Murdered Gulf

BP really got away with one.  Who woulda thought, right? 

Published in the journal PLOS One in June, Montagna’s full analysis of his 10-year-old samples showed damage to seafloor organisms stretching across at least 124 square miles. That’s nearly two times larger than the 66-square-mile footprint described in the abbreviated report Montagna turned over for the disaster’s Natural Resource Damage Assessment.

The NRDA process helped determine how much BP owed for the harm done to marine organisms, from the little mud-dwelling creatures Montagna studied to the dead dolphins and oil-drenched pelicans that washed up on Louisiana’s shores. In April 2016, the case was settled for $8.8 billion. It was both the largest environmental settlement in the nation’s history and the biggest infusion of cash for restoration purposes the state had ever seen.

But it might have been larger had the full scope of the damage been known.

“BP got a good deal by settling early,” Montagna said.

How did they get away with it? Well one thing they did was exercise control over the scope of the research that eventually determined their liability. 

Keeping watch over every step was a BP representative.

“He asked a lot of questions, and was with us 24-7,” she said.

Company officials carefully documented each sample’s chain of custody.

“BP didn’t want anybody spiking the samples with oil,” Montagna said.

BP and Montagna “had many difficult conversations” over how to conduct the sampling. BP wanted a narrow focus, concentrating the sampling close to the well. Montagna wanted to travel farther afield, gathering cores from a wider area. Montagna won out on the scope, but not on which samples to analyze for the damage assessment. On that count, BP got its way, zooming the focus on the 58 samples taken closest to the well.

The company used that tighter scope to its advantage. In a statement in 2013, BP said the 58 samples “confirm that potential injury to the deep sea soft sediment ecosystem was limited to a small area in the immediate vicinity of the Macondo well-head.”

BP required all the samples to be kept in a locked cage in a secure, air-conditioned storage room. That is, until the settlement was reached.

“There was zero interest the next day,” Montagna said. “No one cared.”

As for the lasting environmental damage done to the sea floor, we're still learning about how bad it really is.  But, well, it's bad. 

Montagna says plenty of evidence is waiting quietly at the bottom of the Gulf. Recent check-ins by other scientists have revealed little improvement since 2010. Slow to degrade thanks to the deep sea’s cold, dark and sterile conditions, the oil remains nearly as potent as the day it soaked into the mud and formed black pools on the seafloor.

“There’s been almost zero recovery, and it’ll likely stay that way for a long, long time,” Montagna said.

New Hampshire

If you had New Hampshire in the annual "What state do we compare the size of Gulf Of Mexico hypoxic zone to this year?" pool, please collect your bucket of dead fish.  Betting on next year's state is officially open.  We're starting to get better and better odds on Maryland.

Use of fertilizers has grown as prices have fallen. In recent decades, farmers have applied fertilizers so liberally that about 34% is lost to the environment, the report says.

The share of fertilizer that ends up in the Mississippi is likely to grow. “Climate change is increasing the frequency of heavy rains and floods in the Midwest, which could wash even more nitrogen off farms and into rivers feeding the Gulf,” the report warns.

Should there be a lesson in that, maybe?

Probably not. It's too much to get your head around.

Now broken in two and less than 2 miles long, the island is a mere shadow of the long, sturdy chunk of land Roosevelt visited in 1915, eight years after he made East Timbalier one of the nation’s first wildlife sanctuaries.

The protection didn’t last. Most barrier islands are bereft of natural resources, but East Timbalier promised such a bonanza to oil companies that its federal protections were largely ignored and, in 1969, revoked. A slew of companies have drilled more than 160 wells in and around the island. Canals dug to locate fonts of oil were the first alteration that sped the island’s unraveling. The canals allowed saltwater to seep in and the soil from the crumbling banks to flow out.

See Teddy wanted them to save an island. But later they decided instead that is needed to die for "The Economy." That seems like the wrong choice now but then again maybe not. We're still making it all the time.

