The price of crawfish

Seems like we were just talking about this last month. It's worse than you might think and has been for quite a while. 

Two Mexican citizens who worked for Crawfish Processing LLC last year filed suit in Alexandria federal court Thursday, claiming the company and its owner, Charles Bernard, routinely failed to pay minimum and prevailing wages. Plaintiffs say they also did not receive federally mandated overtime pay while working more than 60 hours per week.

The company also collected $60 per week as rent payments for rat-infested trailers packed with eight or nine people, according to the lawsuit. Also allegedly deducted from weekly paychecks was a $3 fee for cashing checks at a retail market affiliated with Crawfish Processing.

Not surprising in a state like Louisiana, where the legislature continues to debate the "good and bad" of and, in fact, defend the legality of slavery, that this would be allowed to go on.  Even if the plaintiffs win in this case, don't expect these practices to change in the future.

The price of crawfish

A group of seafood processing workers in Breaux Bridge are suing to get rid of a loophole that allows plant owners to pay a lower "prevailing wage" because they employ some migrant workers who are on H-2B visas.  

Basically, before issuing the certification that allows companies to hire temporary workers from foreign countries – using H-2B visas – the employer needs to show that pay will not be less than the prevailing wage for local American workers. The rub, according to the lawsuit, comes in showing what the prevailing wage actually is.

The 2015 Wage Rule modified existing regulations to allow employers to use their own surveys to set the prevailing wage and that rule change impacted the conditions and pay for similarly employed U.S. workers, according to the lawsuit.

This is just one small way the rules are deliberately written to take advantage of workers the government confers a more precarious status upon to lower the standard for everyone. It's an example of how allowing any class of workers to be exploited causes everyone to suffer. The lawsuit estimates the overall effect depresses wages by as much as $5 an hour. 

Of course, as we've seen before, the real costs of this system can be much higher. 

A BuzzFeed News investigation — based on government databases and investigative files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, thousands of court documents, as well as more than 80 interviews with workers and employers — shows that the program condemns thousands of employees each year to exploitation and mistreatment, often in plain view of government officials charged with protecting them. All across America, H-2 guest workers complain that they have been cheated out of their wages, threatened with guns, beaten, raped, starved, and imprisoned. Some have even died on the job. Yet employers rarely face any significant consequences.

Bobby Jindal pantsed us

DEQ still hasn't quite gotten their britches pulled back up.

The fish testing program cost about $500,000 per year and led to an average of three new mercury advisories per year.

That all ended in 2008, when DEQ gutted the program amid a push by Gov. Bobby Jindal to force cuts across various state agencies. For eight years, there was no fish tissue sampling, except in the aftermath of a chemical or oil spill.

State law requires the program to draw its funding from tax dollars, grants or donations. DEQ has been hesitant to ask for more funding from the Legislature or push for a rule change that would allow the use of money from fees or fines.

In 2015, environmental groups put pressure on DEQ to revive the program. “We had to embarrass the hell out of them,” Kohl said. It worked, apparently.

“Our butt was hanging out and we had to cover it up,” Piehler said.

This also says that Louisiana's waterways are particularly dangerous environments for mercury poisoning in the fish that live there. But, you know, as President Trump says....

“Atmospheric mercury is less than it was, and most of the mercury we were getting was from aerial deposition,” he said.

That doesn’t mean testing should cease, Kohl said.

“If you don’t test, you don’t find problems,” he said. “Some people like that. Ignorance is bliss.”

Okay but identify the villains

Here is a brief article in the Guardian US about efforts to organize workers in Louisiana's seafood processing plants.  Perhaps this is an overly optimistic account but it says here the local workers are succeeding at finding common cause with the "guest workers" brought in on H-2b visas.

Formed in 2017 as an offshoot of organizing being done by the National Guestworker Alliance and the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice the Seafood Workers Alliance has hundreds of members in 15 different plants throughout Louisiana.

The organization has focused heavily on suing employers and building alliances with local communities so that workers can help push back when they face abuses in the workplace. They’ve built deep ties in particular with the African American community. Often, low wage employers have attempted to pit low wage African American workers against Latino workers, who many saw as coming to Louisiana to take their jobs.

