The oil company accepts a share of the responsibility for the deadly explosion and oil spill but also takes aim at contractors Transocean and Halliburton, setting off additional finger-pointing.

Richard Simon, Los Angeles Times

September 9, 2010

Reporting from Washington and Los Angeles

An internal investigation released Wednesday by BP concluded that a series of mechanical and human failures by its own crews and its contractors led to the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, which killed 11 men and set in motion one of the world’s worst oil spills.

The oil company accepted a share of the responsibility but also took aim at contractors Transocean and Halliburton, setting off another round of finger-pointing that began soon after the rig sank.

No single factor caused the disaster, concludes the 234-page report summarizing the first of several investigations of the disaster. “A complex and interlinked series of mechanical failures, human judgments, engineering design, operational implementation and team interfaces came together to allow the initiation and escalation of the accident.”

BP’s investigative team cited eight problems, including an incorrectly read pressure test, a blowout preventer that didn’t function properly, a faulty cement seal job and the failure of the rig crew to recognize that gas was surging up the well just before the explosion.

“We have said from the beginning that the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon was a shared responsibility among many entities,” BP’s incoming Chief Executive Robert Dudley said in a statement.

“We deeply regret this event,” he added. “We are determined to learn the lessons for the future and we will be undertaking a broad-scale review to further improve the safety of our operations. We will invest whatever it takes to achieve that.”

Transocean, the drilling rig owner, assailed the BP report as “self-serving,” contending that BP’s “fatally flawed well design” set the stage for the rig explosion 50 miles off the Louisiana coast.

Halliburton, which did the well cementing, said it found a “number of substantial omissions and inaccuracies” in the report and “remains confident that all the work it performed … was completed in accordance with BP’s specifications.”

Based on a four-month investigation led by company safety chief Mark Bly, the BP document wraps up the first of a series of reviews looking into the gulf catastrophe. The U.S. Coast Guard, the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement and President Obama’s National Commission are all investigating the accident. The Justice Department is also trying to determine whether BP skirted federal safety regulations.

Pieces of equipment key to the inquiries, including the failed blowout preventer, were recently retrieved from the seafloor and have yet to be thoroughly examined.

More than 200 million gallons of oil were released after the April 20 explosion, which occurred when workers lost control of the well and gas rushed into the rig and erupted in flames. In addition to the dead, 17 others were injured.

Although the 18,360-foot-deep well has not leaked since it was capped in mid-July, BP and the federal government are still working on a permanent seal at the well’s bottom. Officials now say that remedy may not be completed until early October.

Testimony at hearings conducted this summer by the Coast Guard and the Department of the Interior sketched a picture of deferred maintenance on the Deepwater Horizon rig, a confused chain of command and corporate pressure to finish the deep-sea drilling job, which was six weeks behind schedule and costing BP more than $1 million a day.

Federal investigators have questioned BP’s decision to replace its longstanding well site leader with a new man four days before the fatal explosion, as well as the replacement’s competency at reading critical pressure tests, which determined whether the well was properly sealed. An erroneous interpretation of a pressure test was among the eight “critical factors” identified in the BP report.

BP’s well design has come under scrutiny, particularly the use of six centralizers versus the 21 recommended by Halliburton. Experts say that using more centralizers — which keep the casing centered in the well bore — help produce a more consistent cement seal.

Hearing testimony also revealed that BP employed a well configuration that called for a single string of pipe rather than a more expensive design that would have created more barriers to prevent the flow of gas into the well casing and to the rig.

Transocean, responding to the BP report Wednesday, maintained that in its design and construction of the well, BP “made a series of cost-saving decisions that increased risk — in some cases, severely.”

BP’s outgoing chief executive, Tony Hayward, defended the well design Wednesday and pointed a finger at Halliburton’s work. “To put it simply, there was a bad cement job,” he said in a statement. “Based on the report, it would appear unlikely that the well design contributed to the incident.”

The BP investigation found human fault, concluding that rig workers should have known from computer data that gas was flowing into the well for at least 40 minutes before the explosion. But crew members testified at the federal hearings that some gas alarm systems had been either bypassed or disarmed on the orders of rig officials.

On Capitol Hill, lawmakers faulted BP for not shouldering more of the blame. “This report is not BP’s mea culpa,” said Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), a senior member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. “BP is happy to slice up blame, as long as they get the smallest piece.”

Energy chair Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Beverly Hills), complained that the BP document failed to “address the corporate culture at BP that shortchanged safety and caused so much harm to the gulf and the Deepwater Horizon workers.”

Still, Elgie Holstein, oil spill response coordinator for the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund and a former Energy Department chief of staff, said the report “has some value.”

In identifying the various failures of “man and machine,” Holstein said, BP has provided “something of a blueprint that can be used to design new operating protocols, training programs, and equipment needs. In addition, I think it underscores the need to implement more robust, redundant safety systems that can ensure that we never have another accident of this magnitude.”

richard.simon@latimes.com

bettina.boxall@latimes.com

Simon reported from Washington and Boxall from Los Angeles. Times staff writers Julie Cart and Rong-Gong Lin II in Los Angeles and Richard Fausset in Atlanta contributed to this report.

from our friends at TheLATimes.com

An international team of astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope reports a significant brightening of the emissions from Supernova 1987A. The results, which appear in this week’s Science magazine, are consistent with theoretical predictions about how supernovae interact with their immediate galactic environment.