And I'm not only talking here about our choice to march hundreds of meat packing workers off to their deaths so we can keep quartet pounders on the dollar menu, although we are doing that too. No I'm talking about the choice to continue deliberately sinking the coast for the sake of oil exploration. Remarkably,  that is still the long term strategy.

Lafourche did not join seven other coastal parishes — Plaquemines, St. John the Baptist, St. Bernard, Vermilion, Jefferson, Cameron and Orleans — in suing oil and gas companies for widespread environmental damage. The lawsuits, which charge that the companies failed to follow state law in drilling wells, building canals, disposing of waste and restoring wetlands, have encountered fierce opposition in the Legislature.

On Wednesday, May 20, the Senate narrowly passed a measure aimed at killing the lawsuits. Critics say the lawsuits are chilling investment in Louisiana. A big settlement could fund an array of restoration efforts as money from the BP settlement, a main funder of coastal projects, dwindles.

About that "chilling" effect. Are they sure?

Happy BP Day!

Wow has it been 10 years already?  It seems like only yesterday that Cat Island... existed.

For decades oil and gas companies dug exploration canals in the marshlands, which allowed for saltwater intrusion and blocked the hydrological flow of the wetlands. These factors caused the land to erode, subside and disappear at some of the highest rates in the world. Add sea level rise to this, and "we are sinking like a rock," Hahn said.

"You hear all the time, 'Louisiana is losing a football field every 45 minutes.' And when you are with these old timers, they're like: 'This used to be marsh, this used to be land.' You don't get your mind wrapped around it till you get out there."

Talking about Cat Island, Hahn said, "I saw it, not only in my lifetime ... it was only a couple of years ... you could actually see this piece of land shrinking until it was finally gone and became open water."

The oil from the 2010 disaster dramatically worsened the threat to coastal Louisiana. Researchers from LSU found that the BP oil spill accelerated land loss by almost 300% in the first six months after the spill.

For the most part we've been ignoring the problem since then.  Has it gotten better?  You would think it must have. Otherwise the Trump administration wouldn't be rolling back emissions limits now, right? In fact we're pretty sure everything is just fine out there now.

So, yay, we made it! Ten whole years. To celebrate, we're giving away as much crude oil as you can take.

WTI Crude now under $2 per barrel pic.twitter.com/Z2ruuFL1Cb

— Michael McDonough (@M_McDonough) April 20, 2020

Toxic Gulf

This development probably doesn't surprise many but a new study says the BP Horizon oil spill (which is about to turn 10 years old, holy shit) was worse for the health of the Gulf Mexico than previously thought.

“The impact of the oil’s toxicity is larger than previously assumed,” said Igal Berenshtein, a University of Miami marine scientist and the study’s lead author. "It's important to account for the toxicity that's invisible and also the three-dimensional nature of the (oil) plume, and our study does that."

He estimates the extent may be 30% larger than 2010 satellite imagery indicated. The imagery was widely accepted by the public and scientists as showing the spill’s reach, but a growing body of field data collected just after the spill indicates the oil had a much larger footprint. Berenshtein and the study’s other scientists combined data from water, seafloor and beach sampling, fish toxicity studies and oil transport models to track oil invisible to satellites.

Just gonna leave the spillway open all the time now

It's another January high river season.

“This morning, the National Weather Service forecast has the river getting to 15.1 feet here at the Carrollton gage,” Roe said. “We are watching that very closely. Trigger point for phase 2 flood fight is 15 feet and rising so we are seeing if that forecast is going to come in a little bit lower of a little bit higher and we will make a decision of whether to go into phase 2 based on that.”

On Jan. 9, the Corps entered its stage one flood fight following the river’s rise to 11 feet. Roe said the high river is due to heavy rain to our north that is now making its way to the coast.

In recent years, flood fights in January have been followed by springtime openings of the Bonnet Carre Spillway to relieve pressure on levees from New Orleans south.

2019 was an absolutely devastating year for oyster fishers on the Louisiana coast.  It would be a while before they'd begin to recover either way. But now they face the prospect of going through it all over again.

