Please post on-the-water news and opinions about the BP Gulf Coast spill

[vbmlows]

This spill has me very concerned to put it mildly. I'd like to see what SFC members think about it.

[jackdaniels]

Oil Spill's 'Fisheries Failure' May Signal End of Coastal Towns

Friday, April 30, 2010

May 1 (Bloomberg) -- Frank Campo thinks the oil spill approaching the marshes east of New Orleans may destroy his community.

Campo, who runs Campo's Marina in St. Bernard Parish's Shell Beach, says the response to the spill is too little and too late to prevent economic disaster for the commercial and recreational fishermen who earn a living from the coast.

"My family's got over 100 years in this place and we're liable to lose it because these guys are sitting on their hands," he said in an interview.

State agencies today closed recreational and commercial fishing and shut down the oyster harvest in most areas east of the Mississippi River. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal sent a letter to Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, asking Locke to declare a "commercial fisheries failure" and requesting assistance for both the seafood industry and recreational fishing businesses.

Jindal wrote that those businesses are crucial to Louisiana's coastal towns and the country, supplying almost one- third of the seafood in the lower 48 states, with values in excess of $2.85 billion a year.

"As the largest provider of domestic seafood in the continental United States, protection of Louisiana's fisheries, habitats and catch are critical to our nation's economy and food supply," he wrote. "The seafood industry is not only a large economic driver, but a defining element of the unique culture, and a crucial tourist draw to the state."

Response to Spill

At Shell Beach, Parish Councilman Frank Everhardt Jr. sat in his truck near the boat ramp answering questions from a half- dozen angry fishermen and vowing to help everyone find ways to make a living. He also criticized the response to the spill, saying the parish needs 42 miles of boom to protect its oyster bedding grounds. So far, it has 20,000 feet.

"This is going to be the biggest economic disaster to hit Louisiana," he said. "It could be 10 times the economic damage of Hurricane Katrina."

Joe Melton, a crabber from nearby Reggio, said that at least there was work for those who returned after storm to St. Bernard, where almost all of the parish's 27,000 dwellings were flooded. He said he never wanted to live anywhere other than these towns, strung along the boat-lined bayous, where new vacation camps stand next to rubble left from the storm.

"I was gone three years, five months, 10 days and 12 hours and I came back because this is my home," he said, with tears in his eyes. "This makes Katrina look like a birthday party."

About two miles away in Hopedale, Malcolm "Mally" Assevado, owner of the Southern Foods oyster dock, supervised workers loading the day's last sacks onto a truck from a 40-foot boat docked on the roadside bayou. He said he didn't know what his neighbors would do now.

"Most commercial fishermen here are in their 50s and 60s," he said. "They're not going to go out and get another job."

Campo, 68, said his marina can't survive long without the men and women who make their living in the marsh. He pointed to a new concrete slab adjacent his hoist and said he'd halted work on a building meant for the spot.

"If a guy can't go fishing, and a guy can't go crabbing and a guy can't go get oysters, what good is the fuel?" he asked. "If they shut you down for four, five, maybe 10 years, what are you supposed to do in the meantime?"

--Editor: Mike Millard.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...#ixzz0mirE3YTs

[jackdaniels]

By ROBERT LEE HOTZ

Driven deep into Gulf Coast waterways by wind and seasonally high tides, the spreading oil slick from the Deepwater Horizon accident could cause serious ecological and wildlife-health consequences long after signs of surface damage have been erased.

Independent studies of several major oil spills, including the 1989 Exxon Valdez accident, show that oil often reaches farther into tidal estuaries than previously thought and can soak into shoreline sediment where it can continue to affect fish and wildlife for 10 or 20 years.

In the aftermath of offshore oil spills in Alaska, Massachusetts and Spain, researchers discovered long-term effects on shellfish, crabs, seabirds, whales and sea otters years after the accidents. The problems ranged from altered blood chemistry and higher levels of stress hormones to erratic behavior, contaminated eggs and long-term population declines.

"Everyone assumes all the bad stuff happens immediately after a spill and that things get progressively better," said wildlife biologist Dan Esler at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. "There are long-term consequences."

