is working for YOU and who is working for the corporations.

Laura Cooke   Lies, deceit and more cover up....ALL BS!!!!

Marsha Pivert Dale     Wayne, I'm not sure that's true. One report says they are all dead. This one says their health was studied but not published http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/06/29/96782/health-of-exxon-valdez-cleanup.html
The question is why haven't these ...problems been addressed?

April Triplett   My question is, my family went swimming in the gulf in Destin. are they going to get sick?

Mary Anne Ruppert    Good observations and comments. In SW FL we have been fortunate not to have any visual dirty oil in our water. I guess time will be the Big factor in wildlife sustainability. in the meantime Whole Foods has an intensive program to assure fresh seafood.

Michael Reese    I can't believe people are swimming in the Gulf at all. It's like they haven't even heard of the spill. For example, who are the idiots walking barefoot on the beach through all the crap in the photo? It blows my mind!

René O'Deay Bad News from Bayou Barataria.
http://bpoilslick.blogspot.com/2010/06/bad-news-from-bayou-barataraia.html
Reports from people living along the bayou, of helicopters flying over at night spraying, with no lights. black copters. more reports on... this can't find right now from last June.   One day there's oil in the bayou and the next, after the copters sprayed, none on surface.... but.....The big copters flew over our house on Westbank at night, running very low and with no lights. not long after that my big healthy tomato plants just up and died, shriveled up. tomatoes that were on it spoiled. still tried to grow, but no more tomatoes.
Here's about a lawsuit, with a little more info on this.
http://bpoilslick.blogspot.com/2010/07/lawsuit-targets-bps-use-of-corexit.html

Nikki Oldaker  Hello - where is the EPA?

Colleen A Shea    heard that is happening @ Perdido too, could'nt get a date on it.

Julie Peters-Haymes   In bed with BP along with the President.

Margaret Collier   THE PEOPLE OF THE GULF COAST DO NOT MATTER ,WE ARE JUST LIKE OUR FISH IN THE GULF KILL US WE ARE NOTHING

Steve Drinkard   http://www.stevedrinkard.com/archives/150 Authorities should implement precautions in new Gulf of Mexico developments due to increasing earthquake risks.

[Nichi]

BP educates Terrebonne students on oil spill
By JENNA FARMER

Over the last five months, BP has had a prominent presence along the Gulf Coast at various local government meetings and outreach centers - but this time, BP has made its way into the Terrebonne Parish school system.

Eighth grade students of Oaklawn Junior High School were able to sit in on one of four scheduled science demonstrations last Wednesday prepared by BP and Gary Ott of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The demonstrations were designed to better educate the students about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and give them the most current information available.

"The primary purpose [of the demonstration] is to inform and educate students on the methods used to clean up the oil in the Gulf and the wetlands and marshes," Janella Newsome, BP media liaison said in a press release. "It's also to dispel myths about dispersants, subsurface oil and seafood safety."

According to BP representatives, it won't be the last demonstration.

"This is the first session of many going on," Charles Gaiennie, a BP representative said at Oaklawn's library last week. "We are starting here in Terrebonne Parish with eighth grade because they are the first of school age kids that have a defined science class. We wanted to reach out to schools that are near communities that have been directly impacted by the oil spill, so Terrebonne was a good choice. There's a lot of information that's out there isn't current or accurate."

The students who attended the first demonstration, held at 8:30 a.m., filed into the library and were greeted by BP Community Support Lead Peter Clifford, who asked if they had heard about the oil spill. Students who answered Clifford's questions correctly received a prize - a BP hat or pen.

"There was a lot of oil that went into the Gulf, so that's the reason we're here, and there were a lot of scientific things that had to happen with clean up," Clifford told students.

Ott began opened his presentation by giving the students a quick overview on oil, then began his visual presentation with a fish tank full of water.