Meanwhile, in  other flood control news, just as the corps of engineers begins public discussions of necessary upgrades to our perpetually sinking levee system, the big question we've been worrying about for over a decade is coming to a head.  How do we pay to maintain the system we have?

The multiparish dispute is complicated by many factors, but the principal one is that the Lake Borgne levees protect parts of Orleans and Jefferson parishes in addition to St. Bernard. The agreement calls for St. Bernard to bear most of the cost of maintaining them, and many residents and officials see that as unfair.

The parish’s residents have twice voted down a proposed 7.5-mill property tax that would have raised new money for levee maintenance. St. Bernard residents already pay an 11.33-mill tax that mostly goes to levees. Had the new tax passed, the various levee district millages would have been reallocated, with 15.4 mills going to levee maintenance and 3.43 mills transferred to the parish for drainage.

That’s more than St. Bernard’s neighbors pay their local levee districts: New Orleans residents pay a little over 10 mills for levee maintenance, and East Jefferson property owners pay just 4.02 mills. However, New Orleans residents also pay 16.23 mills for drainage, and Jefferson residents pay between 4 and 5 mills.

The parish governments and flood protection authorities each have their own pots of money and constituencies, but, as we all know very well, they're really maintaining one big interdependent system. So, even under the wholesale reorganization of the regime after Katrina, there will always be disputes like this to deal with.  Apparently, there is a fix in the works, albeit a potentially problematic one.

CPRA officials said Wednesday they plan to submit a bill in the upcoming legislative session that would address such funding disparity issues for both the east bank and West Bank regional levee authorities. The legislation might allow the authorities to set regional tax rates to pay for levees' operation and maintenance.

I'm very curious to see more about how that works.  I assume it still means that tax rates have to be authorized by voters in one way or another.  Or maybe not?

Out of sight out of mind

Apparently it is worse than they would have expected.

Mark Benfield, a professor of oceanography and coastal sciences at LSU, led monitoring of visible marine animals, called megafauna, for about a year after the Deepwater Horizon spill. He found the lack of vitality seen in the video "disturbing."

The video offers the first glimpse of the site since visual inspections ended in 2011.

"Given the amount of time that's passed, I figured that the site would look normal or well into recovery," Benfield said. "I was surprised."

Recall that BP's primary response to the Macondo disaster was to spray the slick with a chemical dispersant called Corexit.  Workers exposed to the chemicals during clean up operations also complained of serious health problems. Their symptoms were positively liked to that exposure.   As early as 2012, it was found to have caused major disruptions to the Gulf marine food chain.

In April 2012, Louisiana State University’s Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences was finding lesions and grotesque deformities in sea life—including millions of shrimp with no eyes and crabs without eyes or claws—possibly linked to oil and dispersants.

The shocking story was ignored by major U.S. media, but covered in depth by Al Jazeera. BP said such deformities were “common” in aquatic life in the Gulf and caused by bacteria or parasites. But further studies point back to the spill.

A just-released study from the University of South Florida found that underwater plumes of BP oil, dispersed by Corexit, had produced a “massive die-off” of foraminifera, microscopic organisms at the base of the food chain. Other studies show that, as a result of oil and dispersants, plankton have either been killed or have absorbed PAHs before being consumed by other sea creatures.

But the important thing to remember about Corexit as it relates to the sea floor anyway, was its purpose. It wasn't intended to clean up the oil so much as it was to sink it. Get it out of sight and out of mind as fast as possible.  Seems like that strategy is still paying dividends. 

The video and study were only possible because researchers were near the site for an unrelated project.

No one is funding research into the impact of the Deepwater Horizon spill on the surrounding sea floor, said Craig McClain, director of LUMCON. Getting money for deep sea research can be difficult because it's "out of sight, out of mind," he said.

But damage to the sea floor ecosystem can permeate through the food chain to commercial fisheries and disrupt the process by which oceans pull carbon from the atmosphere and store it in the deep sea.