The team observed the supernova remnant in optical, ultraviolet, and near-infrared light. They studied the interaction between the ejecta from the stellar explosion and a glowing 6-trillion-mile-diameter ring of gas encircling the supernova remnant. The gas ring was probably shed some 20,000 years before the supernova exploded. Shock waves resulting from the impact of the ejecta onto the ring have brightened 30 to 40 pearl-like “hot spots” in the ring. These blobs likely will grow and merge together in the coming years to form a continuous, glowing circle.

“We are seeing the effect a supernova can have in the surrounding galaxy, including how the energy deposited by these stellar explosions changes the dynamics and chemistry of the environment,” said University of Colorado at Boulder Research Associate Kevin France of the Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy. “We can use these new data to understand how supernova processes regulate the evolution of galaxies.”

Discovered in 1987, Supernova 1987A is the closest exploding star to Earth to be detected since 1604 and it resides in the nearby Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy adjacent to our own Milky Way Galaxy.

from our friends at Hubble Site

Woe, 6 trillion miles wide in a ‘dwarf galaxy’!
TTMG

Researchers describe ‘a constellation’ of oil droplets mixed with sediment. Phytoplankton, the base of the marine food web, is found to be in poor health nearby.

“…feeling a toxic response to those waters…”

By Sara Kennedy, McClatchy Newspapers

August 18, 2010

St. Petersburg, Fla. — Scientists have found evidence that oil has become toxic to marine organisms in a section of the Gulf of Mexico that supports the spawning grounds of commercially important fish species.

Researchers from the University of South Florida said Tuesday that, in preliminary results, there appear to be droplets of oil among the sediments of a vital underwater canyon where clouds of oil from the BP spill were found.

“So, indeed, the waters have a level of toxicity that needs to be recognized, and I think these were some of the first indicators that the base of the food web — the bacteria and the phytoplankton — may be affected,” said David Hollander, chief scientist on a research vessel that just returned from a 10-day trip in the gulf.

More than 200 million gallons of oil leaked into gulf waters from BP’s broken well until it was capped last month. The company used millions of gallons of chemical dispersant to break up the oil as it gushed off the Louisiana coast.

Researchers peering into the murk described what they saw using a process involving ultraviolet light.

“We were able to detect sediments that had oil covering them,” said Hollander. “It wasn’t like a drape, don’t get me wrong, like a blanket of oil; rather, it looked like a constellation of stars that were at the scale of microdroplets. They seemed to be at every location we looked east of the wellhead, and interestingly and surprisingly, at the top of the DeSoto Canyon to the east.”

He described the DeSoto Canyon as an underwater geologic feature that is thought to bathe the Continental Shelf with nutrient-rich waters.

In subsurface waters east of the wellhead, phytoplankton — microscopic, plant-like organisms that form the base of the marine food web — was found to be in poor health, Hollander said.

In those locations, phytoplankton was repressed, or “feeling a toxic response to those waters,” he added.

———

from our friends a LATimes.com

BRIAN SKOLOFF AND HOLBROOK MOHR

| 08/ 9/10 07:19 PM |
ORANGE BEACH, Ala. — Sheryl Lindsay’s wedding planner business is on the brink, crumbling with each cancellation over concerns about oil. Brides-to-be are walking away from plans for beachside vows, leaving Lindsay waiting to see whether she’ll be part of BP’s promise to make whole everyone who’s suffered from its spill.

BP said Monday it had received 145,000 claims from residents and business owners like Lindsay citing lost income because of the massive spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and had paid out $324 million without denying a single claim.

That sounds pretty good, until frustrated residents and officials point out that 39,000 claims are in limbo – some of them, including Lindsay’s, have been there for months. Some that have been paid are only partial payments, and many of those people are still fighting for more money.

“Therein lies the problem,” Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood said recently. “They don’t deny them. They just hold them open forever.”

Hood speculated that BP PLC would rather wait for Kenneth Feinberg, the federally appointed administrator of the $20 billion compensation fund BP established at the behest of the White House, to take over the claims process this month. That way, if a claim is denied, “he’s the bad guy” instead of BP, Hood said.

BP claims director Darryl Willis said the company isn’t deliberately delaying. Rather, 26,000 pending claims are still being evaluated and thousands of others need more documentation, the company said.

“Our intent is to continue paying claims until this process is handed over to Ken Feinberg,” Willis said. “There’s no intent to slow this thing down.”

However, BP does defer “questionable” claims to Feinberg, including “restaurants and tourist claims from areas that haven’t been impacted by an oiled beach,” company spokeswoman Pat Wright said.

“We believe there are some tough decisions out there that need to be made on a variety of these claims because many of these are claims are not squarely within the guidelines of the Oil Pollution Act,” she added.

The act was enacted in 1990 after the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska. Under the law, BP is responsible for cleanup costs, but the act caps the company’s liability for other economic damage, such as lost wages, at $75 million.

BP officials said early on that the company would not limit itself to that cap. But the company is using the guidelines for who should be compensated.