"We're going to have a pretend spill with some vegetable oil," Ott said. "I'm going to put the oil in the water from the bottom, and we're going to pretend this is the Gulf of Mexico. The bottom to the top is one mile, and as the oil floats, it comes up to the surface and spreads on the top of the water."

Using a mixture of vegetable oil and cocoa powder, Ott let the students watch the makeshift crude oil float to the top of the fish tank, then had volunteer Jaycie Jones, 13, help him clean up the oil.

"The biggest thing I learned [today] is oil is not that easy to gather when it's spread out," Jaycie said as she used an eyedropper as a skimmer, paper towels as absorbent boom and dish detergent as dispersant to try to get rid of the oil on the top of the fish tank.

"There's inefficiency with skimmers," Ott said. "They also pick up water with oil. It's as if I told you I want to clean this whole building with eyedroppers, how well am I going to do it? Not too well. So there's a certain amount of helplessness when you're dealing with big oil spills."

Ott also passed around oil-coated feathers to demonstrate the effects of oil on the wildlife in the Gulf, comparing the feathers to zippers.

"The zippers wont gather up again if oil is on the feathers," Ott said.

After assisting Ott with the demonstration, Jaycie asked why people had blamed BP for the spill.

"When you have a spill and it's going on day after day and you think it's going to affect your life and your ability to fish and have a job, you feel helpless and you get angry," Ott responded. "That's what people do when they feel helpless, and who are they going to blame? They're going to blame someone. So, one company that stood up was BP because they had interest in that well, and they took the heat."

Following the presentation, students were given homework assignments in both their science class and English class based on what they learned from the demonstration.

"The plan is to conduct these science projects in affected parishes including Terrebonne, Iberia, Vermillion, Jefferson, Lafourche, Plaquemines, Orleans, St. Bernard, St. Mary and St. Tammany," Newsome said. "The science project was very successful very well received by students [at Oaklawn]."

Newsome added there's no timeline as to when the science demonstration will reach other junior high schools within these coastal parishes as BP is still in the process of scheduling.


Latest update: Sep 29, 2010 - 07:17:06 am PDT
http://www.tri-parishtimes.com/articles/2010/09/29/business_news/093_50_bpeducatesterrebonnestudents.txt

Pretty insidious.

[Nichi]

Panel: Gov't thwarted worst-case scenario on spill
           
Dina Cappiello, Associated Press Writer – 41 mins ago
WASHINGTON – The Obama administration blocked efforts by government scientists to tell the public just how bad the Gulf oil spill could become and made other missteps that raised questions about its competence and candor during the crisis, according to a commission appointed by the president to investigate the disaster.

In documents released Wednesday, the national oil spill commission's staff describes "not an incidental public relations problem" by the White House in the wake of the April 20 accident.

Among other things, the report says, the administration made erroneous early estimates of the spill's size, and President Barack Obama's senior energy adviser went on national TV and mischaracterized a government analysis by saying it showed most of the oil was "gone." The analysis actually said it could still be there.

"By initially underestimating the amount of oil flow and then, at the end of the summer, appearing to underestimate the amount of oil remaining in the Gulf, the federal government created the impression that it was either not fully competent to handle the spill or not fully candid with the American people about the scope of the problem," the report says.

The administration disputed the commission findings, saying senior government officials "were clear with the public what the worst-case flow rate could be."

In a statement Wednesday, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief Jane Lubchenco and White House budget director Jeffrey Zients pointed out that in early May, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen told the public that the worst-case scenario could be more than 100,000 barrels a day, or 4.2 million gallons.

For the first time, the documents — which are preliminary findings by the panel's staff — show that the White House was directly involved in controlling the message as it struggled to convey that it, not BP, was in charge of responding to what eventually became the biggest offshore oil spill in U.S. history.

Citing interviews with government officials, the report reveals that in late April or early May, the White House budget office denied a request from NOAA to make public its worst-case estimate of how much oil could spew from the blown-out well. The Unified Command — the government team in charge of the spill response — also was discussing the possibility of making the numbers public, the report says.