All we have is a brief glimpse of the undersea wasteland around the well head. No telling how bad it really is.

All dead

Not mostly dead. All dead.

NEW ORLEANS, La. (WVUE) - Oyster fishermen are saying 100 percent of what they dredge up is coming up dead, which is not only a serious hit to their livelihoods but could have lasting impacts for years to come.

Fishermen will tell you part of the draw of the job is just being out on the water, but the waters near the Biloxi marsh are a little too quiet.

“North, east, west, there’s usually someone harvesting someone trawling you don’t see nothing, there’s not one person out here,” said oyster fisherman, Gregory Perez.

Gregory Perez says he's worked for years building and tending to these acres of water, or his private oyster leases. This year was supposed to be the most lucrative for him until the oysters started dying.

Perez blames this swirling blue-green algae blooms he’s seen intensify in the area. He says it’s killed off all the oysters he was planning to harvest, including the young oysters that would be ready years from now.

“Twenty-five square miles of blue-green algae in this area, and everybody's oyster farm in this area they’re 100 percent completely dead,” said Perez.

I noticed this week Rouses was running a sale on shucked gulf oysters.  The price was still high because Rouses but it does make me wonder where they were getting them from. Might have to be wondering that for a while, it turns out. 

A spokesperson with the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries says as the oysters die, and the flood continues, the crisis is just beginning for those in the oyster industry.

“We’re also going to see the aftermath of the flood in terms of additional algal blooms… they’re not going to be able to recover quickly,” said Fisheries Administrator, Harry Blanchet.

“We have more damage now. This is worse than B.P. this is worse because we don’t have any reproduction,” said Perez.

Learn to live sick

The Berkley Law Clinic is suing the EPA on behalf of environmental groups in Alaska and Louisiana over its failure to adequately restrict the use of Corexit to "disperse" oil spilled into the sea during the Valdez and Macondo disasters.

This article (and presumably the lawsuit) cites several "recent studies" indicating the harmful effects of these dispersants.

Recent studies have indicated dispersants caused lung irritation, rashes, nausea and other illness in humans, as well as a host of problems for fish, deep-sea coral and other marine life. Dispersants can kill or inhibit the growth of oil-eating microbes, weakening nature’s ability to cleanup spills. New research also indicates that dispersants can have the unintended effect of transforming oil into a toxic mist able to travel for miles and penetrate deep into human lungs.

Those of us old enough to remember the 2010 Macondo spill will remember also that this was all widely understood and observed at that time.  None of that stopped BP from insisting everything was perfectly safe, of course.  So it is no surprise they are continuing to do so now. There is a BP contractor quoted in that story who says, "many of Corexit’s ingredients are shared by common health beauty products." So, you know, nothing to worry about. It's like Botox for the ocean.

Of course that doesn't help the many workers and fishers on the Louisiana coast who have documented health problems from exposure to these chemicals over the past decade. 

Arnesen, whose family business fishes for Gulf shrimp, crab and reef fish, said she continues to suffer from respiratory problems and headaches eight years after exposure to dispersants. She was aboard a vessel sprayed with dispersant while in Barataria Bay, an area hard-hit by the spill.

“Dispersant is nasty stuff to deal with,” she said Monday. “You learn to live sick.”

Corexit kills oysters faster

This is from a Smithsonian article about a recently published study on gulf oyster and their chances of surviving having massive amounts of petroleum dumped on them which, admittedly, seems like an unlikely thing to ever happen.... 

When oil leaks into the ocean, it gloms into a giant mass at the surface (think of the layers in a bottle of salad dressing). This is because oil is both hydrophobic—it doesn’t mix well with water—and lighter than water. With large quantities of oil, these properties make it difficult for microbes in the water to quickly and efficiently break down oil into less toxic forms. To aid the breakup of oil so that microbes can do their job, scientists decided to add a chemical to the spill that would break up the oil mass into tiny droplets. While this chemical dispersant helps expose more of the oil to bacteria and waves which help to break it down, it also makes the oil more available to the oysters.