Wright said BP decided to defer some claims because Feinberg “has said that he’s going to look at this, maybe, a bit differently than we are looking at it.”

Feinberg, who oversaw payouts for victims of the Sept. 11 attacks, did not respond to e-mailed questions from The Associated Press. He has said that claims without a direct tie to the oiled water will have a harder time making it through the process.

In Washington, the Justice Department and BP announced Monday that the company had deposited the initial $3 billion into the $20 billion fund.

Louisianians have been hardest hit by the oil and have reaped the most through BP’s claims process, getting 34,000 checks totaling $139 million as of Monday, according to BP. Alabama was next with $75 million, Florida residents took in $61 million, Mississippians $26 million and Texans had received $9 million since the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig killed 11 and started a spill that lasted more than three months.

BP said it has paid out $58 million in just the first eight days of August, in part by eliminating some paperwork requirements for business claims.

“I’ll be the first to admit that this process has not been perfect,” Willis said. “We’re going to continue to look for ways to get this money out and do it more efficiently.”

Who is eligible and how much compensation they deserve are open questions.

Lindsay said she was pointedly told by a claims adjuster that she wouldn’t get money from BP to keep afloat the beach wedding business she owns with her sister, which she said was on pace to make $500,000 this year until the spill.

“Last week we were told they were not paying wedding planners,” she said with a huff of frustration. “We’re having to close our offices. We’re not closing the business – yet – but we’ve just got to get out from under the rent. We can’t afford it anymore.”

Orange Beach Weddings has had 30 cancellations, owes on loans to the bank and must refund deposits while hoping for new clients.

“The phones just don’t ring anymore,” Lindsay said.

A few days after being told her claim was denied by one BP claims adjuster, another said it was merely on hold.

On Thursday, yet another adjuster, who identified himself as Buddy, said Lindsay’s claim was denied, that wedding planners were ineligible.

“Nobody can make a decision,” Lindsay said. “We’re just stuck.”

Wright said the adjusters in Lindsay’s case made a mistake, and that the 1,650 people on the claims team aren’t always on the same page. She said BP adjustors shouldn’t be denying any claims.

“I’ll be working to address this with the adjusters to make sure they fully understand,” she said.

Another lingering question is whether folks hurt by the federal moratorium on oil drilling will get help, specifically those who didn’t work directly on the 33 rigs that were shut down.

BP gave $100 million to a charity to give grants to rig workers affected by the moratorium, but that money isn’t for businesses such as supply boats that support the rigs.

Brett Broussard, who pilots offshore oil service boats, called it laughable for BP to say the company hasn’t denied claims. Broussard said BP told him he was ineligible because the moratorium put him out of work, not the oil spill.

“They’re parsing words. I am not eligible because of the moratorium, but their spill caused the moratorium,” Broussard said. “I find it repulsive and repugnant.”

Mitch Jurisich, a Plaquemines Parish, La., oyster farmer, compared the claims process to dealing with the Federal Emergency Management Agency after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 – “so similar it’s pitiful,” he said.

“I’m still sitting here sending paperwork after paperwork trying to get my first paycheck,” Jurisich said of his spill claim. “I feel I’ve had to give more paperwork for this than I would have to give the IRS in an audit. I’m losing confidence on a daily basis.”

___

Mohr reported from Jackson, Miss. Associated Press writer Pete Yost in Washington contributed to this report.

from our friends at LATimes.com

Looking from a bike trail near Griffith Park (Zoo Drive and the 134
Fwy), the Los Angeles River flows towards downtown Los Angeles
during part of its 51-mile route through 13 cities.
(Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times / July 28, 2010)

An expedition along a muddy strech of the waterway offers a glimpse into the potential recreational and environmental jewel running through the city.

By Louis Sahagun, Los Angeles Times

August 1, 2010

Marsh grasses along the Louisiana coast have been blackened by the BP oil spill.
(Reuters / July 28, 2010)

Oil-damaged wetlands may just have to wait it out!

Cleanup efforts often seem futile, and some biologists suggest simply letting nature take its course.

By Alana Semuels and Rong-Gong Lin II, Los Angeles Times

August 1, 2010

Reporting from Terrebonne Parish, Comfort Island

Although thick, sprawling oil slicks have vanished from much of the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, pockets of goo still menace delicate wetlands and there is no effective way to clean them up, experts said.

The best hope for the soiled bayous, some biologists said, may be to wait for Mother Nature to do its own cleaning. In the meantime, some patches of marsh will probably die.

On remote Comfort Island on the eastern edge of Louisiana, lush grass meets a soft-dirt beach and abandoned oyster shells. On the shore, shining like grotesque jewels, are droplets of oil. Push further into the mushy dirt, and spots of oil seep up.

“See? You can see it. Here, here and here,” said Paul Kemp, National Audubon Society vice president, pointing to a spot in the dirt. He picked up an oily seashell, rubbed the goo on his thumb, and sniffed it. “It comes in on every high tide.”

Countless insects and tiny crabs pop in and out of holes in the oil-stained dirt. They are key parts of a sensitive ecosystem — food that will be gobbled up later by sandpipers and shore plovers.

Oil is a poison to the wetlands. On Comfort Island, elsewhere in Breton Sound and farther south in Barataria and Terrebonne bays, the oil has appeared to kill grass along the water’s edge, leaving once-green reeds coarse, stunted and blackened.

