Jordan Flaherty : Gulf Residents Fear for the Future

Image from GRIID. Two years after the BP drilling disaster,

Gulf residents fear for the future

By Jordan Flaherty / The Rag Blog / April 23, 2012

“The Gulf is a robust ecosystem and it's been dying the death of a thousand cuts...” -- Aaron Viles, Gulf Restoration Network.

On April 20, 2010, a reckless attitude towards the safety of the Gulf Coast by British Petroleum, as well as Transocean and Halliburton, caused a well to blow out 5,000 feet below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico.

As the world watched in horror, underwater cameras showed a seemingly endless flow of oil -- hundreds of millions of gallons -- and a series of failed efforts to stop it, over a period of nearly three months. Two years later, that horror has not ended for many on the Gulf.

“People should be aware that the oil is still there,” says Wilma Subra, a chemist who travels widely across the Gulf meeting with fishers and testing seafood and sediment samples for contamination.

Subra says that the reality she is seeing on the ground contrasts sharply with the image painted by BP. “I’m extremely concerned on the impact it’s having on all these sick individuals,” she says. Subra believes we may be just at the beginning of this disaster. In every community she visits, fishers show her shrimp born without eyes, fish with lesions, and crabs with holes in their shells. She says tarballs are still washing up on beaches across the region.

While it's too early to assess the long-term environmental impact, a host of recent studies published by the National Academy of Sciences and other respected institutions have shown troubling results. They describe mass deaths of deepwater coral, dolphins, and killifish, a small animal at the base of the Gulf food chain.

"If you add them all up, it’s clear the oil is still in the ecosystem, it’s still having an effect,” says Aaron Viles, deputy director of Gulf Restoration Network, an environmental organization active in the region.

The major class action lawsuit on behalf of communities affected by the spill has reached a proposed $7.8 billion settlement, subject to approval by a judge. While this seems to have brought a certain amount of closure to the saga, environmentalists worry that any settlement is premature, saying they fear that the worst is yet to come.

Pointing to the 1989 Exxon spill off the coast of Alaska, previously the largest oil spill in U.S. waters, Viles said that it was several years before the full affect of that disaster was felt. “Four seasons after Exxon Valdez is when the herring fisheries collapsed,” says Viles. “The Gulf has been a neglected ecosystem for decades -- we need to be monitoring it closely.”

In the aftermath of the spill, BP flooded the Gulf with nearly 2 million gallons of chemical dispersants. While BP says these chemicals broke up the oil, some scientists have said this just made it less visible, and sent the poisons deeper into the food chain.

It is widely agreed that environmental problems on the coast date back to long before the well blew open. The massive catastrophe brought into focus problems that have existed for a generation. Land loss caused by oil company drilling has already displaced many who lived by the coast, and the pollution from treatment plants has poisoned communities across the state -- especially in "cancer alley," the corridor of industrial facilities along the Mississippi River south of Baton Rouge.

“The Gulf is a robust ecosystem and it's been dying the death of a thousand cuts for a long time,” says Viles. “BP is legally obligated to fix what they screwed up. But if you’re only obligated to put the ecosystem back to where it was April 19, 2010, why would we?”

Fishing is a huge part of the economy for the Gulf Coast. Around 40% of the seafood caught in the continental U.S. comes from here. Many area fishermen were still recovering from Hurricane Katrina when the spill closed a third of Gulf waters to fishing for months.

George Barisich, president of the United Commercial Fisherman’s Association, a group that supports Gulf Coast fishers, says many fishers still had not recovered from Hurricane Katrina when the oil started flowing from the BP spill. Now, he says, many are facing losing their homes. “Production is down at least 70 percent,” compared to the year before the spill, he says. “And prices are still depressed 30, 40, 60 percent.”

In a video statement on BP’s website, Geir Robinson, Vice President of Economic Restoration for BP’s Gulf Coast Restoration Organization, says that the company believes the legal settlement will resolve most legitimate economic claims. “We do have critics,” adds Robinson. “And we’re working hard every day to show them that we will meet our responsibilities.”

Environmentalists and scientists also complain that the Obama administration has let down the Gulf Coast. Viles is critical of the role the U.S. government has played, saying that by inaction they seemed to protect BP more than coastal communities or the environment. “The coast guard seems to empower the worst instincts of BP,” Viles says. “I don’t know if it’s Stockholm Syndrome or what.”

International environmental groups have also joined in the criticism. Oceana, a conservation group with offices in Europe and the Americas, released a report criticizing the U.S. government’s reforms as being either ineffective or nonexistent, saying “offshore drilling remains as risky and dangerous as it was two years ago, and that the risk of a major spill has not been effectively reduced.”

Theresa Dardar lives in Bayou Pointe-au-Chien , a Native American fishing community on Louisiana's Gulf Coast. Dardar and her neighbors have seen their land vanish from under their feet within their lifetimes due to canals built by the oil companies to access wells.

The canals brought salt water into freshwater marshes, helping cause the coastal erosion that sees Louisiana lose a football field of land every 45 minutes. The main street that runs through the community now disappears into the swamps, with telephone poles sticking out of the water.

Now, in addition to worries about disappearing land and increasing risk of hurricanes, she fears that her family’s livelihood is gone for good. “It’s not going to be over for years,” she says, expressing a widely held concern among fishers here. “We’re just a small Native American fishing community."

That’s all they’ve done their whole lives. Some of them are over 60. What are they going to do? If BP gives them money for the rest of their lives, that’s one thing. But if not, then what can they do?

[Jordan Flaherty is a journalist based in New Orleans and author of the book Floodlines: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six. He can be reached at neworleans@leftturn.org. This article was also published at CounterPunch. Find more articles by Jordan Flaherty on The Rag Blog

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Robert S. Becker : The Environmental Rabble-Rousing of Diane Wilson

Environmental activist Diane Wilson in a still from the PBS documentary, Texas Gold.
Eco-Outlaw Diane Wilson:
The environmental rabble-rousing
of an unreasonable woman

By Robert S. Becker / OpEd News / June 21, 2011

Environmental activist and author Diane Wilson will be Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, June 24, 2011, 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on Austin's community radio station, KOOP-91.7 FM, and streamed live on the internet. [UPDATE: Listen to the podcast of Thorne Dreyer's interview with Diane Wilson on Rag Radio, here.]

Diane will also speak about her book, Diary of an Eco-Outlaw, at Book People, 603 N. Lamar in Austin, Thursday, June 23, at 7 p.m. and will appear at the Texas Louisiana Gulf Coast Shindig & Soiree at Pine Street Station, 1101 E. 5th Street, Austin, from 4-7 p.m., Saturday, June 25.

Legendary Texas journalist Molly Ivins once joked about rebel-rouser-activist Jim Hightower: "If Will Rogers and Mother Jones had a baby, Jim Hightower would be that child -- mad as hell, with a sense of humor."

Well, Hightower has a protest soul sister, the inventive, congenial, yet fierce "eco-outlaw" named Diane Wilson. Unlike armchair activists and witty journalists, this champion takes risks, gets bloodied and arrested, and endures jail -- then turns her adventures into good-hearted, epic tales reminiscent of Mark Twain.

And what progressive battles need, more than ever, are inspiring protest leaders -- and crowds in the street. Otherwise, we fail to learn from the insipid, conspiracy-ridden, if effective escapades of the Tea Party. One hard-won lesson I take from this hell-raising muckraker from Seadrift, Texa, is that petitions, donations, columns, and news interviews are nice but don't save lives, jobs, America, or Mother Earth.

Diane was featured in a terrific PBS documentary called Texas Gold, voiced by Peter Coyote, and, with Coyote, produced a hilarious satirical commercial for the film -- about bottled Gulf water you get to drink once. Wilso was interviewed on Amy Goodman's Democracy Now!, and performs daring CodePink disruptions. [Wilson was, in fact, a founding member of CodePink, the theatrical direct-action peace group.]

