A year after BP’s oil spill devastated the Gulf of Mexico, we are analyzing the cleanup efforts and, sadly, find them both paltry and embarrassing.
The U.S. Coast Guard has issued an unbelievably bogus report that says that no further remedial action is needed to clean up BP’s massive mess. Huh? The tourist boosters don’t like to say it, but this oil is not gone, not by a long shot. It exists in floating mats in the ocean, on the floor of the Gulf, and underneath the sand on countless beaches.
Earthjustice has filed a petition on behalf of the Florida Wildlife Federation under the federal Data Quality Act which challenges the Coast Guard’s ridiculous claim that no further cleanup is needed. The Coast Guard made its claim in a document called a Net Environmental Benefit Analysis (“NEBA”), which is the government’s method to “evaluate the tradeoffs related to spill response and cleanup techniques,” and to determine how best to strike a balance between “enough” cleanup and “too much” cleanup.
Our analysis shows that the report was not scientifically peer reviewed by
outside experts, and, incredibly, two BP employees sit on the evaluation team –
a glaring conflict of interest.
There’s more: The Coast Guard’s conclusion
that no more cleanup is needed was based on a tiny set of samples -- only four
beach sampling sites for almost a thousand miles of coastline. That is certainly
not enough samples to base a decision on the cleanup of the biggest oil spill in
U.S. history. It’s worth noting that astronauts took more samples than that from
the Moon!
Government regulators need to do more extensive, scientific beach
sampling before they compare environmental benefits to environmental
costs.
The government report also seriously downplays the
risk to sea turtles. Five of the world’s seven species of sea turtle nest on the
Gulf Coast. Each species – the green, hawksbill, loggerhead, leatherback,
and Kemp’s Ridley – are federally listed as either threatened or
endangered.
The oil can do major harm to nesting sea turtles, eggs,
and hatchlings. The Coast Guard’s report insists that the risk of injury to the
turtles is low, but also admits that the danger to turtles is higher when the
oil softens in summer heat. News flash! The South’s beaches get blazingly hot in
the summer, when sea turtles nest. Before anyone decides that oiled buried
on Gulf beaches doesn’t need to be cleaned further, scientists ought to analyze
the effects of oil in summer temperatures.
Moreover, the report
indicates that 20 percent of the oil will remain in the environment up to seven
and a half years from now. Buried oil could continue to harm sea turtles
for generations. Before it concludes that leaving the oil in place won’t harm
turtles, the Coast Guard must carefully map deposits of buried oil and compare
the data with known sea turtle nesting locations – it only makes
sense.
There is also the very serious and visible issue of tar mats
still floating in the Gulf. Each tar mat constitutes approximately half a ton of
oil, yet there have been numerous reports of the Coast Guard dismissing citizen
reports of submerged oil mats in specific areas. Callers are often told
that the brownish black substance they see is sludge or algae, or natural
seaweed called sargassum. Sargassum is not often found in the Eastern Gulf
this early in the year, so it is extremely unlikely that reports of oil mats are
actually sargassum. Far more likely is that many of these reports are going
unacknowledged, uninvestigated, or even undocumented.
The Coast
Guard should be keeping a detailed record of all oil mat reports and
investigating each one of them by air and boat (the mats are visible from
aircraft and boats should be out sampling them to confirm that the objects are,
in fact, oil mats).
The report also doesn’t analyze the possible
effects that these oil mats have when shrimp nets or dredges trawl through the
Gulf – an everyday occurrence. Incredibly, the report doesn’t even consider the
effect that major storms and Gulf hurricanes will have in disturbing and
redistributing the oil mats!
All of this oversight is quite
shocking and disappointing. You would think regulators would be more thorough,
considering the massive impact of the biggest oil spill in our country’s history
and all the attention being paid to it. The bottom line is that the government
can, and must, do better to force BP to clean up its mess and make our Gulf
whole again. We’re standing watch to make sure that happens.