Through combined struggle, the workers have learned that, while their struggles are different, their problems both with local employers and enforcement are similar.

“Look, we understand now that when they say deportation that’s incarceration for black people,” said Alfred Marshall, a middle-aged African American activist with Stand with Dignity, also a project of the New Orleans Workers Center for Racial Justice.

“When they say undocumented, we know that there are over 50,000-60,000 people in New Orleans who have outstanding warrants on them that can’t even go get a job because of the fear they have,” said Marshall.

“The language they use is different, but the problems are the same and now we understand that better than ever.”

The employers in this industry thrive on exploiting the H-2 program which subjects foreign workers to horrendous abuses and depresses the wages and working conditions of the Americans they are forced to compete with.   Here is an extended Buzzfeed feature from 2015 on the appalling conditions imposed on guest workers in Louisiana and elsewhere. 

Each year, more than 100,000 people from countries such as Mexico, Guatemala, the Philippines, and South Africa come to America on what is known as an H-2 visa to perform all kinds of menial labor across a wide spectrum of industries: cleaning rooms at luxury resorts and national parks, picking fruit, cutting lawns and manicuring golf courses, setting up carnival rides, trimming and planting trees, herding sheep, or, in the case of Valdez, Gonzalez, and about 20 other Mexican women in 2011, peeling crawfish at L.T. West Inc.

A BuzzFeed News investigation — based on government databases and investigative files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, thousands of court documents, as well as more than 80 interviews with workers and employers — shows that the program condemns thousands of employees each year to exploitation and mistreatment, often in plain view of government officials charged with protecting them. All across America, H-2 guest workers complain that they have been cheated out of their wages, threatened with guns, beaten, raped, starved, and imprisoned. Some have even died on the job. Yet employers rarely face any significant consequences.

Many of those employers have since been approved to bring in more guest workers. Some have even been rewarded with lucrative government contracts. Almost none have ever been charged with a crime.

In response to these outrages, the Department of Labor tightened some of the rules intended to protect against some of these abuses. This was immediately opposed by Senator Bill Cassidy and then-Congressman Charles Boustany. They both frequently boast of the "friends" they have in the industry.  Over the past few years, enforcement of the new rules has been de-funded and other restrictions on the guest worker program selectively modified by the Trump Administration although courts have ruled the DOL does retain enforcement authority should it choose to exercise it.

In any case, it's good to see the organizing efforts of both foreign and native workers in Louisiana meeting with some measure of success. That is, if the situation is as rosy as that Guardian story implies.  In not mentioning our industry-friendly Republican Senators or our insane President, they seem to have left some important villains out of the narrative.

Movie time

Yesterday the Chemical Safety Board released its long-awaited report on the 2010 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon and subsequent oil spill into the Gulf of Mexico.  It comes with a helpful animation.



The cartoon focuses on the failure of Horizon's blowout preventer.   Specifically, it points to a miswired battery which caused some of the BOP's systems to fail at a critical moment.  The video doesn't dig very far into the reason for this. But the report does.

A miswiring disabled the blowout preventer’s control system, which was designed to activate the shear ram in an emergency. A separate miswiring caused another battery failure on an identical, redundant control system, but the two battery failures “canceled each other out.” That second battery failure triggered a shearing blade inside the blowout preventer, which attempted to cut the pipe. But it was unsuccessful because the drill pipe had been bent.

In the report, the CSB said  the blowout preventer had been miswired before it was ever set on the sea floor, paralyzing certain key functions. Houston-based Cameron International manufactured the device and Swiss rig contractor Transocean owned it.

“Neither Transocean nor BP treated the Deepwater Horizon blowout preventer as a safety critical element,” the agency said in a written statement accompanying the report. “The component of the DWH blowout preventer meant to shear and seal the well was not suitable for the Macondo drilling operation, as it could not reliably shear the drill pipe.”

Transocean is the world's largest offshore drilling contractor. According to this report, they either don't know or don't care about how to properly maintain a crucial safety mechanism.

Oh well.  Meanwhile, we'll be on the lookout for other places to get oysters. 