Diane has also penned two inspiring protest memoirs -- real-life, laugh-out-loud, unflinching stories reliving what happens when a terrific activist puts her liberty on the line. This woman walks the line, until she gets forcibly removed. Her two full titles alone justify the price of admission:

• An Unreasonable Woman, the True Story of Shrimpers, Politicos, Polluters, and the Fight for Seadrift, Texas
• Diary of an Eco-Outlaw, An Unreasonable Woman Breaks the Law for Mother Earth

Her tactics are "unreasonable," of course, only to cancer-inducing, worker-killing resource predators (well-shielded by official protection) whom she ambushes with inventive schemes. Eco-activism here is downright fun, mostly, like anti-war '60's agitation (though absent the crowds). She invites all of us to do local agitation.

Where she's best known as Corporate Criminal Enemy No. 1 is Calhoun County, Texas, which -- alas, B.D. (Before Diane) -- was a remote, Gulf coast pushover ripe for chemical dumpers, and by 1989 had won the EPA's dubious prize as America's most polluted place. That shocker woke Diane up, and she's been confronting polluters (and now related war-mongers) ever since.


Teaching by bold example

I found out about Diane because my wife is writing a young adult novel and needed to check background about the Gulf, shrimping, and endangered sea turtles. So, who better to learn from than the liveliest, most notorious, ex-professional Gulf shrimper living between Galveston and Corpus Christi?

Naturally we jumped in the van and drove eight hours when hearing Diane was to keynote a women's literary celebration in Santa Barbara. Her simple if hard to execute message: trust your heart, assess the damage, disregard most well-intentioned warnings and, above all, don't sweat outcomes impossible to know in advance.

Progressives are forever talking and talking about direct protests, so time to learn from Diane's fearless bravery, lit up by over 50 arrests. Would be 100 were she less even-tempered, her outrage tempered by quiet irony and southern courtesy, even to abusers.

She never hides, however, the fact that maximizing bad publicity against huge public menaces means getting roughed up, inconvenienced, and punished. The system discourages disruption and, judging by her harsh prison depictions, many here would pipe up, "Is there a Plan B?"


Climbing the protest tower

When not delivering subversive keynotes or satiric writing, being restrained in jail, or sidestepping Texas Rangers, Diane has initiated five hunger strikes (some surprisingly effective), performed inventive media protests and political theater (including nudity), done mock citizen arrests -- and pulled off one truly notorious stunt -- protesting 22,000 deaths in India by single-handedly climbing a 75-foot tower.

Here's that tale, begun when "nobody particular" -- right! -- donned a hardhat, hitched a ride into the Dow Chemical plant, thus breaching its vaunted security, and unfurled this heinous banner: "Dow Responsible for Bhopal." After which ensued 10 hours of Keystone Cops commotion, during which time our chained (thus hard-to-move) heroine was bloodied by a sadistic SWAT team, straitjacketed, whisked to the hoosegow, and eventually found guilty of criminal trespassing.

Protesting starts with intimidation on both sides. Apparently, in Calhoun County, Texas, educating folks about inhumane, criminal behavior is itself criminal -- whereas officials dumping tax incentives to encourage the unregulated poisoning of the community's most valuable resource, once lovely bay waters -- no problema. Live jobs trump dead dolphins or toxic shrimp.

Diane then doubled her outlaw-rebel trademark by refusing to show up for prison. Talk about direct, predatory protest drones to offset all the fancy PR industry "goodwill" (payoffs like police cars, computers, and the like). What's four-months prison time for "nobody particular" versus paltry wrist slaps to the Union Carbide CEO whose plant leaked so much lethal gas it wiped out a good-sized city while poisoning 500,000 others.

This episode encapsulates the plucky Wilson Way -- brash, non-violent, dramatic, low-cost -- and with a rippling unpredictability that unnerves testy execs. What makes Diane crazy like a fox, a match for the planet's most shameless polluters (Dow, Alcoa, BP, Dupont and Formosa Plastics), is an uncompromising refusal to sweat outcomes.

Diane Wilson is arrested after pouring oil over herself during an appeareance by BP CEO Tony Hayward before a Congressional hearing in 2010. Photo by Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images.
Commit all the way

Diane elevated the "Just do it" notion before the shoe brand. Why limit unknowable results, she implies, with Obama-like, risk-averse "pragmatism," or entrenched group cautiousness, when you've got Wilson's full-throated impulsiveness, inspiration, and fearless nonchalance on your side? From Diary of an Eco-Outlaw:

I can truthfully say that I've never planned a single action that I was in charge of. I've never thought of the outcome or the ending. My actions were not outcome driven. That's not what propelled me. It was the urgency of the moment affecting my heart. I didn't care if there was no hope. I didn't care if no one was with me. I didn't care if what I did would end there that day. I could be on the losing side. I could go to jail.

Wilson amplifies John Lennon's quip, "Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans," for she disowns planning, beyond scheduling the next cunning expose of corporate wickedness. And by any standards, Diane's career achievement is impressive, awarding her highest honors in the nation's demanding, shit-disturbing sweepstakes.

She shows how much one, non-ideological woman can do without initial fame, private angels or fortune, fancy friends in high office, or big alliances with well-heeled NGOs.

Just do it.

Her blend -- sacrifice, risk-taking, trusting herself, and widening horizons (now anti-war) -- identifies a true western maverick, literally an "unbranded calf." In fact, the term "maverick" celebrates the independent, progressive Texas family of that name. There's nothing right-wing or authoritarian about mavericks; au contraire, they boldly battle both the status quo and status holders.

True political mavericks like Diane insist those hell-bent on making money must not then negligently unmake the earth: thus, no industry is above federal clean air and water laws, or has the right to inflict cancer along with its paycheck, or devastation on treasured community resources.

Is this logic too hard for chemical companies -- and public officials -- or what?

[Robert S. Becker was educated at Rutgers College (BA) and UC Berkeley (Ph.D, English). Becker left university teaching (Northwestern, U. Chicago) for business, founding and heading SOTA Industries, a high-end audio company, from '80 to '92. From '92-02 he did marketing, consulting, and writing; since 2002, he has been scribbling on politics and culture, looking for the wit in the shadows. This article was originally published at -- and was distributed by -- OpEd News.]

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Jordan Flaherty : Rising Anxiety on the Gulf Coast

Many residents have been forced from their homes as a spillway is opened to protect major cities from the flood. Photo by Gallo / Getty / Al Jazeera.
One disaster after another:
Mississippi flood renews Gulf Coast anxieties

By Jordan Flaherty / The Rag Blog / May 23, 2011

NEW ORLEANS -- Byron Encalade grew up in the swamps of southeast Louisiana, a place where day-to-day life hasn’t changed much in generations. “I grew up tying my Pirogue to the front porch when the tide would come up,” he says. “For a lot of us born and raised fishing and trapping and hunting, it’s a way of life.”

That way of life is now in danger.

First there was Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita, two storms in 2005 that famously devastated the Gulf Coast, and literally changed the map of southern Louisiana, quickening already-rapid coastal erosion while destroying homes and communities. Just as coastal residents had begun to recover from those storms, last year's BP Deepwater Horizon drilling disaster had a catastrophic effect on the economy and health of the region and its people.

Now, the waters of the Mississippi River have reached historic heights, and Encalade is worried. “For the small fishers, it’s a very thin line between losing money and making a profit,” he explains.

The Mississippi is central to economic life here on the Gulf, and it’s rising waters have wide-ranging effects, from disrupting shipping and causing rising prices for gas, food, and other necessities, to a loss of tourism dollars and the destruction of an estimated 100,000 acres of crops, as well as oyster fisheries, in the now-flooded Atchafalaya Basin.

A third generation oyster fisherman, Encalade serves as president of the Louisiana Oystermen Association, which represents minority fishers, including African-American, Vietnamese and Cambodian and Native Americans. “This flooding is going to have a enormous economic effect in the fisheries,” he explains.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the federal agency charged with maintaining the levees and overseeing the flood controls, has acted to preserve the safety of Baton Rouge and New Orleans; two cities perched along the Mississippi. To reduce the stress on the levees around the urban areas, the Corps has let water flow through the Morganza Spillway, flooding farmland and rural communities upriver from Baton Rouge, including thousands of houses, farms and oyster fisheries.

The Morganza, a flood control structure designed and built in the aftermath of a devastating 1927 flood of the Mississippi, has only been opened once before, in 1973.