The White House budget office has traditionally been a clearinghouse for administration domestic policy.

The report shows "the political process was in charge and science really does not have the role that was touted," said Christopher D'Elia, dean of environmental studies at Louisiana State University.

But Jerry Miller, head of the White House science office's ocean subcommittee, told The Associated Press in an interview at a St. Petersburg, Fla., scientific conference on the oil spill that he didn't think the budget office censored NOAA.

"I would very much doubt that anyone would put restrictions on NOAA's ability to articulate factual information," Miller said.

The explosion in the Gulf of Mexico killed 11 workers, spewed 206 million gallons of oil from the damaged oil well, and sank the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig.

BP's drilling permit for the well originally estimated the worst-case scenario to be a leak of 6.8 million gallons per day. In late April, just after the spill began, the Coast Guard and NOAA received an updated worst-case estimate of 2.7 million to 4.6 million gallons per day.

While those figures were used as the basis for the government's response to the spill — they appeared on an internal Coast Guard situation report and on a dry-erase board in NOAA's Seattle war room — they were never announced to the public, according to the report.

However, they were, in fact, announced, as news stories from May 2 to May 5 show, though the figures received little attention at the time.

For more than a month after the explosion, government officials were telling the public that the well was releasing 210,000 gallons per day. In early August, in its final estimate of the spill's flow, the government said it was gushing 2.6 million gallons per day — close to the worst-case predictions.

The documents also criticize Carol Browner, director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy, saying that during a series of morning-show appearances on Aug. 4, she misrepresented the findings of a federal analysis of where the oil went and incorrectly portrayed it as a scientific assessment that was peer-reviewed by inside and outside experts.

"I think it's also important to note that our scientists have done an initial assessment, and more than three-quarters of the oil is gone," Browner said on NBC's "Today" show.

But the analysis never said it was gone, according to the commission. It said it was dispersed, dissolved or evaporated — meaning it could still be there. And while NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco was more cautious in her remarks at a news conference at the White House later that day, the commission staff accuses the two senior officials of contributing to the perception that the government's findings were more exact than they actually were.

Florida State University professor Ian MacDonald, who has repeatedly clashed with NOAA and the Coast Guard over the size of the spill, the existence of underwater plumes and oil in the sea floor, said he felt gratified by the report.

From the beginning, there was "a contradiction between discoveries and concerns by academic scientists and statements by NOAA," MacDonald said in an interview with the AP at the oil spill conference.

And he said it is still going on. MacDonald and Georgia Tech scientist Joseph Montoya said NOAA is at it again with statements saying there is no oil in ocean floor sediments. A University of Georgia science cruise, which Montoya was on, found ample evidence of oil on the Gulf floor.

___

Online: National Oil Spill Commission: http://www.oilspillcommission.gov

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101006/ap_on_sc/us_gulf_oil_spill

[Nichi]

[Nichi]

America moves on from spill; Gulf Coast feels abandoned

The Associated Press
By Jay Reeves, AP Writer

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — About 800 miles from the Gulf of Mexico, Dave Edmonds is struggling to remind people about the BP oil spill.

There aren't many magazine covers with photos of oil-drenched birds now that BP has capped its massive gusher at the bottom of the sea. People aren't looking online for information about the historic spill like they were a few weeks ago.

So Edmonds, who lives on the Delaware coast, has started a nonprofit organization to keep the disaster on people's minds with a website and social networking campaign.

"Awareness has dropped. People don't really care about the people who were affected. They don't care about the fish life," said Edmonds, founder of Taking Back the Gulf.

For Gulf residents fighting for economic survival, a nation's short attention span is deeply unsettling, especially with oil still washing ashore. Yet it's unclear whether Americans are turning their attention elsewhere, or whether it's just the media that have.

Either way, people like Chef Chris Sherrill feel abandoned.