And this is what Powers and his team determined. The addition of dispersant to the moderate salinity experiment tanks led to a drastic increase in oyster death. Mortality of oysters exposed to both oil and dispersant was about 90 percent, compared to 70 percent when only oil was added.

Okay now try it with horseradish. 

I like that one of these is called Atlantis

When you are expanding production of the fossil fuel industry most responsible for putting South Louisiana under the ocean, that is an appropriate name.

The $1.3 billion Atlantis Phase 3 development is the latest example of the British oil company’s strategy of growing oil production through its existing facilities in the Gulf, he said.

BP is the operator of Atlantis and holds a 56 percent working interest, with BHP holding the remaining 44 percent. BHP is expected to make a final decision early this year on whether to proceed with the expansion.

The announcement comes amid a four-and-a-half-year offshore oil bust that has cost the Houma-Thibodaux area about 16,000 jobs. Over the past few months, several reports from economists and consultants have predicted an uptick in the Gulf this year, forecasts that hinge on how high oil prices rise above current levels of about $50 a barrel.

BP’s announcement comes a day after Danos, an oilfield service company based in Gray, said two new contracts in the Gulf prompted it to hire 150 workers.

BP’s actions come after recent the company’s recent breakthroughs in advanced seismic imaging and related technology that revealed an additional 400 million barrels of oil in place at the Atlantis field, officials said.

The same innovation helped the company find an additional 1 billion barrels oil at its nearby Thunder Horse field, officials said.

Long story short, BP has found 1.4 billion more barrels of oil in the Gulf and is moving it into production.  It's nice to know things are working out for them after everything that's happened. It's a good thing we didn't overly burden that company with the task of rebuilding the coast they have played such a prominent role in despoiling.  Otherwise they might not be around to profit from these discoveries today.

And then what would we do?  After all, as bad as this activity has been for the global environment generally and Louisiana in particular, the "job creation" more than makes up for any of those unhappy side effects. And now BP is bringing the good times back. Right?

The new projects are the latest examples of a trend in which offshore oil companies drill several deep-sea wells then transfer the oil to existing platforms then later onshore by pipeline. The so-called “tiebacks” have helped drive down the break-even cost of producing oil so companies can profit at lower oil prices but have stripped business from major employers in the Houma-Thibodaux area that build and service the platforms.

Atlantis Phase 3, which operates in 7,000 feet of water, will include the construction of a new subsea production system from eight new wells that will be tied into the current platform, the company said. Scheduled to begin producing oil next year, the project is expected to boost output by about 38,000 barrels a day at its peak. It will also access the field’s eastern reaches, where advanced imaging identified additional reserves.

Oh well, that's just capitalism, though.  Gotta get more and more efficient.  Ideally, BP would be able to churn through the wetlands and suck out as much oil as the atmosphere can choke on without employing anybody except maybe a few guys to polish the robots.  They're not there yet but they're trying.  And we're grateful to have them here doing it. 

We killed the magic microbes

Congratulations on your purchase of 770,000 gallons of Corexit.  We know you have many choices in the market for poisons to dump into the ocean for no particular purpose. But we are glad you have chosen us.  No, sorry, there are no refunds.

University of Miami-led study indicates that the massive amounts of dispersants BP applied directly at the spewing wellhead – about a mile below the Gulf of Mexico’s surface – failed to curb the oil’s spread, and may have increased the disaster’s ecological damage.

The explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig released more than 200 million gallons of crude oil, making it the largest oil spill in U.S. history. About 770,000 gallons of the dispersant Corexit was applied at the wellhead. Another 1 million gallons was sprayed over the massive slick on the water’s surface. Dispersants loosen the tension between oil and water, allowing the oil to break up into smaller droplets. It was hoped that dispersants would lessen the disaster’s impact.

Yeah sorry about that. Maybe those features will work in the next version. But hey let's see what you did get.