While no one can say for sure the lasting effects of this flooding, optimism is rare. “The oyster people, they’re screwed again,” says George Barisich, president of the United Commercial Fisherman’s Association. “The oysters that survived the BP spill, they’re going to die now.”

Barisich, a fisherman who lives and works in southern Louisiana, says that across the Gulf Coast fishing industry, people have been hit hard, both economically and personally. “A lot of people, this is wearing down on them,” he says. “For the people with the small boats, it’s going to wipe them out. People have heart attacks over this.”

The high waters in the Mississippi have brought into focus problems that have existed for a generation. Land loss caused by oil company drilling has already displaced many who lived by the coast, and the pollution from treatment plants has poisoned communities across the state -- especially in “cancer alley,” the corridor of industrial facilities along the Mississippi River south of Baton Rouge.

Matt Rota, science and water policy director for the Gulf Restoration Network, says that pollution carried by the Mississippi will create a massive “dead zone,” a lifeless stretch of water that he says will further harm the Gulf ecosystem and impact fishers.

According to Rota, the combination of oil company exploration with the construction of levees that have cut off the natural delta-building processes of the river has resulted in a massive loss of coastal land. The state loses a football field-sized area of its coast every 45 minutes, he says. Since 1930, Louisiana has lost over a million acres of land, an area the size of a small state.

While plans have been drafted to stop the erosion and replace the coast, the federal government has never found the money to actually follow through. “I’m seeing this as a squandered opportunity,” he says. “We need to build our wetlands and build our coast instead of losing it.”


Residents don’t trust the levees

Even with the Morganza open, high water levels continue to alarm residents of New Orleans, who are suspicious of the Army Corps of Engineers. “We can’t trust the levees, and we cant trust the Corps,” says Monique Harden, the co-director Advocates for Environmental Human Rights.

Harden, as with many Gulf residents, lost trust in the Corps after faulty construction and maintenance allowed the levees to fail in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Her organization has worked to bring accountability to the U.S. government, even bringing charges of environmental injustice on the part of the U.S. to the United Nations. “This whole thing is going to be weeks, not days,” she says. “And no one’s giving any guarantees.”

Matt Rota of Gulf Restoration Network thinks the whole system of flood control needs to be rethought. “We’re still stuck in this opinion that we can control the Mississippi River,” he says. “We need to shift our thinking and let the river have more room. We’ve walled off the Mississippi from the vast majority of its floodplain.”

While freeing the river in these areas would carry great costs, it would also help restore the coast, and ease pressure on other levees, such as those protecting New Orleans, explains Rota.

“Right now, we’re very confident in the system we have,” responds Mike Petersen, public affairs officer for the Corps, when asked about the concerns expressed by Harden and Rota. However, says Petersen, there are still risks. “There’s no such thing as a flood-proof levee,” he acknowledges. “Although the system works beautifully now, it’s taking a beating like it never has before.”

First Sergeant Jimmy Hankins, with the New Orleans office of the Army Corps of Engineers, says he understands people’s fears. “People in New Orleans are always concerned about their levees. Were under sea level.” But he says New Orleans is safe. “Of course, we always recommend to be safe and concerned,” he added. “But the best levees there are, are the ones on the Mississippi because they’re tested every day.”

Byron Encalade doesn’t want to talk too much about the Army Corps or other federal agencies. “It gets to the point when you’re tired of saying who’s at fault,” he says. “Lets move forward with a solution.”

For Encalade, this means a comprehensive approach that repairs the Gulf, restores the coast, and maintains the freshwater, brackish water, and saltwater marshes so important to fisher communities and local ecosystems. “To do a plan that leaves out a part of it is to ruin it,” he says. For Encalade, whose family has been fishing here for generations, there is no other choice. “I just don’t know where else to go. I can’t live anywhere else. Louisiana is me.”

[Jordan Flaherty is a journalist and staffer with the Louisiana Justice Institute. His award-winning reporting from the Gulf Coast has been featured in a range of outlets including The New York Times, Al Jazeera, and Argentina's Clarin newspaper. His new book is FLOODLINES: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six. He can be reached at neworleans@leftturn.org, and more information about Floodlines can be found at floodlines.org. This article was also published at Al Jazeera. Find more articles by Jordan Flaherty on The Rag Blog.]

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Dahr Jamail : Strong Evidence BP Is Spraying Toxic Dispersants

Dispersant remnant, June 26, 2010. Photo by Shirley Tillman / Truthout.
Evidence mounts:
BP spraying toxic dispersants

The Tillmans and thousands of other fishermen and residents along the Gulf of Mexico are deeply concerned about local, state, and federal government complicity in what they see as a massive cover-up of the oil disaster by using toxic dispersants to sink any and all oil that is located.

By Dahr Jamail / September 15, 2010

See gallery of photos, Below.

[The following dispatch from journalist Dahr Jamail, whose work has frequently appeared on The Rag Blog, was distributed by Truthout.]

Shirley and Don Tillman, residents of Pass Christian, Mississippi, have owned shrimp boats, an oyster boat and many pleasure boats. They spent much time on the Gulf of Mexico before working in BP's Vessels Of Opportunity (VOO) program looking for and trying to clean up oil.

Don decided to work in the VOO program in order to assist his brother, who was unable to do so due to health problems. Thus, Don worked on the boat and Shirley decided to join him as a deckhand most of the days.

"We love the Gulf, our life is here and so when this oil disaster happened, we wanted to do what we could to help clean it up," Shirley explained to Truthout.

However, not long after they began working in BP's response effort in June, what they saw disturbed them. "It didn't take long for us to understand that something was very, very wrong about this whole thing," Shirley told Truthout. "So that's when I started keeping a diary of what we experienced and began taking a lot of pictures. We had to speak up about what we know is being done to our Gulf."

Shirley logged what they saw and took hundreds of photos. The Tillmans confirm, both with what they logged in writing as well as in photos, what Truthout has reported before: BP has hired out-of-state contractors to use unregistered boats, usually of the Carolina Skiff variety, to spray toxic Corexit dispersants on oil located by VOO workers.

Shirley provided Truthout with key excerpts from the diary she kept of her experiences out on the water with her husband while they worked in the VOO program before they, like most of the other VOO workers in Mississippi, were laid off because the state of Mississippi, along with the U.S. Coast Guard, has declared there is no more "recoverable oil" in their area.

"The first day I went, I noticed a lot of foam on the water," reads her entry from June 26. "My husband said he had been seeing a lot of it. At that time, we were just looking for 'Oil.' We would go out in groups of normally, five boats. The Coast Guard was over the VOO operation. There was always a Coast Guard on at least one of the boats. They would tell us when to leave the harbor, where to go and how fast to go. They had flags on each of the VOO boats and also a transponder. Sometimes we would have one or more National Guardsmen in our group too, as well as an occasional safety man to monitor the air quality and procedures on the boat. If we found anything, the Coast Guard in our group would call it in to 'Seahorse' and they would determine what action would be taken."

Along with giving a clear description of how the Coast Guard was thus always aware of the findings of the VOO workers, her diary provides, at times, heart-wrenching descriptions of what is happening to the marine life and wildlife of the Gulf of Mexico.

"Before we went to work, I went down by the beach," reads her entry from July 4. "There were dead jellyfish everywhere. Some of them were surrounded by foam. A seagull was by the waters edge, as the foamy stuff continued to wash up. There was also a crane that appeared to be sick. It didn't look like it had any oil on it, but it just stood there, no matter how close I got."

On the morning of August 5, Shirley describes spotting a dead young dolphin floating in the water. "As we waited for the VOO Wildlife boat to come pick it up, we noticed a pod of dolphins close by," she writes. "Even with all the boats around, they did not leave until the dead one was removed from the water. It was very emotional, for all of us."

The next day, August 6, found her logging more death. "Last night on the news, they reported a fish kill. Before we went to work, I went to the beach by the harbor. The seagulls were everywhere. As for the dead fish, the only ones on the beach, were ones that the tide had left when it went back out. The rest of the 'Fish Kill,' was laying underwater, on the bottom. It was mainly flounder and crab. We only spotted two dead flounder floating that day. I can only imagine how many were on the bottom... I went back to the beach after work. The tide had gone out and the seagulls were eating all the dead fish that had been exposed. You could still see dead fish underwater, still on the bottom. Dead fish don't float anymore?"