At the oyster task force meeting Tuesday, Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries biologist report that there is not a lot of spat. That's the larval or infancy stage that settles to the bottom and begins to develop a shell. And they won't know until July if there's a numbers problem. But one 35-year-oyster producer doesn't like what he sees.

"I'll tell 'ya, things aren't normal," said Al Sunseri.

Sunseri is the co-owner and president of P & J Oyster Company. It's been in business for 138 years.

"I've been doing this for 35 years and I've just seen a continual reduction in the amount of oysters available over the last four and a half years. Ever since the oil disaster, there's been a continued decline, and the public oyster grounds have been basically nonproductive."

Sunseri said he had to lay off workers after the BP oil spill in 2010.

Brand awareness

Try as it might to set us straight, BP just can't keep Louisiana on message.

BP is going to the mat over a fishing closure in state waters off Plaquemines Parish over Fourth of July weekend. The British oil giant isn't happy with the state's decision to close waters to fishing because of oil finds. Following a state Wildlife and Fisheries hold on fishing near East Grand Terre Island due to the discovery of an underwater tar mat, the company responsible for the Deepwater Horizon disaster accused the state of "perpetuating the myth" that Gulf seafood is unsafe.

Chicory

I was standing in line for coffee this morning with a group of people who were obviously in town for the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival Presented By Shell when I got to overhear yet another, "So what is chicory, anyway?" conversation.  Usually when they ask this they want you to give them some canned performance built around some combination of these frequently-in-dispute factoids.

Many myths surround the use of chicory in coffee blends. One story holds that the root was accidentally found to be a flavorful additive to coffee as far back as the sixteenth century. Chicory is made from the root of the endive plant and was used as a filler and flavor enhancer in parts of northern Europe at least as far back as the eighteenth century. Napoleon's armies reportedly brought chicory back to France, where Parisians began to prefer its taste and the thriftiness of adding chicory. Since chicory could be grown in parts of Europe where coffee could not, the root was obviously cheaper. How it made its way to the United States is unknown. For many years it was used to stretch coffee supplies, especially in hard times such as the Civil War. This practice upset many purists, who disdained chicory and other additives. Somewhere along the way, however, New Orleanians developed a taste for chicory in coffee blends and many prefer it today. Throughout the New Orleans area, chicory has been used as a flavor additive. Local coffee companies have kept up with demand by offering the same blends with and without chicory. Within the city, coffee and chicory are consumed in greater quantities than anywhere else. Outside of the city, most coffee drinkers imbibe pure coffee instead.

You can arrange this any way you like to suit whatever story you feel obligated to tell. Here's a slightly different version, for example.

Chicory was first roasted and used in coffee in Holland around the year 1750. In a short period of time, it became a popular replacement for coffee. By 1785, James Bowdoin, the governor of Massachusetts had first introduced it to the United States. In 1806, Napoleon attempted to make France completely self-sufficient. To eliminate coffee imports, chicory was used as a complete substitute. While this system did not last more than a few years, the French continued to use chicory to blend with their coffee. This practice would migrate to the still French-influenced New Orleans and is still considered the normal New Orleans-style of coffee.

Or slightly different again.

One historical and cultural example of chicory's use as a coffee substitute is found in New Orleans. Due in part to its influences from French culture, New Orleans was a major consumer of coffee prior to the Civil War. Then, in 1840, coffee importation to the New Orleans harbor was blocked. Taking a cue from their French roots, locals began to use chicory as a coffee substitute. Today, chicory remains a popular coffee replacement or coffee flavoring in New Orleans, and 'New Orleans Coffee' typically refers to chicory coffee. New Orleans coffee vendors often blend their coffee with up to 30 percent chicory root.

So, depending on which resourceful, embattled, thrifty people you feel like romanticizing, the basic story is it's a root used as an additive to stretch coffee.  Or make it taste better... or worse... again depending on the point of view of the storyteller.

In any case, it's definitely one of the more tiresome things tourists will ask you about and expect you to dance for them in the telling.  But rather than just start punching people in the face I'm looking for new and less boring lies to tell them. Here's my new one. You see "chicory" isn't a root at all. Instead it's the flavor enhancing byproduct of this process.