The study is one of several in recent months that have questioned whether dispersant should be used at all. Other research cited in the UM study noted that dispersant appears to fight nature’s ability to clean-up after oil spills. A study by the University of Georgia indicates that dispersant kills or inhibits the growth of oil-eating microbes, including naturally-occurring bacteria that rapidly consume oil that dispersants only break apart.

Oohhhh man, remember the "magic microbes"? They really were celebrated as heroes back during the Summer of Spill and afterward when everyone was trying to tell us how no all that bad the whole thing was.   And that whole time we were out there murdering the little guys. What a bummer.

Oh wait. Also....

Dispersant has also been linked to illnesses in humans and several types of marine life. The Gulf’s deep sea coral were found to suffer more from a dispersant-oil mix than oil alone.

I'm sure there is a punch line somewhere about a Trump Administration directive to ease off of holding oil producers accountable for this sort of damage but I'm too depressed to look it up right now.

Bitter fish in crude oil sea

It's yet another busy week of trying to figure out how to find the NOAA page that tracks caravans or determining the racism content of soup.  Also there's early voting happening so a lot of concerned defenders of democracy are occupying their day screaming at "millenials" or Susan Sarandon or whatever they imagine the problem to be other than just the racist Republicans and corporate Democrats who are actually on the ballot. Oh and the Saints just traded for a (THE WRONG) cornerback so... yeah.. lots of stuff going on.

Which is one reason we may have missed this.

NEW ORLEANS — An oil spill that has been quietly leaking millions of barrels into the Gulf of Mexico has gone unplugged for so long that it now verges on becoming one of the worst offshore disasters in U.S. history. 

Between 300 and 700 barrels of oil per day have been spewing from a site 12 miles off the Louisiana coast since 2004, when an oil-production platform owned by Taylor Energy sank in a mudslide triggered by Hurricane Ivan. Many of the wells have not been capped, and federal officials estimate that the spill could continue through this century. With no fix in sight, the Taylor offshore spill is threatening to overtake BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster as the largest ever.

Is the biggest oil disaster in history better or worse if it happens over a period of fifteen years rather than six months?  Also how does one draw so much less attention than the other?

The Taylor Energy spill is largely unknown outside Louisiana because of the company’s effort to keep it secret in the hopes of protecting its reputation and proprietary information about its operations, according to a lawsuit that eventually forced the company to reveal its cleanup plan. The spill was hidden for six years before environmental watchdog groups stumbled on oil slicks while monitoring the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster a few miles north of the Taylor site in 2010.

The Interior Department is fighting an effort by Taylor Energy to walk away from the disaster. The company sued Interior in federal court, seeking the return of about $450 million left in a trust it established with the government to fund its work to recover part of the wreckage and locate wells buried under 100 feet of muck.

It's "largely unknown outside Louisiana," according to the Wa-Po.  But that doesn't mean it's constantly on everyone's mind here either.  Sure we get an occassional update. But it's remarkable that the Taylor spill has been relegated to the middle-to-back pages in the local press all these years.

It's not like the media doesn't know who they are... what with all the "iconic" philanthropy and whatnot. 

Congratulations, the Gulf is safe now

The Horizon disaster was so long ago nobody even remembers that anymore. Hell it's not even art history at this point.  They took down the memorial earlier in August.

So I guess that means the oil companies can all come out of timeout now too .

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has completed its plan to roll back major offshore-drilling safety regulations that were put in place after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster in 2010 that killed 11 people and caused the worst oil spill in American history.

The Interior Department’s Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, which was established after the spill in the Gulf of Mexico and regulates offshore oil and gas drilling, has finalized a proposal for loosening the regulations as part of President Trump’s efforts to ease restrictions on fossil fuel companies and encourage domestic energy production.

It was twice as big

Ho hum, nothing to see as usual.

New Jersey!

Congratulations to the Gulf Dead Zone on finally reaching the size of a state you might immediately notice on a map.

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — There’s an unwanted record in the Gulf of Mexico: This year’s “dead zone,” where there’s too little oxygen to support marine life, is the biggest ever measured.