The Tillmans' primary concern is the rampant use of toxic dispersants by what they described as private contractors working in unregistered boats, that regularly were going out into the Gulf as they and other VOO teams were coming in from their days' work. There was, oftentimes, so much dispersant on top of the water, their boat left a trail.

"The first thing I noticed, was the 'trail' the boat was leaving in the water," her log from July 10 reads. "You could see exactly where we had been, as far back as you could see. Around 11:00, we were in oil sheen and brownish clumps. We were North of Cat and Ship Island when the Coast Guard told us to drop the boom over. When you pick the boom up, you have to wear 'protective gear.'"

Her log from August 1 describes, in detail, an incident of the Coast Guard not allowing them to collect oil and his proceeding to deny what they found was even oil:

Around 2:00 p.m., we started noticing a lot of oil sheen. We were North of the East end of Cat Island, but South of the Inter Coastal channel. There was, as usual, a Coast Guard on one of the boats in our team. He called in to report it, but we were told not to drop the boom, it was just "Fish Oil." In the beginning of the clean-up operation, if something was floating on the water and it looked like oil, it was oil or oil sheen. Later they would sometimes say it was just "Fish Oil." Also, if it was heavy foam with a brown or rust color, originally it was "Oil Mousse." Later it was called "Algae." We were then told to head Northwest. The further we went, the worse the "Fish Oil" got. Then, the foam was mixed in with the oil. It was at least the size of a football field, around our boat alone. My husband got on the radio and asked if they could put the boom over.

The Coast Guard, again, told them no.

We were then headed West, back towards Pass Christian. A pleasure boat flagged one of the boats in our group down and told him that there was oil all over. The Coast Guard said to tell him that they were aware of the situation... On the way back to the Pass Harbor, I asked my husband, "Just exactly what are we even doing out here?" He told me that he was beginning to think that it was all just for show. I can only imagine what the people on the pleasure boat had to say when they got back home that day. Probably, that they had seen a lot of oil on the water and the VOO boats were out there just riding around in it and not doing anything to clean it up. That is exactly what happened. We decided then to start documenting as much as we could. I believe it was the very next day, Thad Allen was on TV saying that they were scaling operations back due to the fact that, "No oil has been seen in the Gulf in almost two weeks." Now, if we had pulled boom on Sunday and unloaded a bunch of dirty boom in the Pass harbor, it might have been a problem for him later.

On August 5, she describes a rare instance of their being allowed to drop boom in order to collect oil. "We had a Coast Guard and two Safety Men on our boat. We went to the West of the Pass Harbor. The water looked black in places. Lots of bubbles, not foam, just bubbles. Around 8:30, we were in oil sheen and mousse and were told to drop the boom. The more we pulled the boom, it appeared the more was coming up. The Pass [Christian] Harbor was closed because the oil was coming in so bad. We pulled boom back and forth the rest of the afternoon."

By early August, the total number of VOO boats operating out of Pass Christian Harbor, where Shirley and Don worked, was down to 26.

On August 8, Shirley wrote,

Talk at the harbor was that airplanes were spraying dispersants on the water at night, out by the islands. There was also talk of skiffs, from Louisiana, with white tanks on them, that were spraying [dispersants] too. We had seen the skiffs before. They would pass us up in the mornings and head towards the Bay St. Louis Bridge. We were told that they were working out of an area at Henderson Point. Henderson Point has a county-owned area with a boat launch & piers. It was closed to the public after the oil spill and a BP sub-contractor staging area was set up. It always appeared that these boats were finishing up their work day, just as we were going to start ours. Most of these skiffs were Carolina Skiffs.

Later that same morning, Shirley and her husband headed out of the harbor with a member of the National Guard on their boat, heading west, while a member of the Coast Guard and another member of the National Guard were on another boat in their VOO team. After boating for an hour, they turned back to the east, at which point Don spotted five of the Carolina Skiffs.

"I got my camera and started taking pictures of them," Shirley writes.

As I was zooming in as close as I could, I saw one of them spraying something onto the water. I did not get a picture of it, I was too busy telling my husband to tell the Coast Guard on the other boat. The skiffs had turned North and were scattered out, zigzagging South of the train bridge. The Coast Guard called the incident in and sent one of our boats to follow the skiffs. The skiffs immediately left. When I saw the boat spraying, it was upwind from our boat. Within a few minutes, my nose started drying out. Later my throat and eyes did the same thing. A Coast Guard helicopter was dispatched along with a Coast Guard boat. We saw the helicopter about twenty minutes later, but I never saw the Coast Guard boat.

Back at Pass Christian Harbor, her team reported the Carolina Skiffs actively spraying dispersants. She was told by the contracting company, Parson's, that managed their VOO team, to bring in her photographs.

Her entry from the next day, August 9, reads:

I took the pictures, 8x10's to Parson's. A short time later, my husband called and said the Coast Guard wanted me to make a disc of the pictures. I took the disc and turned it over to the Coast Guard. I was told, in the presence of others, that the incident had been investigated and the boats in question had been located at the Henderson Point site. He said that these boats were in the VOO program as skimmer boats, but it had not yet been verified. He said that he had questioned them about spraying something on the water. They told him that if I had seen them spraying anything, they were probably just rinsing out their tanks. He also asked me, "Don't you think if they were spraying dispersants, they would be wearing respirators?" I told him, "You would think so, but nothing surprises me around here anymore." We basically left after that. I knew all they had really wanted was to see exactly what I had gotten pictures of. There is of course the question, "Why would a skimmer boat need to rinse out his tanks?" If he had been skimming oil, why dump it back over? If he hadn't been skimming oil, what was he rinsing out? I know what I saw and I know how I felt afterwards. I also know that in one of the pictures I took, you can see a helicopter over those boats. BP has spotters looking for oil. Could it be he was telling them where to "Touch Up" before they called it a day? One thing I did learn from Coast Guard guy that day, evidently these so-called skimmer boats, also have the ability to spray!

The Tillman's curiosity drove them to investigate further, given the inconsistencies they were seeing in the Coast Guard's actions regarding the dispersant being sprayed from contractors in the Carolina Skiffs.

"My husband came home and said that they had seen the 'Skiffs' again today," reads Shirley's entry from August 10.

He took pictures of them and a jack-up-rig. The rig moves around in the sound and is suppose to be a de-contamination station. However, some Captains have said when they went there, they were told it wasn't in operation at the time. After thinking about the tank skiffs and the Coast Guard for two days, I could not make any sense of this whole situation. The Coast Guard is supposedly over the VOO Program, but it knows nothing about the skiffs at the site, so close to the Pass Harbor. They not only tell us every move to make, but they are always with us when we make the moves. Our boats are flagged and have transponders on them. Those boats have no flags, we have not seen a transponder, nor a Coast Guard member on one of them telling them what to do.

That afternoon, the Tillmans visited the Henderson Point staging area. Though it was guarded, what they found shocked them: "There were probably more boats there than in the entire Pass [Christian] VOO program at the time," reads her entry.

There were only a couple of regular skimmer boats. All appeared to have Louisiana registrations. Almost all of the skiffs had the white tanks on them. A few of the tanks looked like they could have had something in them at one time, but nothing like the oily, sticky mess we had been dealing with. If we got something on our boat, it was almost impossible to get it off. I don't see how they could have gotten it out of the tanks and still looked like they did. Also, there was a Harrison County Sheriffs Department car, right by the boats and some large, plastic, white containers with yellow bases.

On August 13, the VOO boat that Shirley and Don were running was deactivated. Still very concerned, the next day they visited the BP staging area in Hancock County.

"They had evacuated this site," she writes. "Same setup though, a guard and a Sheriff's car. We then went to a site in Gulfport. Evidently, this is a main BP storage site. There were all kinds of boats, including the tank skiffs. The Sheriffs Department was there also and so was those large, plastic tanks with the yellow bases."

Other reports, of a very similar nature, have been reported about other BP staging areas along the Gulf of Mexico. The tanks are clearly used to store and transport Corexit dispersant. The Carolina Skiffs are clearly used to spray it atop oil.