Kemp said he hasn’t received an official estimate of the extent of wetlands oil exposure. But the damage is vast: Louisiana has 7,700 miles of shoreline, and much of it teems with wetlands and marshes, which were hit with the first waves of the oil.

The marshes are an important part of the Gulf of Mexico’s ecosystem. They are home to fish, shrimp and crab, and an important last stop for migratory birds who feed in the grassy waters before they make the long journey across the gulf. They also help calm storm-driven surges of water that pummel seaside communities.

If enough oil seeps into a marsh, “the plants die, and once the plant dies, there isn’t any natural regeneration,” said Denise J. Reed, a wetlands specialist and director of the Pontchartrain Institute for Environmental Sciences in New Orleans.

Once marshes turn into open sea, there’s no getting them back.

Just setting foot on the grasses can cause irreparable damage, pushing oil toward the plant roots deep below the mud. Breaking their stems will deprive the roots of oxygen. And pulling out oil-soaked grasses removes the only roots that keep the patches of soft marshland soil from eroding into the sea.

“They’re so sensitive that they succumb to the oil spill impacts, but you can’t go in and clean them up because you cause more damage,” said Wes Tunnell, associate director of the Harte Research Institute for the Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi.

Some ideas for cleanup include burning grasses, vacuuming oil or flushing the marshes with fresh water.

However, “the removal process may be too aggressive and cause more damage to the marsh than would have occurred if a passive approach was utilized,” said a report by the Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary Program and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Nonetheless, crews did attempt triage recently on an oil-contaminated marsh in Terrebonne Parish on the southern edge of Louisiana. With a fleet of 75 boats, crews treaded lightly, standing on boats to avoid crushing delicate grass. They tried to soak up oil with pads attached to poles — something like giant Q-tips — gingerly swabbing them through the marshes.

Success was limited. The grass still looked brown, and some seemed on the verge of death.

The best method may be to wait it out.

“We have nature on our side, we have a very warm climate, and we have fantastic amounts of natural microbes in our system” that can digest the oil, Reed said.

The long-term future of the wetlands, environmental groups said, also lies in efforts to stop the marshes from eroding into the sea. The marshes were already disappearing because of flood-control levees and canals built to help construct and maintain oil and gas pipelines.

The projects essentially starved the wetlands of their lifeblood: rich sediment from the Mississippi River. More than 2,300 square miles of Louisiana marshlands have disappeared since the 1930s.

from our friends at LATimes.com

alana.semuels@latimes.com
ron.lin@latimes.com

Semuels reported from Terrebonne Parish, La., and Lin reported from Comfort Island, La.

Sampling operations being conducted on the research vessel Brooks McCall, near the site of the oil breach at the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico. (Photo: Dr. Oscar Garcia / Florida State University).

~St. Petersburg, Fla. – Through a chemical fingerprinting process, University of South Florida researchers have definitively linked clouds of underwater oil in the northern Gulf of Mexico to BP’s runaway Deepwater Horizon well — the first direct scientific link between the subsurface oil clouds commonly known as “plumes” and the BP oil spill, USF officials said Friday.

Until now, scientists had circumstantial evidence, but lacked that definitive scientific link.

The announcement came on the same day that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that its researchers have confirmed the existence of the subsea plumes at depths of 3,300 to 4,300 feet below the surface of the Gulf. NOAA said its detection equipment also implicated the BP well in the plumes’ creation.

Together, the two studies confirm what in the early days of the spill was denied by BP and viewed skeptically by NOAA’s chief — that much of the crude that gushed from the Deepwater Horizon well stayed beneath the surface of the water.

“What we have learned completely changes the idea of what an oil spill is,” said chemical oceanographer David Hollander, one of three USF researchers credited with the matching samples of oil taken from the water with samples from the BP well. “It has gone from a two-dimensional disaster to a three-dimensional catastrophe.”

The other scientists involved in making the link, USF said, were biological oceanographer Ernst Peebles and geological oceanographer David Naar.

The finding is important because oil that escaped from the mile-deep, blown-out well had been treated with dispersants, which broke the oil in the water column into tiny droplets, and therefore did not form an oil slick at the surface, said Richard H. Pierce, senior scientist and director of the Center for Ecotoxicology at Sarasota’s Mote Marine Laboratory.

“It’s more readily taken up and absorbed and ingested by marine animals,” he explained.

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Although dispersed oil degrades more quickly over the long-run, in the short-term, it poses a more toxic threat to marine life, Pierce said.

“So, we’ve been very concerned, and it is critical USF has verified it,” he said.

The full report was not released Friday, but will be available sometime next week, USF spokeswoman Vickie Chachere said.

BP declined to comment on the USF discovery. “We have only seen media reports, and have not yet seen the report and underlying data,” BP spokesman Phil Cochrane said in an e-mail.

USF scientists found microscopic droplets of biodegraded oil at varying depths beneath the Gulf’s surface, the university said in a statement.

One layer was 100 feet thick; it was found 45 nautical miles north-northeast of the well site, officials said.

The researchers found the plumes after models created by a USF expert in ocean currents, Robert Weisberg, predicted subsurface oil from the Deepwater Horizon well would move toward the north-northeast, USF said.