"It's amazing how quickly the American public forgot that this was one of the worst manmade disasters in U.S. history," he said. His wedding catering and event business in Gulf Shores, Ala., is teetering because few brides are still coming to the beach for weddings.

The slight isn't necessarily intentional. Walking with his girlfriend in a park in Des Moines, Iowa, Michael Gauthier said he wonders about the oil's lingering impact on the environment, and he fears for Gulf residents.

"It's not in your face every day so you forget about it. Who doesn't have bills to pay and work to go to? Who has time to think about what's going on in Louisiana?" said Gauthier, 26.

What's going on is the continued arrival of oil washing ashore, although in lesser amounts than during the summer. Dire predictions of environmental Armageddon have yet to materialize, but there's also no consensus on how badly the ecosystem has suffered.

At first, no one could agree on how much oil was spilling into the Gulf; now there's disagreement over how much remains. A commission this week faulted Barack Obama's administration for multiple missteps, including an effort to block scientists from telling the public how bad the spill could be early on.

"If someone could say it will affect this, our shrimp are going to be poisoned for 10 years, people would think this is a bigger deal maybe," said Scott Peterson, 37, also of Des Moines.

Peterson's sentiment was echoed by Kathy Yoder, whose family works a farm in Washington, Maine. She said people may be dismissing the spill because the impacts don't seem as devastating as first predicted.

"What irritates me is people act like it's all gone because it's not floating on top of the water," she said. "I'm like, 'Hello, there's plenty of oil under the surface.'"

Recent research also raises the question of whether the spill is being overlooked outside the Gulf region, or if information on recent developments is just harder to come by. A Pew Research Center study found that only 1 percent of news coverage was dedicated to the spill last month, down from 22 percent during the height of the crisis.

However, a separate Pew survey found that 34 percent of the people responding to a poll in mid-September said they were still very interested in the spill — making it the top news item that week in terms of public interest. Participants were presented with news topics and asked how much they were following them.

But even if people say they're interested when asked directly, information from Google suggests that they're not searching as much for information about the spill online.

The term "Gulf oil spill" was a hot search on Google for weeks, peaking in mid-May as a sense of doom built around the fate of coastal towns, marshes and beaches. Soon, photos were all over the media of oiled marshlands and crude washing in with the surf on beaches.

Conditions on some parts of the coast improved in July, and Google searches had decreased dramatically by late that month, when BP finally capped the well and oil stopped flowing into the deep-blue waters off the coast of Louisiana.

Even more Web users lost interest through August despite the occasional blip, and people now enter in the Gulf oil spill search terms about as often as they did in April before the horrendous rig explosion and unstopped gusher grabbed the coast by the throat. Far more common today are searches for information about the economy, actress Lindsay Lohan or the University of Alabama's top-ranked football team.

One place where interest remains high is Cordova, Alaska. The northern fishing community of 2,200 was devastated after the tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground in Prince William Sound in 1989, and Gulf residents have visited to learn from survivors of the Alaska spill.

"I think like all things media-related, when you see it often enough, it's pushed to the back of your mind," said Rochelle van den Broek, executive director of Cordova District Fishermen United. "But here, it's in our minds a little bit more than other places because it's a subject so close to people."

In Louisiana, Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser became the face of the oil spill during the summer, meeting with Obama and conducting countless media interviews. The parish still sends out regular news releases with photos of fresh oil, almost begging someone to notice.

Nungesser said it's no accident that America has spill amnesia. He faults BP commercials for portraying the region as being healthier than it really is, for focusing more on successful aspects of the cleanup than the havoc the gusher created.

"What's frustrating to me is that they're obviously setting the stage for pulling out," Nungesser said.

BP has said it's in for the long haul, and Chef Sherrill said the company needs to be. He has creditors all over the country, and he regularly must explain to them that he can't pay his bills because the spill dried up business and there's simply no money.

"It should be a crime what is happening down here," Sherrill said.


http://blog.al.com/wire/2010/10/america_moves_on_from_spill_gu.html