Her August 16 entry details her discovery:

Over the next few days, I continued to go by the Henderson Point site and the Gulfport site. The Henderson Point site brought back a few boats, but none of the tank skiffs or the large plastic tanks. The Gulfport site stayed the same, full of everything. On August 25, I received an email with a link to an article about dispersants. It had a picture of the tanks that dispersants come in, with the label "Nalco Corexit EC9005A." They were 330 gallon, large, plastic, white tanks with a yellow base. These were the same tanks that I had been seeing at the Henderson Point site and the Gulfport site. I was able to get the name of the manufacturer of the tanks, off a picture I took and compared it to the picture in the article. It was the same manufacturer. I researched this company on the internet and found the 330 gal tanks. They are marketed as: "The only manufacturer in the industry to offer portable tanks certified for hazardous goods transport by the United Nations and the U.S. Department of Transportation."

Shirley and Don are, like tens of thousands of other VOO workers and Gulf residents, left with more questions than answers.

"While working on the boats, if you pull boom back onto the boat, you not only had to wear Tyvek suits, protective glasses and gloves, you also had to put tape around the gloves and suit sleeves, as well as around your boots and the suit." Shirley asks, "Why would it be safe for people to get into the same water that all of this hazardous stuff was coming out of?"

For the Coast Guard, she asks:

How can you not know there are boats in the VOO program if you are in charge of the VOO program? The Coast Guard was supposedly over the VOO program, but they acted like they don't know anything about the Carolina Skiffs. The boats were in either a task force or strike force. Every VOO boat has a flag. We all had transponders. This was VOO and Coast Guard regulations. But these skiffs didn't have flags and we never saw transponders on them, nor did they have Coast Guard with them and supposedly every group had at least one Coast Guard in each group. Sometimes we would have two. But the Skiffs didn't have any.

Local media in Pass Christian and Gulfport, Mississippi, are now reporting that BP hopes to have the VOO program in that area completed by September 19.

Shirley is incredulous. "Why would anyone bring their children here and put them in water that has had millions of gallons of toxic chemicals dumped into it, not counting the oil itself?" she asks. "Why would you want to eat seafood that has been living and dying in the water, with all those contaminates?"

Truthout has earlier reported on other fisherman in the area, James "Catfish" Miller and Mark Stewart, who have reported being eyewitnesses to the contractors in the Carolina Skiffs spraying dispersant as well.

Meanwhile, local, state and federal authorities continue to claim that dispersant was only used south of Mississippi's barrier islands and that the Carolina Skiffs and the large tanks they carry are only used to "skim" oil.

"If dispersants were only being sprayed South of the islands, why would these 330 gallon hazardous goods tanks be located at two different work sites, right by the tank skiffs?" Shirley asks. "Why would the skiffs tanks be so clean if they were really skimming oil?"

The Tillmans and thousands of other fishermen and residents along the Gulf of Mexico are deeply concerned about local, state, and federal government complicity in what they see as a massive cover-up of the oil disaster by using toxic dispersants to sink any and all oil that is located.

Dr. Riki Ott, a toxicologist and marine biologist, is a survivor of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil disaster in Alaska. She recently submitted an open letter to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency expressing many of these same concerns.

Ongoing government denials of this problem neither fool nor dissuade Shirley. "I know what I have seen," she told Truthout. "I know what I have been told. I know what I have experienced. I know what I have documented. I also know that I have taken hundreds of pictures to verify what I am saying."

[Houston native Dahr Jamail, an independent journalist, is the author of The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, (Haymarket Books, 2009), and Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq, (Haymarket Books, 2007). Jamail reported from occupied Iraq for nine months as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Turkey over the last five years.]

Source / Truthout

Oiled boom, August 5, 2010.
Oil sheen and dispersant remnant, August 1, 2010.
Corner of Canal Road and I-10, in Gulfport, Mississippi, at the Gulfport site used as a BP staging area, August 14, 2010.
Corner of Canal Road and I-10, in Gulfport, at the Gulfport site used as a BP staging area.
Corexit tanks, September 1, 2010.
Dead flounder among fish kill, August 6, 2010. Photos by Shirley Tillman / Truthout.
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Jordan Flaherty : Five Years After Katrina and Still Not Home

Image from Facing South.
Displacement continues:
New Orleans five years after Katrina

More than 100,000 New Orleanians received a one-way ticket out of town and still have received no help in coming back, and these voices are left out of most stories of the city.

By Jordan Flaherty / The Rag Blog / August 28, 2010

NEW ORLEANS -- Poet Sunni Patterson is one of New Orleans’ most beloved artists. She has performed in nearly every venue in the city, toured the U.S., and frequently appears on television and radio, from Democracy Now! to Def Poetry Jam. When she performs her poems in local venues, half the crowd recites the words along with her.

But, like many who grew up here, she was forced to move away from the city she loves. She left as part of a wave of displacement that began with Katrina and still continues to this day. While hers is just one story, it is emblematic of the situation of many African Americans from New Orleans, who no longer feel welcomed in the city they were born in.

Patterson comes from New Orleans’s Ninth Ward. Her family’s house was cut in half by the floodwaters and has since been demolished. Despite the loss of her home, she was soon back in the city, living in the Treme neighborhood. She spent much of the following years traveling the country, performing poetry and trying to raise awareness about the plight of New Orleans.

But her income was not enough -- her post-Katrina rent was twice what she had paid before the storm, and she was also putting up money to help her family rebuild as well as preparing for the birth of her son Jibril. “I wound up getting evicted from my apartment because we were still working on the house,” she said. “In the midst of it, you realize that you are not generating the amount of money you need to sustain a living.”

Just as the storm revealed racial inequalities, the recovery has also been shaped by systemic racism. According to a recent survey of New Orleanians by the Kaiser Foundation, 42 percent of African Americans -- versus just 16 percent of whites -- said they still have not recovered from Katrina. Thirty-one percent of African-American residents -- versus eight percent of white respondents -- said they had trouble paying for food or housing in the last year. Housing prices in New Orleans have gone up 63 percent just since 2009.

Eleven billion federal dollars went into Louisiana’s Road Home program, which was meant to help the city rebuild. The payouts from this program went exclusively to homeowners, which cut out renters from the primary source of federal aid.

Even among homeowners, the program treated different populations in different ways. U.S. District Judge Henry Kennedy recently found that the program was racially discriminatory in the formula it used to disperse funds. By partially basing payouts on home values instead of on damage to homes, the program favored properties in wealthier -- often whiter -- neighborhoods. However, the same judge found that nothing in the law obligated the state to correct this discrimination for the 98 percent of applicants whose cases have been closed.

At approximately 355,000, the city’s population remains more than 100,000 lower than it’s pre-Katrina number, and many counted in the current population are among the tens of thousands who moved here post-Katrina. This puts the number of New Orleanians still displaced at well over 100,000 -- perhaps 150,000 or more. A survey by the Louisiana Family Recovery Corps found that 75 percent of African Americans who were displaced wanted to return but were being kept out. Like Patterson, most of those surveyed said economic forces kept them from returning.

New Orleans after Katrina.

A changed city

As New Orleans approaches the fifth anniversary of Katrina and begins a long recovery from the BP drilling disaster, the media has been searching for an uplifting angle. Stories of the city’s rebirth are everywhere, and there are reasons to feel good about New Orleans.

The Saints’ Super Bowl victory was a turning point for the city, and the HBO series Treme has gone a long way towards helping the story of the city’s trauma and search for recovery get out to a wider audience. Music festivals like Jazz Fest and Essence Fest, which are so central to the city’s tourism-based economy, have brought in some of their largest crowds in recent years.

But despite positive developments in the city’s recovery, more than 100,000 New Orleanians received a one-way ticket out of town and still have received no help in coming back, and these voices are left out of most stories of the city.

Many from this silenced population complain of post-Katrina decisions that placed obstacles in their paths, such as the firing of nearly 7,000 public school employees and canceling of their union contract shortly after the storm, or the tearing down of nearly 5,000 public housing units -- two post-Katrina decisions that disproportionately affected Black residents.

Advocates have also noted that among those who are not counted in the statistics on displacement are the New Orleanians who are in the city, but not home. They fall into the category that international human rights organizations call internally displaced.