View Full Image
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Jared Moossy / Redux for the Wall Street Journal

Louisiana crabbers on Friday said they were worried this would be their last catch for a while.
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Since the Exxon Valdez spill—one of the most intensively studied marine oil incidents in history, Dr. Esler has tracked the long-term effects of the spill among wildlife in Alaska's Prince William Sound. Last month, he reported genetic evidence showing that the harlequin ducks there are still exposed to oil. He cautioned that exposure didn't by itself prove any adverse effect. "We can safely say that oil is not good for you, but how bad it is at the levels they are encountering, we can't say," he said.

Other follow-up studies have shown that, a decade after the spill, fish in the original spill zone still were being exposed to hydrocarbons, while 17 seabird species had yet to recover.

The National Marine Fisheries Service still lists seven species of oysters, clams, ducks and killer whales as recovering from the oil spill. Two species of herring and salmon have shown no signs of recovery even after 20 years.

As long as the underwater well in the Gulf of Mexico continues to spew oil, currently at a rate of about 5,000 barrels a day, oil will wash into estuaries on every tidal cycle, building up successive layers of silt and oil along the shoreline. The salt marshes and beaches are home to thousands of nesting waterfowl and a rest stop for millions of migrating birds.

Emergency workers continued Friday to set up protective barriers around the most vulnerable coastal regions, but the area's salt marshes and other wildlife refuges are difficult to sequester. And researchers said mangrove swamps, seagrass shallows and marshes are so fragile that any effort to clean them up would do additional damage.

To some extent, the Gulf of Mexico is naturally awash with oil seeping from seafloor sediment.

In the early 1990s, researchers discovered more than 600 areas where oil naturally leaks into the Gulf from undersea reservoirs. Based on satellite and radar surveys, the researchers estimated that this natural leakage amounted every year to twice the amount of the Exxon Valdez spill, which was about 260,000 barrels.
[OILIMPACT]

Last year, researchers at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and the University of California calculated that natural oil seeps off Santa Barbara, Calif., had leaked 20 tons to 25 tons of oil every day for thousands of years. Almost all of it had been naturally contained in seafloor sediment.

But the concentrated spillage from the Deepwater Horizon well overwhelms the natural background levels, researchers said, and the oil will be carried into more vulnerable intertidal zones. "The oil will come in on the tide and penetrate as far as the tide penetrates," said marine ecologist Charles Peterson at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

Exposed to the air, the lighter hydrocarbons in crude oil, such as benzene, toluene, xylene and ethylene, evaporate quickly, researchers said. But the heavier carbon compounds, called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, can persist at toxic levels in sediment for years, isolated from the sunlight and bacteria that ordinarily would break these chemicals down. The oil traces can contaminate fish and animals' food, impair their ability to breed successfully and even alter their natural behavior. Fiddler crabs, for example, in oil-soaked areas stagger and "act like drunken sailors," Dr. Peterson said.

"These are areas where the oil can come to rest and retrain its toxicity and cause longer-term chronic effects," Dr. Peterson said, "not killing wildlife outright in some spasm of agony—but affecting their fitness, health and growth."

Write to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000..._WSJ_US_News_6

[Shortfin]

Sarah Palin said it best "Drill Bay Drill"


I am sick to my stomach thinking of the marine and ecosytem damage that is happening.


not sure how we keep it from ever happening again

[Deep C]

Local news says that the state of Florida has declared state of emergency in so far six counties and has followed Louisiana in shutting down commercial and recreational fisheries in that region and also banned taking of shellfish.

Other local reports indicate that there is more of a liklihood that this spill will be caught up in currents that will bring it to the gulfstream and up the east coast. Originally it was thought possibility remote at best but the latest data indicates a moderate chance of that happening...

[mad dog bite]

Local news says that the state of Florida has declared state of emergency in so far six counties and has followed Louisiana in shutting down commercial and recreational fisheries in that region and also banned taking of shellfish.

Other local reports indicate that there is more of a liklihood that this spill will be caught up in currents that will bring it to the gulfstream and up the east coast. Originally it was thought possibility remote at best but the latest data indicates a moderate chance of that happening...

I don't think we need to worry about it the charter guys in venice are saying it ain't nothing the media is just making it sound bad.