“The clouds were found near the DeSoto Canyon, a critical area that interacts with Florida’s spawning grounds,” USF said.

The NOAA study made similar findings. According to the report, which was reviewed by 19 scientists known as the Joint Analysis Group, data collected by five research ships deployed in the Gulf from May 19 to June 19 showed oil suspended in the water between 1,000 and 1,300 meters — about 3,280 feet to 4,265 feet.

The NOAA scientists detected the oil by measuring its fluorescence — many of the droplets are too small to detect otherwise — and said that that measurement linked it to the BP well.

The report said the oil had been detected in heaviest concentrations near the BP well and that its concentrations dropped as the ships moved away from the well, but that not enough samples had been taken to determine the full “horizontal extent” of the plumes.

The report also said the impact of the oil on sealife had yet to be determined. Even at low concentrations, the report said, the oil “might be biologically meaningful” because of the length of time fish and other organisms would be exposed to it.

The report also said that scientists had detected lower levels of dissolved oxygen in the water at depths below 3,280 feet, but that they couldn’t determine why the levels were low with certainty. They said the levels were not so low as to be fatal to sealife.

Steven Murawski, chief scientist for NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service, said the data confirm that the subsea plumes of oil were the result of the Deepwater Horizon well.

“That’s a real smoking gun, as far as we’re concerned,” he said. “It really is a flow” from the well.

In May, when scientists first reported that they had discovered oil beneath the Gulf’s surface and blamed it on the Deepwater Horizon spill, they were denounced by both BP and NOAA chief Jane Lubchenco.

BP CEO Tony Hayward denied that such plumes existed and Lubchenco called the reports “misleading, premature and, in some cases, inaccurate.”

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from our friend’s at www.Truth-Out.org

None of the five witnesses called to testify will appear at Wednesday’s hearing of the U.S. Coast Guard-Interior Department probe into what caused the Deepwater Horizon oil rig to explode.

U.S. Coast Guard Capt. Hung Nguyen said the panel was notified shortly before 5 p.m. Tuesday that four of the five people set to appear, all employees of Transocean, the owner of the rig, said they had changed their minds and would not appear. A fifth employee, Daun Winslow, had already been rescheduled to appear at hearings scheduled for Aug. 23-27 in Houston.

The panel has been set back by a handful of key witnesses failing to attend, calling in sick or refusing to testify on 5th Amendment grounds that they have the right not to provide testimony that could be self-incriminating. Two of BP’s top officials on the rig the day of the explosion, Robert Kaluza and Donald Vidrine, failed to show up Tuesday, with Kaluza invoking his 5th Amendment rights, and Vidrine’s doctor supplying a medical note.

Both men gave the same reasons in May, when they also were called to testify before the panel, which has been meeting in suburban New Orleans.

Testimony from both men, who represented BP’s interests on the Deepwater Horizon, would shed light on what happened in the crucial hours before the explosion.

U.S. Coast Guard Senior Chief Petty Officer Mike O’Berry said the four Transocean employees “chose to not voluntarily come in to testify,” and their decision came about 40 minutes before the conclusion of Tuesday’s hearings. As a result, Wednesday’s hearings were canceled. They are expected to resume Thursday and conclude Friday.

It was not immediately clear late Tuesday whether the four were invited to testify or had been subpoenaed.

David Adler, a lawyer for Mark Hay and Billy Stringfellow, both Transocean employees, said he did not have access to documentation that would be used to question his clients.

“I’d like to be able to sit down with my clients and read the documents,” Adler said, adding that his clients were willing to testify.

– Rong-Gong Lin II in Kenner, La.
Twitter: @latenvironment
Facebook: latimesenvironment

from our friends at LATimes.com

The NYC govt. and the USDA quietly captured 250-400 Prospect Park geese and carted them off to gas them, needless deaths that won’t prevent plane crashes.

By Deanna Zandt, AlterNet
Posted on July 16, 2010, Printed on July 16, 2010

It was a sickening shock that no one saw coming: In the dark, early morning hours of July 8, officials from the US Department of Agriculture, along with NYC Parks Department representatives, rounded up several hundred resident geese in Brooklyn’s largest park, ziptied their feet and legs together and carted them off–to gas them with carbon dioxide. They were then double-bagged, and shipped off to a landfill. It’s not entirely clear how many geese were killed altogether; estimates range from 250-400 in total. (Also notably missing are the several hundred mallard ducks that also populate Prospect Park’s lake; at the moment, only a few dozen black ducks are seen now.)

The reason? Well, it all starts with America’s favorite hero, Captain Sully. Since the Hudson landing in January 2009, rules around geese populations near airports have been shifting. Recently, it was decreed that no geese can exist within seven miles of New York’s airports. The decree is fraught with numerous problems.

First, the geese that US Airways Flight 1549 struck were not resident geese — they were migratory geese from other parts of the continent. It’s well-known in Prospect Park that the geese there are resident; not only do they stay their year-round, but their flight muscles are relatively atrophied in comparison due to their sedentary lifestyle. They are simply unable to fly as high as the airplanes that make their way over the park. (It’s a common joke amongst park regulars that some of the geese spent their winters in nearby Green-Wood Cemetery.)