The guiding principles of internal displacement, as recognized by the international community, call for more than return. UN principles number 28 and 29 call for, in part, “the full participation of internally displaced persons in the planning and management of their return or resettlement and reintegration.”

They also state that, “They shall have the right to participate fully and equally in public affairs at all levels and have equal access to public services,” as well as to have their property and possessions replaced, or receive “appropriate compensation or another form of just reparation.”
In other words, these principles call for a return that includes restoration and reparations. As civil rights attorney Tracie Washington has said, “I’m still displaced, until the conditions that caused my displacement have been alleviated. I’m still displaced as long as Charity Hospital remains closed. I’m still displaced as long as rents remain unaffordable. I’m still displaced as long as schools are in such bad shape.”

In the U.S., Katrina recovery has fallen under the Stafford Act, a law that specifically excludes many of these rights that international law guarantees.

Among those who are back in New Orleans but still displaced are members of the city’s large homeless population. In a report this week, UNITY for the Homeless estimated from 3,000 to 6,000 persons are living in the city’s abandoned buildings. Seventy-five percent of these undercounted residents are Katrina survivors, most of whom had stable housing before the storm. Eighty-seven percent are disabled, and a disproportionate share are elderly.

Sunni Patterson. Image from lifeizpeotry.

Cultural resistance

Sunni Patterson can’t remember a time when she wasn’t a poet. The words flow naturally and seemingly effortlessly from her. When she performs, it is like a divine presence speaking though her body. Her frame is small but she fills the room. Her voice conveys passion and love and pain and loss. Her words illuminate current events and history lessons -- her topics ranging from the Black Panthers in the Desire housing projects to domestic violence.

You can hear Sunni Patterson’s influence in the performances of many young poets in New Orleans. And in the work of Patterson, you can hear the history of community elders passed along, the chants of Mardi Gras Indians, and the knowledge and embrace of neighbors and family and friends.

And Patterson is part of a large and thriving community of socially conscious culture workers. Since the late ’90s, you could find spoken word poetry being performed somewhere in New Orleans almost any night of the week. And many of these poets are also teachers, activists, and community organizers.

Although Patterson’s house had been in her family for generations, her relatives had difficulty presenting the proper paperwork for the Road Home Program -- a problem shared by many New Orleanians. “We’re dealing with properties that have been passed down from generation to generation,” says Patterson. “The paperwork is not always available. A lot of elders are tired, they don’t know what to do.”

Now, like so many other former New Orleanians, she cannot afford to live in the city she loves. “I’m in Houston,” she says, seemingly stunned by her own words. “Houston. Houston. I can’t say that and make it sound right. It hurts me to my heart that my child’s birth certificate says Houston, Texas.”

One of the hardest aspects of leaving New Orleans has been the loss of her community. “In that same house that I grew up, my great grandmother and grandfather lived,” she says. “Everybody that lived around there, you knew. It was family. In New Orleans, even if you don’t know someone, you still speak and wave and say hello. In other cities, there’s something wrong with you if you speak to someone you don’t know.”

New Orleanians were displaced after the storm to 5,500 cities, spread across every US state. Although the vast majority of former New Orleanians are in nearby cities like Houston, Dallas, or Atlanta, many are still living in further locales from Utah to Maine.

While she is sad to be gone from the city, Patterson wants to see the positive in the loss. “The good part is that New Orleans energy and culture is now dispersed all over the world,” she says. “You can’t kill it. Ain’t that something? That’s what I love about it. So we still gotta give thanks, even in the midst of the atrocity, that poetry is still being created.”

[Jordan Flaherty is a journalist, an editor of Left Turn Magazine, and a staffer with the Louisiana Justice Institute. He was the first writer to bring the story of the Jena Six to a national audience, and his award-winning reporting from the Gulf Coast has been featured in a range of outlets including The New York Times, Mother Jones, and Argentina's Clarin newspaper. He has produced news segments for Al-Jazeera, TeleSur, and Democracy Now! and appeared as a guest on CNN Morning, Anderson Cooper 360, and Keep Hope Alive with the Reverend Jesse Jackson. Haymarket Books has just released his new book, FLOODLINES: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six. He can be reached at neworleans@leftturn.org.]

More information about Floodlines can be found at floodlines.org. Floodlines will also be featured on the Community and Resistance Tour this fall. For more information on the tour, see communityandresistance.wordpress.com.

• See other articles by Jordan Flaherty on The Rag Blog.
• Listen to Thorne Dreyer's May 18, 2010, interview with Jordan Flaherty on Rag Radio.

Resources mentioned in this article:

• Sunni Patterson
• Kaiser Family Foundation Survey
• Louisiana Family Recovery Corps Survey: Displaced Louisianians: Where did they go and are they coming back?
• UNITY of Greater New Orleans Report
• Home prices up 63 percent in Orleans Parish over the year

Other Resources:

• Louisiana Justice Institute
• Justice Roars
• Project Transparency
• Left Turn Magazine

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Larry Ray : Hitting the Pause Button

From the land of the 'oil geezer':
America's round-the-clock 'churnalism'

By Larry Ray / The Rag Blog / July 21, 2010

GULFPORT, Mississippi -- This column has been on pause for almost a month.

The disgust and distraction from smelly, greasy petroleum pollution rolling onto beaches and marshes just a mile or so from my home has been mostly responsible for the hiatus. But the general roar of background noise from today’s “news media” is more disgusting, distracting, and off-putting than the BP oil well blowout itself.

Immediately dubbed “the oil spill,” it is not a spill at all. It is a runaway blown-out oil well almost a mile beneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico that has been pumping an estimated 40-60,000 barrels of oil a day into the Gulf for almost three months. It is a very complex story that requires at least a basic understanding of high school physics and knowledge of basic geology to discuss it in any sort of meaningful way.

It also helps to know something about hydrocarbons and the advanced technology used in oil and gas drilling and producing deep ocean oil wells. But those basic requirements don't stop pretty news faces from blathering on, basically clueless, reading teleprompter tripe or swapping fuzzy speculation amongst themselves.

The plight of gulf coast residents is heralded by local politicians and a few, including a morbidly obese New Orleans area parish president, have become regulars on national newscasts as they growl and repeat their attacks on BP and the U.S. government. Not that there isn't plenty to growl about, if you like to listen to it over and over.

In May, immediately after the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded and plunged to the bottom, the short, hyper, bald headed afternoon CNN ringmaster exclaimed breathlessly that they had just discovered a “geezer of oil” coming from the sea floor. And that was before the reporting got really bad.

Nightly stories with video of oil soaked birds and massive pollution of sensitive marine marsh lands requires only a video camera and a talking head reciting the lines of the generic “Gee isn’t this a shame” news story template. Works equally well for earthquakes, floods and raging forest fires.

Mix in the soap opera of BP CEO, Tony Hayward, with his passive Lemur-like gaze and terminal case of foot-in-mouth disease (it has just been announced he is leaving BP in a matter of weeks), then add grimy pre-November election political dirt, tea party racism, and General McChrystal’s inglorious cashiering for trash talking his Commander in Chief, and Arizona's Nazi immigration law and viola... non-stop, 24-7 all American “churnalism.”

That churnalism, mixed with endless side-effect warnings of 4-hour erections, rashes, and diarrhea from the drug commercials that dominate the evening news and the off switch is the best bet. The New York Times and a cuppa coffee in the mornings along with a visit to the BBC and a couple of Italian major newspapers seems to provide an adequate news balance.

With the dog days of summer spreading record breaking heat and humidity across much of the nation and the threat of an above average hurricane season here where Katrina tore us up almost five years ago, I will probably just keep the pause button pressed and plan to be back, intact, by Thanksgiving or maybe before, hopefully.

[Retired journalist Larry Ray is a Texas native and former Austin television news anchor. He also posts at The iHandbill.]

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Gulf Oil Spill : Toxic Popsicle or Extinction Event?

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A speckled crab -- and an American flag -- are encased in a thick layer of oil just offshore from the Bon Secour National Wildlife Refuge. Photo from BP Slick.
Methane in the Gulf:
Is the oil spill a toxic popsicle
Or an extinction event?