Scientists say the oxygen-depleted region is about the size of New Jersey, covering 8,776 square miles (22,720 square kilometers).

Seems we were stuck on Connecticut for a few years there.  A Delaware got in at one point.  But, hey, Jersey now.  That's big time, guys.  Imagine a whole New Jersey of open water completely incapable sustaining any life. Except for Chris Christie and his family just floating around on vacation probably. 

It happens all the time

The big spills get all the attention but the little spills and leaks are the chronic problem. 

“There’s two ways things go bad,” says Eustis. There’s new stuff, like Deep Water Horizons: under-tested, in deep water, under high pressure, and far from land. But that new stuff is, as you can now guess, rare. Many more leaks come from rust bucket rigs that are chronically broken and patched, instead of rebuilt, says Eustis. These rigs are usually close to shore, have changed hands a few times, and are now operated by the subcontractor of a subcontractor of a subcontractor of a subsidiary of a major oil company. “That’s where the oil production started,” MacDonald says. “Everything close to land is 20, 30 plus years old.” And the older they are, the more they leak.

Many aren’t even operational anymore. According to Henderson, about 36,000 abandoned wells dot the shallow waters of the Gulf of Mexico, sites where the oil companies either drilled and didn’t find anything below the sediment, or sapped a reserve to the point where it made more sense to move resources on to other, juicier wells.

But that doesn’t mean that these wells are exhausted: in many cases small (or not so small) amounts of oil are still hanging out in the reservoir or the pipes connected to it. “There’s all these ticking time bombs out there rusting,” Henderson says. “And it’s inshore too. Thousands of wells and pipelines in the wetlands were abandoned with oil still in them, and because of rising sea levels and coastal erosion, now they’re sitting in salt water and they’re corroding and leaking.” Or sitting in the path of some future hurricane.

Trump will fix this, of course, by freeing us from "regulations."

Oil spills are already great

Some of you may remember back about six years ago when one especially ugly offshore disaster briefly focused our attention on the environmental devastation* wrought by the rapacious practices of the oil and gas industry.  Thankfully the resultant political outrage focused our resolve to create and enforce new safety standards, invest more in moving away from reliance on destructive fossil fuel production and bring about a better world for ours and future generations to enjoy.

Just kidding! Actually we screamed at Obama for "killing our jobs" even as he worked to protect industry interests to the best of his ability. (Obama was eventually shamed into somewhat less bad behavior) We allowed a class of politically connected trial lawyers to steal much of the settlement fund meant for oil spill victims. And we failed to hold the industry accountable for its role in the destruction of the Louisiana coast.

Oh also we kept dumping oil into the Gulf.  It's actually something we do all the time.

Recent discoveries of illegal, unreported oil discharges and systematic dumping of chemicals from rigs and platforms have raised new fears about environmental damage in the Gulf of Mexico, more than six years after the worst oil spill in U.S. history.

Tracking of federal data by the environmental watchdog group SkyTruth shows more than 11,700 oil spills have been reported in the Gulf of Mexico since the BP oil spill ended in July 2010.

But the rate of spills also has slowed significantly, from 245 a month in 2012 to 80 in October 2016.

As a part of its series “Oil & Water,” WWL-TV is taking a fresh look at how these often-overlooked spills – and an unknown number that never get reported at all – might affect the Gulf environment.

The station aired shocking video last month from a whistleblower who recorded his supervisors on an oil rig in 2014 opening a valve on a deep sea oil pipe and brazenly letting pollutants flow into the Gulf for 90 minutes, then talking about how they could cover it up.

Meanwhile, despite the fact that America has always been great at spilling hydrocarbons and chemicals into the ocean, we're about to find out if we can make that even greater.

WASHINGTON ― President-elect Donald Trump is just starting to arrange the team that will advise him and implement his policy agenda. But the list of names that have been floated to fill the top job at the Interior Department includes many people who would slash environmental regulations.

David Bernhardt, who served as the Interior Department solicitor in the George W. Bush administration and is now a lobbyist in the natural resources sector, is leading Trump’s transition work for the department.