[saltyron]

This spill has me very concerned to put it mildly. I'd like to see what SFC members think about it.

...... Anyone that has fished the Gulf of Mexico and has see these huge rigs, knew sooner or later there would be something like this to happen. They drill so far down to hit the crude oil its scary, so when this happens there options are limited to stop the breach of oil. I understand they are trying to put a frame around the leak then capture the crude and pump to surface into tankers, if it works there will be problems still on the surface and with the lines coming up, im not sure they ever done it before so you know stuff will go wrong..if does not work they have to drill another well to drain the crude that will take months to do, and the Gulf will be distroyed by that time, at 200,000 gallons a day going into the gulf now. The srimp industry and other stuff will be lost for yrs. , the east coast and west coast will have to take up the slack , and the over seas shrimpers are salavating at the mouth right now because they will be pouring in millions of tons of overseas farmed srimp and crabs into the market. It will kill a lot of our USA fishermen and women with boat payments. No matter how you look at it it will hurt the hard working fishing boats and charters to make a living. Lets hope with all there BP brains working on this thing they can cap and pump to surface ships as fast as possible, and not have to drill any more.

[jackdaniels]

Gulf oil spill swiftly balloons, could move east Enlarge Photo Charter and commercial fishermen listen to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration administrator Jane Lubchenco, not pictured, in Venice, La., Friday, April 30, 2010. Local fishermen are worried about how their industry will withstand a growing oil spill that resulted from last week's explosion and collapse of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico near the coast of Louisiana. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)


.By SETH BORENSTEIN The Associated Press

Updated: 1:11 a.m. Sunday, May 2, 2010

Posted: 4:33 a.m. Saturday, May 1, 2010

VENICE, La. — A sense of doom settled over the American coastline from Louisiana to Florida on Saturday as a massive oil slick spewing from a ruptured well kept growing, and experts warned that an uncontrolled gusher could create a nightmare scenario if the Gulf Stream carries it toward the Atlantic.

President Barack Obama planned to visit the region Sunday to assess the situation amid growing criticism that the government and oil company BP PLC should have done more to stave off the disaster. Meanwhile, efforts to stem the flow and remove oil from the surface by skimming it, burning it or spiking it with chemicals to disperse it continued with little success.

"These people, we've been beaten down, disaster after disaster," said Matt O'Brien of Venice, whose fledgling wholesale shrimp dock business is under threat from the spill.

"They've all got a long stare in their eye," he said. "They come asking me what I think's going to happen. I ain't got no answers for them. I ain't got no answers for my investors. I ain't got no answers."

He wasn't alone. As the spill surged toward disastrous proportions, critical questions lingered: Who created the conditions that caused the gusher? Did BP and the government react robustly enough in its early days? And, most important, how can it be stopped before the damage gets worse?

The Coast Guard conceded Saturday that it's nearly impossible to know how much oil has gushed since the April 20 rig explosion, after saying earlier it was at least 1.6 million gallons — equivalent to about 2½ Olympic-sized swimming pools. The blast killed 11 workers and threatened beaches, fragile marshes and marine mammals, along with fishing grounds that are among the world's most productive.

Even at that rate, the spill should eclipse the 1989 Exxon Valdez incident as the worst U.S. oil disaster in history in a matter of weeks. But a growing number of experts warned that the situation may already be much worse.

The oil slick over the water's surface appeared to triple in size over the past two days, which could indicate an increase in the rate that oil is spewing from the well, according to one analysis of images collected from satellites and reviewed by the University of Miami. While it's hard to judge the volume of oil by satellite because of depth, it does show an indication of change in growth, experts said.

"The spill and the spreading is getting so much faster and expanding much quicker than they estimated," said Hans Graber, executive director of the university's Center for Southeastern Tropical Advanced Remote Sensing. "Clearly, in the last couple of days, there was a big change in the size."

Doug Suttles, BP's chief operating officer for exploration and production, said it was impossible to know just how much oil was gushing from the well, but said the company and federal officials were preparing for the worst-case scenario.

In an exploration plan and environmental impact analysis filed with the federal government in February 2009, BP said it had the capability to handle a "worst-case scenario" at the Deepwater Horizon site, which the document described as a leak of 162,000 barrels per day from an uncontrolled blowout — 6.8 million gallons each day.