By Bruce Melton / The Rag Blog / July 6, 2010

Tar balls have hit Galveston now, observations from Monday show patches of oil south of Vermillion Bay, Lousiana, half way between New Orleans and Texas, but poor observation conditions due to rough seas may be hampering the identification of oil.

The oil spread models for the Gulf south of Western Louisiana and Eastern Texas show that strong southeast winds have set up a strong westward current that could result in impacts to Texas.

NOAA says there is a 60% chance that Miami Beach will be hit, and although the models show the oil ejecting far out into the North Atlantic on the Gulf Stream, NOAA is saying that it is increasingly unlikely that anything north of North Carolina will be affected.

It is also interesting to understand how these models work. The current NOAA model says that the "coastlines with the highest probability for impact (81 to 100 percent) extend from the Mississippi River Delta to the western panhandle of Florida...”

Science is science. There are industry standards in the world of science that dictate how scientists behave. To say that there is only an 81% probability of oil hitting the coast from Louisiana to Florida, may be perfectly valid to a computer modeler. But tell that to the wildlife, the fishermen, the business owners and the generation (generations?) of people who will have to live with the results of this modeling.

The model uses 90 days of spill at 33,000 barrels per day, or just about 3 million barrels (120 million gallons). The official Deepwater Horizon Spill Response numbers for what is actually coming out of the blowout are between 35,000 and 60,000 barrels per day or up to 2.5 million gallons per day.

As of July 6, the 77 days of spill could have released 4.6 million barrels or 193 million gallons of oil. This would be equal to 17 Exxon Valdez spills. This volume of oil is now approaching the level of the largest spill ever -- the Gulf War spill in Kuwait.

British Petroleum (BP) says they have captured about 10 million gallons of oil and 28 million gallons of oily water.

Eighty one thousand square miles of the Gulf are closed to fishing, an area larger than the six New England States and New Jersey combined. Enough boom has been placed to almost stretch from Pheonix, Arizona to Pensacola, Florida. More than 45,000 personnel are working the spill with the on and offshore response. More than 1.7 million gallons of dispersant have been deployed.

Five hundred miles of shoreline are oiled, but the area of marsh impacted is not readily available. I was able to dig up this quote from Plaquemines Parish (on the Mississippi delta in Louisiana) president Billy Nungesser: “Well, they can go to Pensacola and find tar balls. If they want to find 4,000 acres of thick oil, destroying wildlife, eating up the marsh, where everything is dead, come to Plaquemines Parish.”

What Nungesser is saying is something that is feared in the environmental community. When oil soaks a marsh, it not only kills the vegetation, but it can form a seal on the marsh muck where the marsh plants have their roots. Once this happens, oxygen is cut off and the roots of the plants die, along with all of the life that lives in the muck (a lot more than just crabs and crawdads).

Without this life, the countless number of air channels and decomposition gas pockets (think of rotten eggs) and root paths that gave the marsh muck that good old mucky feel -- well, all of that collapses. Once it collapses, it can take years, or even decades to regenerate.

So now we have a situation similar to that in the Rockies, where the forests are dying because their changed climate is just too warm. The foresters say that the trees will grow back in 100 years but in 100 years the temperature will be 13 degrees warmer than it is now. (The Rockies will warm like the polar regions -- at a much greater rate than the rest of the planet.)

If the forests are dying now because of a few degrees of temperature change, how will they grow back with five times that much change?

In Lousiana, the marshes are already struggling with sea level rise, subsidence, and lack of sediment nourishment. But that will not complete the death sentence of the marshes. Sea level rise is rapidly accelerating.

For most of the 20th century sea level rise was about 1.5 mm per year. Since the turn of the Century it has jumped to 3.4 mm per year and is rapidly accelerating.

I know 3.4 mm per year doesn’t sound like much, but it is cumulative. And the Army Corp of Engineers has recently published a report stating that, in healthy ecosystems, when sea level rise reaches 7 mm per year, the dynamical processes will begin to disintegrate -- meaning that even healthy marshes will disappear. How will these marshes devastated by oil be able to cope?

To keep some of the spill from hitting shore, 275 fires have been set in the Gulf to burn oil corralled by containment booms. These fires are the fires that have reportedly burned sea turtles alive, confirmed by testimony from NOAA scientists in a Huffington Post article on July 2.

The wildlife report below is of course the official statistics for the subject. None of the turtles burned in the 275 offshore fires were included in this report. These are just the numbers of reported impacts by the official collectors and rehabilitates. The actual number of impacted individual animals is also unknown, but it's likely to be far in excess of the official statistics.

CLICK ON CHART TO ENLARGE.

The Ixtoc blowout in the Bay of Campeche in the far southwestern Gulf of Mexico in 1979, the second largest oil spill ever, dumped 140 million gallons in nine months. The Deepwater Horizon spill surpassed this milestone in late June, after about three months. The difference in scale too is dramatic. The Ixtoc was in 160 feet of water and the well was 10,000 feet deep. The Deepwater Horizon is in 4,100 feet of water and the well is 18,000 or maybe even 25,000 feet below the ocean bed (there seems to still be some uncertainty involving the permitted and actual numbers).

There is a big difference between the Deepwater Horizon oil and that from most other oil wells because of the amount of natural gas in this particular oil field. As a result, this spill contains enormous amounts of natural gas, or methane.

This methane has caused a lot of trouble beginning with the actual blowout itself. Natural gas in an oil well is common, but not in large amounts and it is usually not a good thing. A lot of natural gas makes things even worse.

This well pushes the limits in many ways -- with the combination of the deep water, the deep well, and the high natural gas concentration -- and then we add in the technical mistakes, which we won't be able to fully determine until sometime in the future.

Gulf on fire. Image by John L. Walthen / BP Slick.
The methane continued to cause problems, as the oil recovery devices started to became clogged with methane ice, or what is really called methane clathrates -- a combination of methane and water ice that can freeze when the temperature is above 32 degrees and the pressure is high enough (like at the bottom of the ocean).

But this is not the worst that methane can do. Texas A&M Oceanographer John Kessler says that deep-ocean methane levels from the Deepwater Horizon blowout are hundreds of thousands of times higher than background levels and even approached one million times higher than normal in some of the samples that his team made while researching the “oil plumes” around the blowout.

One million times greater than background is indeed astonishing, but when put into context it becomes all the more sobering.

Methane is the same as the natural gas that we burn in our stoves. It is a greenhouse gas with one carbon and four hydrogen atoms. It has a global warming potential many times that of carbon dioxide, but when burned as a fuel only emits 71% as much CO2 as oil and 56% as much as coal. (Some say it could be a good transition fuel to get us off of coal.)

This well has a tremendous amount of natural gas, estimated to be 40% by weight of the total spill by Kessler and 50% by Samantha Joye at the University of Georgia. This is compared to about 5% from normal oil deposits.

By day 160 of the blowout we will hopefully have the pipe plugged. It should be well into August when the relief wells are finished. But we should note that it took the Mexican oil firm Pemex nine months to get their relief well to work on the Ixtoc blowout -- a well that was only 10,000 feet deep in 160 feet of water. And by the time 160 days have elapsed, the Deep Horizon will have spilled 236 million barrels of natural gas.

To put this much methane into perspective, we have to understand its global warming potential. Normally, we know that methane, as a greenhouse gas, is capable of capturing about 25 times more heat than carbon dioxide. But recent studies have shown this to be low. Because our planet is warming and the natural CO2 sinks are slowing, methane really has about 34 times the heat trapping capacity of CO2.

But wait, that’s not all.

The figure of 34 times the heat trapping capacity is for time spans of 100 years. In the not too distant past, this was an appropriate time span to consider for climate change. But that was 20th century climate change. A decade -- a half generation -- has passed since those times. The climate change times scale of relevance today is 20 or 30 years, not a century.

So when we realize that the heat trapping capacity of methane should now be based on a short 20 or 30 year times scale, the number increases to something more like 62 times more potent, not 34, or even 25.

So methane has a warming capacity that is 62 times more than carbon dioxide. And when we calculate the global warming potential of those 236 million barrels of methane, it is equal to about 5 percent of the total U.S. transportation fleet emissions of carbon dioxide. This is one incredibly huge well.

But are the emissions really important? Doctors Kessler and Joye are finding that little of the methane is making it to the surface. It is becoming dissolved in the great ocean depths and suspended with the oil in those massive plumes.