The company, Houston-based W&T Offshore, admitted its workers had used coffee filters in October 2009 to clean oil and other minerals out of the water byproduct discharged overboard from their platform in the Ewing Banks 910 lease block, about 65 miles south of Port Fourchon.

They were filtering the oil out of the water samples that were sent into a lab and recorded with the federal government.

Meanwhile, the water they were dumping back into the Gulf on a constant basis stayed contaminated.

We already know how much the oil industry enjoys describing contamination in food metaphors. Why not throw another one in there?   At least this one is appropriately bitter which is bound to fit the mood of anyone whose had to pay the consequences of bucking such a system.

“When you’re in the offshore industry if you want to get along, you better go along,” said Randy Comeaux of Lafayette, who was a contract employee assigned to W&0T platforms in 2009. “And what happens offshore stays offshore. You break any one of those two rules, in one fashion or another, you will not be working offshore.”

Comeaux says he’s one of the few who doesn’t simply “go along,” and he’s paid the price. He said he’s been fired multiple times for reporting violations and can’t get a job offshore because of it.

Comeaux maintains a blog on Examiner.com where he writes about offshore drilling hazards such as, well, naturally, the kinds of food additives produced.

The produced water with the chemicals is then discharged overboard into the gulf of mexico waters. This produced water is basically salt water , the chemicals are now hazardous waste which can only be discharged in limited quantities, to allow the gulf waters to break them down with time .

Fish , shrimp , crabs , oysters and a large multitude of seafood life swim in these contaminated waters around the offshore platforms consuming these contaminants.

These fish , shrimp , crabs , oysters and other seafood are then consumed by the people along the gulf coast and the entire US.

This is why it helps to look to our plucky ancestors for inspiration in times of hardship. Better to just make lemonade rather than worry about what's gone wrong with the lemons.  In the next century maybe our descendents in the New Orleans Islands could be standing in line at the seafood automat fielding questions from tourists about the origins of the locals' peculiar love of Corexit as a condiment. Probably we'll tell them it adds aroma or something.  

May have

Uh oh, time to send more chefs to the Olympics.

A study on possible effects of the 2010 BP oil spill indicates dispersants may have killed plankton -- some of the ocean's tiniest plants and creatures -- and disrupted the food chain in the Gulf of Mexico, one of the nation's richest seafood grounds. Scientists who read the study said it points toward major future effects of the spill. One called its findings scary.

Robust website of the day

Rickygohome.com is a protest site set up in support of efforts to keep the Times-Picayune in print. It compares the "paper"'s new publisher Ricky Mathews to other infamous villains familiar to New Orleanians.

Its opening page features a slideshow of new publisher Mathews along with a rogues' gallery of New Orleans' enemies (former FEMA director Michael Brown, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, the Atlanta Falcons, a mosquito and Edward Pakenham, the director of British forces during the Battle of New Orleans)

It's likely the humor and quite possibly the references are all lost on the Newhouse family.

As for Matthews, who knows what he does and doesn't get?  In this robust Al.com post, he tells us what "we have every reason to believe" about Gulf seafood in the years to come following the Macondo oil disaster. 

We already knew that Gulf seafood is the best-tasting in the world. And now we have every reason to believe that it is the most safety tested and monitored. That should only enhance the Gulf brand. People will someday soon seek out Wild Caught Gulf of Mexico Seafood, and they will pay more for it.

Before we write off Matthews as overly credulous, let us consider that maybe we're not giving him enough credit. Maybe he understands there is a difference between "the most safety tested and monitored" seafood and "the safest" seafood.  The key difference there being whether you care to mention the results of that testing.

Choosing the right words there is certainly one way to "enhance the Gulf brand" anyway.  We look forward to Matthews' work enhancing the T-P brand along similar lines.

Uh oh, time for a new seafood marketing campaign

Does California even have a HoZone fund to help with that?

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Across the vast Pacific, the mighty bluefin tuna carried radioactive contamination that leaked from Japan's crippled nuclear plant to the shores of the United States 6,000 miles away — the first time a huge migrating fish has been shown to carry radioactivity such a distance.