Oil industry experts and officials are reluctant to describe what, exactly, a worst-case scenario would look like — but if the oil gets into the Gulf Stream and carries it to the beaches of Florida, it stands to be an environmental and economic disaster of epic proportions.

The Deepwater Horizon well is at the end of one branch of the Gulf Stream, the famed warm-water current that flows from the Gulf of Mexico to the North Atlantic. Several experts said that if the oil enters the stream, it would flow around the southern tip of Florida and up the eastern seaboard.

"It will be on the East Coast of Florida in almost no time," Graber said. "I don't think we can prevent that. It's more of a question of when rather than if."

At the joint command center run by the government and BP near New Orleans, a Coast Guard spokesman maintained Saturday that the leakage remained around 5,000 barrels, or 200,000 gallons, per day.

But Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, appointed Saturday by Obama to lead the government's oil spill response, said no one could pinpoint how much oil is leaking from the ruptured well because it is about a mile underwater.

"And, in fact, any exact estimation of what's flowing out of those pipes down there is probably impossible at this time due to the depth of the water and our ability to try and assess that from remotely operated vehicles and video," Allen said during a conference call.

The Coast Guard's Allen said Saturday that a test of new technology used to reduce the amount of oil rising to the surface seemed to be successful.

During the test Friday, an underwater robot shot a chemical meant to break down the oil at the site of the leak rather than spraying it on the surface from boats or planes, where the compound can miss the oil slick.

From land, the scope of the crisis was difficult to see. As of Saturday afternoon, only a light sheen of oil had washed ashore in some places.

The real threat lurked offshore in a swelling, churning slick of dense, rust-colored oil the size of Puerto Rico. From the endless salt marshes of Louisiana to the white-sand beaches of Florida, there is uncertainty and frustration over how the crisis got to this point and what will unfold in the coming days, weeks and months.

The concerns are both environmental and economic. The fishing industry is worried that marine life will die — and that no one will want to buy products from contaminated water anyway. Tourism officials are worried that vacationers won't want to visit oil-tainted beaches. And environmentalists are worried about how the oil will affect the countless birds, coral and mammals in and near the Gulf.

"We know they are out there" said Meghan Calhoun, a spokeswoman from the Audubon Aquarium of the Americas in New Orleans. "Unfortunately the weather has been too bad for the Coast Guard and NOAA to get out there and look for animals for us."

Fishermen and boaters want to help contain the oil. But on Saturday, they were again hampered by high winds and rough waves that splashed over the miles of orange and yellow inflatable booms strung along the coast, rendering them largely ineffective. Some coastal Louisiana residents complained that BP, which owns the rig, was hampering mitigation efforts.

"I don't know what they are waiting on," said 57-year-old Raymond Schmitt, in Venice preparing his boat to take a French television crew on a tour. He didn't think conditions were dangerous. "No, I'm not happy with the protection, but I'm sure the oil company is saving money."

As bad as the oil spill looks on the surface, it may be only half the problem, said University of California Berkeley engineering professor Robert Bea, who serves on a National Academy of Engineering panel on oil pipeline safety.

"There's an equal amount that could be subsurface too," said Bea. And that oil below the surface "is damn near impossible to track."

Louisiana State University professor Ed Overton, who heads a federal chemical hazard assessment team for oil spills, worries about a total collapse of the pipe inserted into the well. If that happens, there would be no warning and the resulting gusher could be even more devastating because regulating flow would then be impossible.

"When these things go, they go KABOOM," he said. "If this thing does collapse, we've got a big, big blow."

BP has not said how much oil is beneath the Gulf seabed Deepwater Horizon was tapping, but a company official speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the volume of reserves, confirmed reports that it was tens of millions of barrels — a frightening prospect to many.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said that he has asked both BP and the Coast Guard for detailed plans on how to protect the coast.

"We still haven't gotten those plans," said Jindal. "We're going to fully demand that BP pay for the cleanup activities. We're confident that at the end of the day BP will cover those costs."

In a statement late Saturday, a Coast Guard spokesman said the governor's office helped develop the plans that Jindal referred to.