Microbiologoic activity then begins to consume the methane (and the oil). It is this bioactivity that consumes the oxygen in the water and creates hard times for the organisms that live there. Kessler and Joye said that oxygen depletion had not reached a critical level yet, only falling about 30 to 40 percent below normal. But this was about three weeks ago and at the time they said that, levels were falling 1 to 2 percent per day.

This oxygen depletion would put the waters in question down in the 4 ppm (parts per million) range. Levels of 2 ppm stress most fish. Levels below 1.4 ppm are deadly. The plumes are still 30 to 40 miles long, miles wide and thousands of feet thick. The closer to the well you get, the lower the oxygen content is, and the higher the methane concentrations.

From all over the oil-impacted coastal areas, we are hearing anecdotal reports of strange fish behavior, of sharks and turtles congregating near shore, dolphins disappearing, and that sort of thing. There are also reports about other oxygen deprived waters in the Gulf that are not associated with the great Mississippi Delta dead zone for which there are no ready explanations.

Dead zones are increasing significantly in our world’s oceans because the oceans are getting warmer (warmer water holds less oxygen) and because of increased nutrient runoff from agricultural industrialization. But further study is needed concerning these new Gulf of Mexico dead zones.

Methane occurs naturally in sea water; it is released as a byproduct of the decomposition of organic material. The organic material gets there because of the constant cycling of life; fish live and die and organic debris is washed into the oceans from rivers, but mostly it comes form what is called primary productivity. This is the planetary sized mass of life that creates half of the oxygen on Earth -- the algae and plankton of the oceans.

These single and few celled organisms are like grass and trees on land. They are the fundamental building blocks of life in the oceans. There are approximately 50 gigatons of primary productivity in our oceans (one gigaton is a billion tons). To put this to scale, there are about 2 gigatons of crops on earth.

Over tens and hundreds of thousands of years, this natural production of methane collects in sediments. Below a couple of thousand feet in depth, pressures are so high and water temperature is generally cool enough that the methane decomposition products can freeze, just like the natural gas coming out of the busted blowout preventer froze and clogged up the top hat spill collector that BP had deployed.

The frozen methane, or methane clathrates, collect in the ocean sediments and over tens and hundreds of millions of years form oil deposits deep below the ocean floor.

This is where the methane that clogged the top hat oil collector that BP deployed came from -- four to five miles beneath the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.

But the formation of the shallow methane clathrates continue to this day. The Gulf of Mexico contains some of the greatest shallow methane clathrates deposits in the world and the oil giants are itching to get their hands on them.

There is only one problem. Methane clathrates are very unstable. They form on the edge of the envelope of pressure and temperature. Just a little warming and they become unstable. The recent Congressional inquiry into the Deep Horizon incident brought up this point:

Offshore drilling operations that disturb methane hydrate-bearing sediments could fracture or disrupt the bottom sediments and compromise the wellbore, pipelines, rig supports, and other equipment involved in oil and gas production from the seafloor.

Destabilization of methane clathrates has also been identified as a likely culprit in some of Earth’s more punctuating moments. These moments usually took tens to hundreds of thousands of years, as the earth’s climate naturally changed from warm to cold because of solar influences and natural feedbacks.

But at some point, an additional forcing, like an asteroid striking the Yucatan Peninsula, caused a perturbation in the natural cycle. The additional warming triggered the instability of the methane clathrates, great amounts of methane were released causing great warming, and abrupt climate changes occurred that caused great extinction events.

This is a very critical path that our planet occasionally follows . Right now mankind is increasing the CO2 concentration on this planet faster than at any time in the last 20 million years and likely as fast as when the giant asteroid hit the Yucatan Peninsula and the dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago.

Methane concentrations on earth have started to rise again after a decade of stability. It is thought that contemporary agricultural techniques and their expansion across the world had halted the increase in our planet’s methane emission, and this is probably what happened.

Baby Kemp's Ridley Sea Turtle, covered in oil. Image courtesy the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
The new increase is likely coming from methane clahtrates in the Laptev Sea on the edge of Siberia and the Arctic Ocean. This area of the planet has warmed 7 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit in the last 20 years and the methane clahtrates on the bottom of the Laptev sea have started to vent.

The venting is so great that it rivals all the rest of the methane emissions from all of the rest of the world’s oceans combined.

The methane gas also melts beneath the clahtrates. The heat of the earth can cause free methane gas to collect beneath the solid sheet of methane ice in the sediments at the bottom of the sea. This sheet of ice has become perforated in the Laptev Sea. But what happens when the clathrates are on a slope like in the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi Canyon where the Deepwater Horizon is?

In the past, phonemena called methane outburst occurred when their overlying methane ice laden sediment became destabilized. Scars from dozens of massive tsunami causing landslides along the continental shelf of the east coast are evident from prehistoric times.

These things happen when our climate is rapidly changing. Eight thousand years ago when Earth had just warmed out of the depths of the last ice age, a great undersea landslide took place off of the shores of Norway.

It is called the Storrega slide. It was 200 miles across and the slide traveled for 800 miles under the Atlantic Ocean, most of the way to Greenland. The tsunami it produced was 65 to 82 feet tall. The 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, that killed 200,000, was 50 feet tall.

I am not saying that anything of the sort is imminent. I am saying that there are important things to understand about our Earth and the way it operates. So the important things to understand now are that clathrates are unstable on slopes, the Deepwater Horizon is on a big slope, and the product coming out of the blowout is 180 degrees Fahrenheit.

[When Bruce Melton, P.E., isn't practicing civil engineering, he's studying climate change and writing about it. Melton was one of eight Austinites named in the "Heroes of Climate Change" article published in The Good Life magazine in July 2007. To read more of his work on climate change, visit his website, Melton Engineering Services Austin.]

References:

EIA Transportation Sector Emissions in 2008 –
Total CO2 emissions from transportation sector in the U.S. = 1.93 billion tons
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/1605/ggrpt/carbon.html

Primary Produtivity 50 Gtons in the oceans, 2 gtons in world crops
http://en.academic.ru/dic.nsf/enwiki/30382

Methane GWP 20 year timeframe – 62 times more potent than CO2
Nisbet, Have sudden large releases of methane from geologic reservoirs occurred since the last Glacial Maximum, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 2002.

Dr, John Kessler, Texas A&M University, Department of Oceanography
http://tamunews.tamu.edu/2010/05/26/prof-heads-out-to-study-gulf-oil-spill-with-first-nsf-grant/

Samantha Joye, University of Georgia
http://solveclimate.com/blog/20100701/methane-dead-zones-gulf-waters-confirmed-gas-levels-100-000-times-normal

Methane clathrates:
Laherrere, Oceanic Hydrates - more questions than answers, Energy Exploration and Exploitation, May 2000.

The national Methane Hydrates R&D lab
http://www.netl.doe.gov/technologies/oil-gas/FutureSupply/MethaneHydrates/projects/DOEProjects/MH_5668EMCharGOM.html

NOAA Modeling Threat
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2010/20100702_longterm.html

Wildlife Report – July 5, 2010
http://www.deepwaterhorizonresponse.com/posted/2931/WildLifeConsolidated5july.739707.pdf

Gulf Oil Spill – The Plight of the Sea Turtles, Huffington Post, July 2, 2010
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/02/gulf-oil-spill-the-plight_n_634083.html

Stats July 5, 2010, Government Monitor
http://www.thegovmonitor.com/world_news/united_states/florida-releases-july-6-2010-gulf-oil-spill-situation-update-34982.html

Tsunamis India 2004: Australian Bureau of Meteorology

The North Atlantic tsunami caused by a methane clathrate slide:
Record Breaking Height for Tsunami in the North Atlantic 8000 yrs BP, EOS, 2003

Stability of methane clathrates on slopes:
Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill: Selected Issues for Congress
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R41262.pdf

The oil coming out of the seafloor in Mississippi canyon is about 180 degrees F.
A July 1 interview on the American Geophysical Union blog of marine goechemist John Farrington, one of a group of scientists of the Consortium of Ocean Leadership at Louisiana State University.
http://blog.agu.org/geohazards/2010/07/01/oil-spill-science/

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