Second, I’m told by local Park waterfowl aficionados Anne-Katrin Titze and Ed Bahlman that the measurement that was taken of the new seven-mile rule is wrong: officials measured from the border of the airport’s property, and not the runways. Measuring from the runways, they say, would have spared the lives of the park geese.

Even if the park geese were a danger, no public opportunity to discuss or brainstorm a better solution (such as those offered by groups like GeesePeace), contributing to the outrage and feelings of powerlessness Last year, Mayor Bloomberg supported the killing of local geese in a radio address, saying, “There is not a lot of cost involved in rounding up a couple thousand geese and letting them go to sleep with nice dreams.” Protests outside City Hall and his home resulted; the Mayor is notably silent now.

Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz is “distraught” over the killings, but so far has not taken further action against the federal officials and park representatives who sanctioned them. Park administrator Tupper Thomas (noted for her ushering in the era of public-private partnerships taking over Prospect Park) is reportedly not answering any questions, and is directing inquiries back to the USDA. Park officials are already on the public’s hotseat with the ongoing garbage problems within the park.

For days after the geese disappeared, there were lies and confusion being spread about their whereabouts. The Audubon Society claimed the geese suddenly flew off to nearby Jamaica Bay, for example, though the geese had otherwise never left the park in large numbers. Finally, on Monday, the USDA admitted publicly what they’d done.

No one disputes that public safety is everyone’s top priority. But these geese posed no threat, and were senselessly taken from the community. According to the Brooklyn Paper, the Humane Society of the US “called on federal officials to ‘immediately halt’ its killing program and focus on ‘a plan that will truly protect public safety.’ The group claims that evidence shows that airplanes typically encounter migrating birds, not resident populations like the hundreds that call Prospect Park home.”

The park community mourns the senseless death of these animals that were so much a part of our Prospect experience. On a telephone pole near the lake, an anonymous poster has been taped to a telephone pole. It reads, “R.I.P. Geese. Call 311, voice your outrage.”

Deanna Zandt is a media technologist and the author of the new book, Share This! How You Will Change the World with Social Networking. She is a contributing editor at AlterNet.

© 2010 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

from our friends at AlterNet.org

Caroline Casey talks with LaTosha Brown; Alabama native and Director of the Gulf Coast Fund for Ecological Health and Community Renewal, a community-led social justice philanthropy in the Gulf South region. For the past five years, she has served as a founding Advisor to the Gulf Coast Fund that has provided $2.7 million dollars in grants, technical assistance and support to over 170 coastal groups and organizations. She has over 13 years of institution building, organizational management, political and philanthropy experience in the southern states of Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, and Louisiana.

Caroline Casey_LaTosha Brown 070810

click above

LaTosha Brown’s site: www.gulfcoastfund.org

Caroline Casey’s Coyote Network News: www.coyotenetworknews.com

Shrimp, crab, oysters, gators, birds, snakes, people – all have ties to Louisiana’s Barataria Bay.

The Bald Cypress Swamp of Barataria Preserve, which is more biologically diverse than the Everglades and serves as a nursery and breeding ground for the gulf’s shrimp, crab, oyster and fish. (Carolyn Cole, Los Angeles Times / June 11, 2010)

By Julie Cart, Los Angeles Times

June 11, 2010
Reporting from Barataria Preserve, La.

The sickening images of pelicans struggling in oil along Louisiana’s barrier islands only hint at what’s at stake if the slick forces its way into the state’s 3 ½ million acres of estuaries and marshes.

These bays and bayous are thrumming with life — they are far more biologically diverse than the Everglades — and serve as nursery and breeding ground for the gulf’s world famous shrimp, crab, oyster and fish. The wetlands system that fringes the coast is often called “Liquid Louisiana.”

Nearly everything that lives in the gulf is in some way connected to Barataria Bay, which is part of a coastal water system that regularly flushes with tides that mix salt water and fresh water. Pirates used the region’s uncounted cul-de-sacs as hideouts and bases from which to launch forays into the gulf and Caribbean. Today, commercial fishermen motor south from their docks in Lafitte and Barataria.

The prospect of oil penetrating that connection threatens a unique system of floating freshwater marsh already brought to its knees by hurricanes, thousands of canals cut for oil industry traffic, and the dikes, levees and channels that have altered the natural flow of the Mississippi River.

Oil first reached islands at the mouth of the bay May 20, and this week streamers of rust-colored mousse pushed past Grand Isle well into the inland waterway.

“It’s all tidal. We are connected to the gulf and therefore affected by storms in the gulf and, potentially, oil,” said David Muth, chief of planning and resource stewardship at Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve. Barataria Preserve is part of the park.

“This tragedy has already happened,” Muth said. He poured over colorful map containing hundreds of yellow points, each representing nesting colonies in the region, all in the path of the incoming oil. For example, a survey of site No. 83 revealed 400 pairs of brown pelicans, 8,500 pairs of royal terns, 30,000 pairs of sandwich terns and 200 pairs black skimmers.

“This is a soap opera and we’re just in Act 1 right now,” Muth said. “It’s going to go on and on and on.”

Earlier this week Muth toured Barataria Bay, checking on nesting birds and looking for signs of oil. He launched from Twin Canals into a bright green carpet of floating dots known as duckweed.