"We were frankly kind of startled," said Nicholas Fisher, one of the researchers reporting the findings online Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The levels of radioactive cesium were 10 times higher than the amount measured in tuna off the California coast in previous years. But even so, that's still far below safe-to-eat limits set by the U.S. and Japanese governments.

On the bright side, we can expect our sushi to be bacteria-free for a while now that it comes pre-radiated.

Uh oh, time for another round of marketing $$

Maybe passing the Ho-Zone would fix this

The state Department of Health and Hospitals closed a harvesting area Tuesday after 14 people reported getting sick at an unnamed New Orleans area restaurant, according to a news release.

Deformedelicious

Gulf seafood deformities alarm scientists

"The dispersants used in BP's draconian experiment contain solvents, such as petroleum distillates and 2-butoxyethanol. Solvents dissolve oil, grease, and rubber," Dr Riki Ott, a toxicologist, marine biologist and Exxon Valdez survivor told Al Jazeera. "It should be no surprise that solvents are also notoriously toxic to people, something the medical community has long known".

The dispersants are known to be mutagenic, a disturbing fact that could be evidenced in the seafood deformities. Shrimp, for example, have a life-cycle short enough that two to three generations have existed since BP's disaster began, giving the chemicals time to enter the genome.

Not to worry, of course. As soon as Mayor Landrieu's Hospitality Zone plan is up and running, NOTMC and NOCVB can advertise all of these problems away for us.

At least they can until Geauxjira shows up. Then more drastic measures may have to be taken.



Update: And if Geuxjira doesn't get you, maybe one of these blue creatures from the lagoon will.

The persistence of Corexit mixed with crude oil has now weathered to tar, yet is traceable to BP's Deepwater Horizon brew through its chemical fingerprint. The mix creates a fluorescent signature visible under UV light. From the report:

The program uses newly developed UV light equipment to detect tar product and reveal where it is buried in many beach areas and also where it still remains on the surface in the shoreline plunge step area. The tar product samples are then analyzed…to determine which toxins may be present and at what concentrations. By returning to locations several times over the past year and analyzing samples, we've been able to determine that PAH concentrations in most locations are not degrading as hoped for and expected.


Worse, the toxins in this unholy mix of Corexit and crude actually penetrate wet skin faster than dry skin (photos above)—the author describes it as the equivalent of a built-in accelerant—though you'd never know it unless you happened to look under fluorescent light in the 370nm spectrum. The stuff can't be wiped off. It's absorbed into the skin.

Flavor enhancers

Uh oh, looks like Mitch will have to ask BP for another round of marketing subsidies.

Scientists have confirmed that oil from BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster has entered the marine food chain.

Research by faculty and students at East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C. found crude oil from the 2010 spill in zooplankton (photo), small animals that play a critical role in the aquatic food web.

Dr. Siddhartha Mitra with ECU's Department of Geological Sciences and Dr. David Kimmel with the Department of Biology and Institute for Coastal Sciences and Policy worked with students to analyze samples of zooplankton collected from the Gulf of Mexico in August and September 2010. They identified the origin of the oil by examining polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, natural components of crude oil known to cause cancer, reproductive problems and birth defects.

Hey at least these carcinogens are also "aromatic." Could be very useful in preparing our seafood dishes during this Lenten season.

Unvanished: Alaska edition

Yes, this story was published today.

It's been more than 22 years since the Exxon Valdez dumped 10 million gallons of crude into Alaska's Prince William Sound, but you don't have to look very hard to find lingering impacts from the spill. You can actually still find oil on the shore there, the fisheries are still struggling, and some bird species haven't recovered. But now Exxon is saying it won't pay up, despite an agreement to cover those additional cleanup costs.

Five years ago, the US government asked Exxon for money to continue the cleanup effort there. In its latest court filing, Exxon appears to be trying to shirk its obligation to pay for additional damages. In its filing to the US District Court in Alaska on September 30, the company argues that the agreement it reached with the government only covers "restoration" work—not additional "clean-up."

It's interesting to see this "restoration" vs "clean-up" terminology being used here. From this article it isn't exactly clear how Exxon actually defines those terms. But they do appear to argue that no further "restoration" work is necessary in Prince William Sound. Last summer, the Times-Picayune reported from Cordova, Alaska and found much there, particularly the herring fishery, never has been fully "restored" although Exxon has managed to recover much of its initial liability.