Those rumored to be on the list of potential picks for secretary of interior include: oil executive Forrest Lucas, venture capitalist Robert Grady, oil and natural gas magnate Harold Hamm, Former Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R), Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin (R) and Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R).

We have not yet begun to spill. 



*Also the loss of 11 lives on the Deepwater Horizon due to gross negligence.  I wonder what Trump's OSHA will look like. 

Actually this is an improvement

Could federal regulators and lawyers been more aggressive with this oil company they found blatantly dumping petroleum and chemicals into the Gulf of Mexico?  Sure looks like it.

The government promised to crack down on environmental crimes in the wake of the devastating BP oil spill in 2010. And at first, it appeared to be fulfilling that pledge. The fines against BP set the record as the largest criminal penalty in U.S. history: $4.5 billion.

But since then, the federal government has eased the pressure. Congress failed to put into effect the tougher offshore oil and gas production regulations that were recommended after the BP spill; a ballyhooed training center for government inspectors was scrapped; the Interior Department’s environmental enforcement division was understaffed and couldn’t perform its basic oversight duties; and when companies were caught violating environmental laws, prosecutors were unwilling to reward whistleblowers.

Still, there was reason to believe the government would be more aggressive with Howington’s case. Rarely have the authorities had so much to work with as they did with his video evidence.

Howington and Servos brought the feds copies of crystal-clear video showing chemicals and what looked like oil gushing out of a pipe 1,500 feet below the surface of the Gulf on April 1, 2014. It was recorded by a camera mounted on a remotely operated vehicle, an unmanned submarine Howington and other rig workers controlled from a floating oil rig.

Hey at least they prosecuted somebody!  You millenials are so spoiled. Do you even remember how this kind of federal oversight used to work? 

The report says that eight officials in the royalty program accepted gifts from energy companies whose value exceeded limits set by ethics rules — including golf, ski and paintball outings; meals and drinks; and tickets to a Toby Keith concert, a Houston Texans football game and a Colorado Rockies baseball game.

The investigation also concluded that several of the officials “frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions, had used cocaine and marijuana, and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives.”

The investigation separately found that the program’s manager mixed official and personal business. In sometimes lurid detail, the report also accuses him of having intimate relations with two subordinates, one of whom regularly sold him cocaine.

The culture of the organization “appeared to be devoid of both the ethical standards and internal controls sufficient to protect the integrity of this vital revenue-producing program,” one report said.

The director of the Minerals Management Service, Randall Luthi, said in a conference call with reporters that the officials implicated in the reports had violated the public’s trust.

 So just be happy with what you get now. Ken Polite says it's good enough for him.

In a letter to the court, Maestri stood by the decision to charge Walter Oil & Gas for failing to report the discharge, noting that the fine for that felony is larger than the one for an intentional discharge.

The U.S attorney in New Orleans, Kenneth Polite, stood by Maestri’s handling of the case. He said he couldn’t comment in detail about Howington’s allegations because his claim against Maestri is still pending with the Justice Department in Washington.

“I can state confidently, however, that Walter Oil pled guilty to an environmental criminal charge appropriate to the facts and evidence,” Polite said. “Further, our office timely responded to the questions and concerns of Mr. Howington's counsel. Ultimately, I expect Mr. Howington's claim to be denied.”

In other words, the whistleblower doesn't get the $6 million he might have been entitled to. That sucks for him, of course. It's also not great for changing future behavior among rig operators. We're pretty sure we'll see a no cell phones policy instituted pretty soon. That ought to keep this from happening again, at least. 

So that happened

These actually happen more frequently than many realize.  This one is just big enough to get a little news blurb.

NEW ORLEANS -- The Coast Guard is responding to a crude oil spill from an underwater Shell pipeline Thursday.

Shell officials said they believe about 2,100 barrels of oil were released in the spill. Authorities said Shell has isolated the leak and shut production of both fields about 90 miles south of Timbalier Island, La.