A solidly built New Orleans native, Muth steered the boat down broad avenues of water the color of weak ice tea, the result of naturally occurring tannins. Trailing his hand, he pointed out an oily residue on the surface. It was not crude oil from the Deepwater Horizon well, but vegetable oil that is the byproduct of the near-constant breakdown of organic compounds in the marsh.

These reedy redoubts are where the gulf’s marine life comes to be born and mature. “Much of the life in the Gulf of Mexico depends directly or indirectly on what comes out of the estuaries,” Muth said.

The value to the nation’s fisheries is well known.

If the region’s “natural capital” were treated as an economic asset, the present value of the Mississippi Delta would be between $330 billion and $1.3 trillion, according to a 2006 report by the Seattle-based group Earth Economics.

Muth, his green and brown National Parks Service cap set low on his forehead against a blistering sun, guided the boat past a small alligator, with part of its eyes and nostrils peeking above the water’s surface. At 4 feet long, the gator was likely 4 years old, Muth said. Three moorhen chicks waddled across the duckweed, effectively walking on water to their waiting mother.

The birds were standing on mats, known locally as “flotant.” All the vegetation in this floating estuarine freshwater marsh rest on top of the water’s surface, moving up and down with tides. The mat is so thick in some places that shrubs and trees grow on them.

The mats float above a bay floor that has beneath it 30,000 feet of deltaic sediment, the result of millions of years of deposits by the Mississippi River.

Muth paused, listening to a mournful lowing he couldn’t quite make out. Eventually he guessed the sound was the muted cry of a pig frog being swallowed slowly by an aquatic snake.

“What I love about this place is that it’s a system that is incredibly alive and diverse,” he said. “When I go to the beautiful places — to Yellowstone or to the Rocky Mountains or to the Everglades — what I’m really struck by is how lifeless it is. There aren’t that many creatures around at any given time. I’m used to being in a place where there are birds and frogs and turtles and snakes. This is an incredible place.”

The boat continued south across the expanse of Lake Salvador and its green spits of land, stranded islands of what was once connected land. The region has been ripped apart by storms and the constant cutting of canals for oil and gas operations; there are some 10,000 miles of canals in south Louisiana. Today there are a few threads of land to hold together. Boaters equipped with GPS programs are surprised by false alarms warning they are about to run into land where there is only open water. The programmers can’t keep up with the land loss.

The shoreline in the Barataria Preserve retreats 30 feet every year.

This thin tissue of remnant land eventually gave in to Barataria Bay, where a dozen shrimp boats were laying down booms, which trailed like a tangerine-colored tail.

The crews were busy trying to protect an island where marshy edges already had a black coating of oil. In the open water, strands of rusty orange mousse floated: oil that has been treated with dispersants. Muth observed a colony of nesting Forster’s terns.

“The sickening, helpless feeling around all this is the birds have to go on making a living with patches of oil moving through the system,” he said. “We just don’t know how many times can these birds take even a light oiling.”

Like most wetlands scientists, Muth cannot say for sure what the impact of oil will bring to this delta.

“Oil is a wild card,” he said. “This is an extremely adaptive place. When you throw in a completely unnatural event, like this mass of oil, we just don’t know.”

julie.cart@latimes.com

from our friends at the latimes.com

Richard Simon, Betina Boxall and Margot Roosevelt

June 11, 2010

Reporting from Washington and Los Angeles

Government scientists said Thursday that as many as 40,000 barrels of oil have been flowing daily from the blown-out BP well, doubling earlier estimates and greatly expanding the scope of what is already the largest spill in U.S. history.

The new figures could mean 42 million to 84 million gallons of oil have leaked into the Gulf of Mexico since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on the night of April 20 — with the lowest estimate nearly four times the size of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill.

The flow estimates were released by Marcia McNutt, director of the U.S. Geological Survey, and do not count any increases that may have occurred since the cutting of the well’s riser pipe, a step that was expected to boost the flow.

Teams using a variety of technologies are trying to calculate how much the riser cut has increased the well release, but they will not have that information for several days. “It’s a challenging scientific issue,” McNutt said.

The revised numbers are the latest in a series of estimates that have steadily grown as scientists analyze live video feeds. The earliest figure, 1,000 barrels per day, was supplanted by 5,000 barrels. A government-appointed scientific team then pegged the flow at 12,000 to 19,000 barrels.

That same group has now concluded that “given the limited data available and the small amount of time to process that data, the best estimate for the average flow rate for the leakage … is between 25,000 to 30,000 barrels per day, but could be as low as 20,000 barrels per day or as high as 40,000 barrels per day,” McNutt said in a release.

In a sign of the difficulty of gauging the flow, one team believes that the upper range could be as high as 50,000 barrels. There are 42 gallons in a barrel of oil.

BP has said it will be unable to plug the well before August, when relief wells will be completed. But a containment cap installed on the well last week is capturing about 15,000 barrels, or 630,000 gallons, a day and pumping it to a ship at the surface. Officials predict that by next week they will be able to collect or burn off nearly double that amount.

Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the administration’s point man for the spill, sent a letter Thursday to Carl-Henric Svanberg, BP’s board chairman, summoning “any appropriate officials from BP” to meet Wednesday with President Obama and other senior officials.