Twenty-one years later, the herring that once signaled the start of the summer season are largely gone, rendering $300,000 permits worthless. Losses are tallied in divorces, suicides, repossessed boats, depleted college funds, friends who moved away. Cynicism, normally a stranger to small towns, has lodged permanently in people's craws, receiving a fresh injection two years ago when the U.S. Supreme Court whittled a $2.5 billion punitive-damages judgment against Exxon down to $500 million.

In Louisiana BP has also been using the term "restoration" in a slightly different but no less misleading fashion which Mark Moseley speculated about in this Lens column back in July.

We need to tell BP to stop using the term “Gulf Coast Restoration” unless they are referring to long-term projects that replace lost coastal mass. Conflating clean-up with restoration is not only intellectually offensive, it undercuts Louisiana’s ability to educate the nation about the status of America’s most important wetland and the need to save it. Pretty photos of wildlife and seafood festival updates may have a soothing effect, but in no sense do they amount to evidence of restoration. Rinsing out the salt you threw into a gaping wound doesn’t make you a healer.

I suspect BP’s abuse of language is no accident. They know “Gulf Coast Restoration” is a loaded term in these parts. Associating their effort with the larger mission is a way of obscuring how superficial their clean-up has been to date. BP should immediately cease using “Gulf Coast Restoration” in their ads and websites, and replace it with a more descriptive term like “Oil Disaster Recovery.”

More than semantics is at stake. In the coming years, BP will pay billions in fines, and hopefully a huge slice of those monies will be use to fund long-term plans to save the coast. Louisiana must work with Congress and the Obama administration to ensure that we use this money to fund goals that truly address our long-term needs: If we waste this money merely aiming to reconstruct the coast along BP’s absurd March 2010 “baseline,” it will amount to another wasted opportunity, a big one.

What the Alaska experience should make clear is that, despite efforts to advertise it all away, South Louisiana is going to be dealing with the consequences of this disaster for quite a long time to come. For example, Alaska herring, meet Louisiana white shrimp.

The lack of shrimp around Grand Isle has forced some shrimpers to sail west toward Dulac and Delcambre, said Dean Blanchard, owner of a shrimp dock in Grand Isle.

“Our Grand Isle beach is producing less than one percent of the shrimp it normally produces,” he said.

Many fishermen are blaming the lack of shrimp on the oil leak, said Guidry of the Louisiana Shrimp Association.

“I think you will find the parishes that were most affected by oil are down (in terms of shrimp),” Guidry said. “We are just seeing something (a lower number of shrimp), and what we see on the beaches is a minute fraction of what went on in the Gulf. I don’t think we will ever know what it (the oil) killed.”

Guidry cited a study published Sept. 26 by LSU researchers Fernando Galvez and Andrew Whitehead. The study found that exposure to oil causes changes in fish genes that could have implications for future fish populations.

To whatever extent it looks like BP is "being held accountable" now it's worth noting that, like Exxon, they will always have plenty of time and money with which to define that accountability down.

In the meantime, the worst thing we can do is stop paying attention.

Hey, free fish buckets!

Easy pickings when they're just floating up on top like that. Actually you'll probably have to bring your own bucket. Just be sure you get something that resists corrosion.

Officials are referring to the material in the water as “black liquor,” a byproduct of paper-making that has a high pH. Temple-Inland regularly uses acid to balance the black liquor’s pH before releasing the material into the river, which its permit allows it do, said Jeff Dauzat, an environmental scientist from the state Department of Environmental Quality.

But Temple-Inland discovered, even before it was released, that the black liquor was exceeding its permitted levels in the plant, said Jay Wilson, vice president of environment, health and safety at the mill.

The substance has moved about 45 miles from its source through the Pearl River system, Dauzat said. He said if tests from his department confirm that Temple-Inland is to blame for the fish kill, it will be the third time a fish kill has been traced to the plant, although previous incidents might have occurred before Temple-Inland took over operations there.

Oh and hurry too because I can't imagine there'll be much surface fish left to pick from once we go into sand berm mode which we know always begins with very loud posturing.