Capt. Ron LaBrec said federal and company officials had been working closely with the governor

[jackdaniels]

http://www.charlotteobserver.com/201...ulf-spill.html


Some fear oil from Gulf spill could reach N.C.
By Kirsten Valle
kvalle@charlotteobserver.com
Posted: Saturday, May. 01, 2010
Oil from the Gulf Coast spill could sweep northward to the Carolinas within a few weeks if the situation doesn't improve, some experts say.

Others are calling it a remote possibility - saying their biggest worry is for the N.C. fishing industry, which depends on Gulf Coast oysters and shrimp in the off season.

The spill is at the top of the "very energetic" Loop Current, a part of the Gulf Stream that sends water south along the western Florida shelf, around the state and northward along the East Coast, said Jerald Ault, a professor of marine biology at the University of Miami.

"The net result is, the potential for dispersion is very high," he said.

Whether oil from the spill makes it into the current depends on a few factors, such as the volume of oil being leaked and how quickly responders are able to clean it. If it gets swept into Loop, the oil could drift north as far as Cape Hatteras within a week - though a more conservative estimate would be two weeks to a month, he said.

Either way, "you definitely could be seeing oil that way," he said.

N.C. Geologist Kenneth Taylor said that's a remote possibility.

"The key thing about it is, there are currents," said Taylor, who serves as disaster response and recovery coordinator for the N.C. Department of Environment and Natural Resources. "If it gets into the Gulf Stream, it could go to Canada. But is there enough oil ... to get in there?"

The state has a detailed oil spill plan that's tweaked every year, said Taylor, chief of the N.C. Geological Survey.

The U.S. Coast Guard, which monitors the ocean from a 24-hour watch center, would lead a cleanup effort, with the aid of 15 or 16 state agencies, from the Department of Transportation to Archives and History, he said. Those groups would assist with personnel and other resources and assess the impact on state parks, heritage sites and more.

Taylor said the Coast Guard is prepared to deal with a spill, because it often handles such events on a smaller scale, such as a leaking boat, containing and cleaning the spills with booms and skimmers.

The Gulf spill "would have to foul the coastline of three or four states before it got to us," he said. "That would be huge."

Other state officials declined to speculate on whether the spill would reach N.C. waters.

"We are closely monitoring the situation," said Ernie Seneca, a spokesman for the N.C. Department of Crime Control and Public Safety. "We have close coordination with our state and federal counterparts."

At the N.C. Fisheries Association, the office television has been tuned to news of the spill - but not over worries that the oil could reach North Carolina, association President Sean McKeon said.

"It just seems to me slightly far-fetched," he said. "I think the bigger worries, for us, are very tied into the fishing industry."

North Carolina's shrimp and oysters are seasonal. Companies are buying those products from the Gulf Coast now because they are not in season in North Carolina. Those prices have spiked "significantly higher" in the last few days, McKeon said.

Longer-term, that could mean more business for local fisheries. But the cold winter and heavier-than-usual rainfall mean the shrimp season might not pick up until late summer or fall, if at all, McKeon said. And environmental damage is never beneficial, no matter where it happens, he said.

"We're kind of all in it together," he said. "We believe our shrimp are the best in the world. I'd rather sell them based on the fact that they're the best, rather than, we have them and you don't.

"... We'll see. Certainly this is going to be disruptive of our industry for a while."

Kirsten Valle: 704-358-5248


Read more: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/201...#ixzz0mrUSHjnX

[Oolie]

i'm just in shock that there wasn't a backup plan in case the back up valve failed.

i've been researching this incident.

yes, i understand that this is the largest gas explosion of its kind on record, and that the valve still should have prevented this disaster. but that doesn't make it acceptable that no back up plan was in place to be put i effect in the event something like this occurred.

i'm under the impression that those in charge had made the grave mistake of underestimating the dangers involved with their business, and now we are all in trouble.

this really is unfortunate, as i have always planned to fish this area one day, and now my dreams my have been shattered.

the other really unfortunate thing is this happened right around the full moon in spring time. anyone familiar with the way our oceans work knows that for marine life in areas like these, this is the peak of the spawn.

it appears that this area will take years to recover.