“The BP Deepwater Horizon spill has had a profound impact on Americans living in the gulf region and time is of the essence in resolving these issues,” Allen wrote.

Family members of victims of the rig explosion met Thursday with Obama at the White House. They wore blue ribbons, each with 11 stars — one for each of the workers killed.

Peggy Kemp, whose son Roy died in the explosion, said Obama assured them that the families “will not be forgotten.” Donald Clark’s widow, Sheila, said Obama also said that “everything he can do he will do.”

The updated flow figures come as Congress approved legislation to lift a limit on how much can be paid out from a dwindling emergency oil spill response fund. The bill now goes to Obama, who is expected to sign the measure. Current law caps the payout at $100 million per incident. The fund now contains $1.6 billion.

Although BP will ultimately be held responsible for full damages, lawmakers said lifting the cap would prevent delayed responses to the spill by federal agencies, including the Coast Guard and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

“The laws … have not been adequate for a crisis of this magnitude,” Obama told reporters after a meeting Thursday with congressional leaders. “The Oil Pollution Act was passed at a time when people didn’t envision drilling four miles under the sea for oil.”

Obama said the law would be updated “to make sure that the people of the gulf — the fishermen, the hotel owners, families who are dependent for their livelihoods in the gulf — that they are all made whole, and that we are in a much better position to respond to any such crisis in the future.”

The bill would give federal authorities more latitude to dip into the fund, which is fed by an 8-cent per barrel oil tax. Congress is considering raising the tax in the wake of the gulf spill. The action comes a week after the government sent BP a $69-million bill.

BP estimates it has spent more than $1 billion so far responding to the spill, a figure that it likely to rise considerably as more claims are paid out and lawsuits move through the courts.

The oil giant agreed Thursday to speed up payments to people whose livelihoods have been damaged by the spill, which has closed a third of the gulf to fishing and scared away tourists from shoreline resorts.

Federal officials also said Thursday that BP has agreed to provide the public with more information on the status of claims. Almost 42,000 claims have been submitted, and more than 20,000 payments totaling upwards of $53 million have been made, according to BP.

With another delegation of senators preparing to fly to the Gulf Coast, Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser pleaded, “Please don’t take flyovers of Plaquemines Parish. It’s an insult to the local people. You can’t see it from the air. You’ve got to go down there and touch it. You’ve got to pull into that marsh and see there is absolutely no life. Everything is dead.”

Meanwhile, a bipartisan group of Atlantic Coast senators asked federal officials for the “statistical probabilities” of the spill hitting their coasts and recommendations on how their states should prepare for a “worst-case scenario.”

“If there is any real risk to these communities from a spill that right now remains thousands of miles away, we need to know as soon as possible,” the senators wrote.

richard.simon@latimes.com

bettina.boxall@latimes.com

margot.roosevelt@latimes.com

from our friends at the www.latimes.com

Caroline Casey_Michael Ruppert 061010

Caroline welcomes appropriately dire long-time prognosticator of peak oil industrial collapse, fellow presenter at Harmony Festival, Mike Ruppert. Critique and encouragement to build life-boats. “Localize or Die.”
http://www.collapsenet.com/

…the most rousing romp through dire information I have heard in quite some time !  Inspiring !!

TTMG

Mike Ruppert – Bio:

A leading Peak Oil theorist, author, and “a one man crusade trying to expose America’s bogus war on drugs.” He is also the publisher/editor of From the Wilderness, a newsletter read in more than 50 countries including more than sixty members of the U.S. Congress, professors at more than 40 universities around the world, and major business and economic leaders. Since 9/11 Mike has been in demand as a university lecturer and has spoken on Peak Oil and 9/11 in nine countries. Having concluded that the US government and markets will be useless in preparing American citizens for the coming crisis, Mike’s current focus is on individual and community preparedness for the coming challenges and the development of a reliable news service to quickly identify and track breaking developments around the world.

Mike is a former LAPD narcotics investigator and whistleblower. He received his degree in Political Science (with honors) from UCLA. In 1996, after 18 years of struggle, he finally achieved one of his deepest wishes: a face to face public encounter with then CIA Director John Deutch on national television. Washington sources later told Mike that Deutch’s mishandling of the encounter cost him a guaranteed appointment as Secretary of Defense.

From the Wilderness’ video, The Truth and Lies About 9-11, has sold more than 15,000 copies and includes special exclusive interviews with Representatives Ron Paul (R-TX), Cynthia McKinney (D-GA), Barbara Lee (D-CA), Professor Peter Dale Scott, (UC Berkeley), Professor John Metzger (Michigan State) and Catherine Austin Fitts (former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Managing Director, Dillon Read).

Mike’s book, Crossing The Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil, is one of the three best-selling books globally and in the U.S. about the attacks of 9/11. Rubicon is the only book to show that Vice President Richard Cheney, the U.S. government and Wall Street had a well-developed awareness of Peak Oil before the 9/11 attacks and that U.S. policy since then has been consistent with Peak Oil imperatives. In May, 2006, Crossing the Rubicon was added to the Harvard School of Business library.

from our friends at www.coyotenetworknews.com

less then 60 minutes.