“I made it very clear that we expect the company to clean up this mess, not only to make sure that it never happens again before they reopen the plant, but also that they’ve got responsibility to reverse the damage that has been done by this discharge,” Jindal said. “He (CEO of Temple-Inland, Doyle Simons) committed to me that they were going to do that. We are going to hold them accountable to that commitment.”

Spat in rivers while the fish eggs were hatching

Last week, Bobby Jindal announced Louisiana's plan for using its share of BP money to be paid out in compensation for the 2010 Macondo oil well disaster.

Former director of the Governor's Applied Coastal Science Program and LaCoast Post founding editor Len Bahr assesses Jindal's plan in this post at NOLA Defender.

The governor is well aware that the Gulf Environmental Restoration Task Force established by President Obama envisions using the total amount of money that is ultimately billed to BP and the other responsible parties for comprehensive recovery from cumulative long term Gulf coast damage, not limited to oil damage in 2010.

No matter what level of funding the state actually receives in the near term, I strongly disagree with the first two of three categories for which Gov. Jindal decided to allocate the BP bucks: (1) oyster habitat restoration: (2) fish hatcheries; and (3) barrier island restoration projects. Categories 1 and 2 will do absolutely nothing to prevent the continued sinking and shrinking of America’s Delta.

Bahr goes on to speculate that Jindal's disbursements reveal a political deference to the oyster and fishing lobbies which distorts priorities in a way that hinders comprehensive coastal restoration efforts. This echoes a similar criticism of the oystermen by Ivor Van Heerden which appeared in The Lens this spring.

I have no doubt that there is some truth in this. Certainly Jindal is pandering to a well-orgainized interest group and probably this is diverting some funds and attention away from where they may be of more immediate use. But it's important to remember, while we're keeping score, that the oystermen are on the victims' side of this too.

It wasn't oystermen who chewed through the Louisiana marshes with pipelines and service canals and it wasn't oystermen who have dumped nearly half a million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico over the past five decades not including last year's BP disaster. (See here for more on this number and Senator Landrieu's disgraceful lies about the size of that number.)

Fisheries and oyster beds were directly damaged by last year's spill and their reclamation deserves attention. Yes, it would appear that the oyster industry needs to give some ground concerning the use of freshwater diversion for coastal rebuilding. At the same time, however, this ongoing dispute is already being used by BP to shun responsibility for this year's kill.

the company has clearly moved from a public relations strategy to one focusing on litigation over whether damage to the state's oyster beds was BP's fault. The state contends that its decision to open many freshwater diversions along the Mississippi River to full blast at the height of the oil spill kept oil from entering the oyster beds, though the fresh water killed the oysters, requiring the beds to be restocked with cultch, oyster shell deposited beneath the water on which oyster larvae grow.

Coastal scientists like Bahr and Van Heerden might be better served to focus their attentions on holding the oil and gas industry accountable for the damage it has done to everyone who depends on a healthy Louisiana coast rather than on the dismal internal divisions that damage has engendered.

This week in oil disaster news

Cementing contractor settles with BP Company agrees to pay BP $75M to settle claims

Meanwhile Tranocean has published the results of its internal investigation. Surprise! They find BP negligent.

Mississippi brown shrimp catch is off by nearly one million compared to this time a few years ago.

Traci Floyd, director of the state Department of Marine Resources Shrimp and Crab Bureau, says 903,908 pounds of brown shrimp were caught in the two weeks after the brown shrimp season started on May 25. She says that compares with first two weeks of 2007 when the catch was 1.96 million pounds.

Mark Stewart, an Ocean Springs shrimper, said the shrimp have been small and scarce in Mississippi waters. He says that has resulted in low prices.

This morning on WWL radio, Bob Delgiorno was confusingly describing the low price paid to shrimpers for a scarce and low quality product as a "shrimp glut." Clearly that's not what this is.

Feinberg says he's making progress. Although it's still quite difficult to pin down what that actually means.

The biggest lingering question is: What claims are still out there? The uncertainty rests mostly in the fishing industry, where the true measure of the spill's economic pain is still unfolding. Only 24,000 fishers, crabbers, shrimpers, oyster harvesters and seafood processors have sought final payments so far, and half have settled. The vast majority of them -- about 11,000 -- took the quick payment option of $5,000 for individuals or $25,000 for businesses.

Also there are thousands of fishers who are currently relying on government assistance and periodic (although stingily disbursed) interim payments from GCCF for subsistence alone. And, of course, the long term damage to the fisheries won't be fully known for many years.

Finally, the deadline to submit oil spill related "restoration" project proposals to the Natural Resource Trustees set up by BP on behalf of five Gulf Coast states is this Saturday.

Louisiana will receive a minimum of $100 million for "oil restoration" projects from the trust but will have to compete for a share of an additional $300 million with Texas, Florida, Mississippi, and Alabama. Despite initial optimism that this money could at least serve as a modest beginning to the massive funding needed to mitigate Louisiana's dire coastal erosion problem, this language appears to restrict the projects to Macondo clean-up only.

Trustees determining early restoration projects are guided in their selection in part by criteria laid down by the Oil Pollution Act of 1990. The projects must "contribute to making the environment and the public whole by restoring, rehabilitating, replacing or acquiring the equivalent of natural resources or services injured as a result of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill or response, or compensating for interim losses resulting from the incident," according to a recent presentations made by Drue Banta, an attorney for the Governor's Office of Coastal Protection and Restoration, and Stephanie Morris, an attorney for the Louisiana Oil Spill Coordinator's Office.

The projects also must "address one or more specific injuries to natural resources or services associated with the incident." And they must "seek to restore natural resources, habitats or natural resource services of the same type, quality and of comparable ecological and/or human use value to compensate for identified resource and service losses resulting from the incident."

The good news is there may be more money available at some point once the National Resource Damage Assessment is complete.

That money will be deducted from the final bill presented to BP and other responsible parties after completion of the overall Natural Resource Damage Assessment process, which is anticipated to take several years.

The bad news is many observers believe BP is trying to manipulate the NRDA process.

"Minimal to no handling"

Fine to eat, though, we're sure.

My guess is that NOAA and the FDA will ultimately confirm that there are sick, contaminated fish all over the northeastern quadrant of the Gulf of Mexico. This is a serious issue that has obvious implications for seafood safety as well as for the overall post-spill health of the Gulf. A highly contaminated link in the food chain can wreak havoc on the rest of the ecosystem.

If the government finally comes around to addressing these marine life issues head-on, before this is all through, we could very well see the re-closing of waters once deemed “all clear” for fishing. Stay tuned…

via AZ

Of course, there are always "other places to get shrimp"

Just not here this year.

See also

In an e-mail response to concerns raised by Young and Council Chairman Chris Roberts, Feinberg said he is considering "some compromise options" to keep the offices open one day per week or having a special "claims day" every few weeks. "I am sensitive to your concerns and will propose some approach to deal with those remaining claimants who, more than a year after the spill, are still filing claims and seeking information," Feinberg wrote. "This is simply a numbers problem along with considerations of alternative claim sites and efficiency."

Young and Roberts said they want both offices to remain open five days a week with reduced staffing through the summer.

Roberts said many commercial fishers waited until the shrimp season was underway before deciding whether to file additional claims.

"I find it a little ironic that just as the shrimp season has opened, they're looking at closing their claims office," he said. "I don't think BP is trying to make it right as much as they are trying to run from their obligations."

All-clear from the taint sniffers

I'm too old and too set in my dietary ways to avoid this stuff regardless but here's a green light anyway.

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Recreational and commercial fishing has been reopened in the Barataria basin, the coastal area hit the hardest by the massive BP oil spill.

Officials say tests show it is safe to fish in Barataria, an important seafood estuary. Parts of the basin were closed to commercial fishermen until Tuesday's announcement.

So far I haven't had any ill effects to report, of course, your results may vary.

The truth is....there are a lot of sick people along the Gulf Coast. One year later, this spill has not disappeared. This spill is producing major health problems across the Gulf region. Whether those health effects are from direct exposure or seafood consumption....or both...we don't have enough independent research to provide honest, scientific answers. That is by design.