Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Un-vanished

New oil surfaces near Elmer’s Island

BATON ROUGE — New oil is still washing up on local beaches, including Elmer’s Island, 10 months after BP’s Deepwater Horizon explosion, state officials said.

It’s a contentious time for crude sightings, especially as BP and the federal government begin to inch out of the Gulf Coast.

Officials with the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries say they’ve been told that the clean-up partners are planning to “pack up shop” at the end of this month.

Secretary Robert Barham called the departure “unacceptable,” especially since new oil is being discovered in places like Bay Jimmy, Red Fish Bay and Pass-a-Loutre.


"Packing up shop" also entails:
BP has reneged on promises made in November to negotiate early payments to Louisiana to help rebuild oyster beds, repair damaged wetlands and build a fish hatchery to allow the state to respond immediately to the collapse of commercial fisheries in the wake of the BP Gulf oil spill, state officials said Monday

Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority chairman Garret Graves and Department of Wildlife & Fisheries director Robert Barham said the state will instead scramble to find millions of dollars to begin the work itself, then bill BP for the costs.

"BP has clearly changed their approach," Barham said. "All we've asked is for them to do what they said they would do in their commercials, be here for the long haul and make it right."

Instead, he said, 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.


Here's part of what "focusing on litigation" has meant.

The documents that oil spill claims czar Kenneth Feinberg is making people sign in exchange for their final damage settlements are illegal and should be voided by a federal judge, according to the plaintiffs in the massive federal civil case against BP and others.

U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier ruled earlier this month that Feinberg must stop representing himself as independent of BP. The oil giant owned the deepwater oil well that exploded last April, fouling the Gulf of Mexico for three months, and pays Feinberg's law firm $850,000 a month to dole out money from a $20 billion compensation fund.

Now, Barbier is considering whether Feinberg, who was jointly appointed by BP and President Barack Obama, has set up a claims payment procedure that properly follows the law.


Kudos, again, to David Hammer for putting the bit about Feinberg's relationship with BP right there at the top of the article.

Meanwhile, returning to the theme we began this little round-up with, more and more oil continues to un-vanish out there.

At a science conference in Washington Saturday, marine scientist Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia aired early results of her December submarine dives around the BP spill site. She went to places she had visited in the summer and expected the oil and residue from oil-munching microbes would be gone by then. It wasn't.

"There's some sort of a bottleneck we have yet to identify for why this stuff doesn't seem to be degrading," Joye told the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference in Washington. Her research and those of her colleagues contrasts with other studies that show a more optimistic outlook about the health of the gulf, saying microbes did great work munching the oil.

"Magic microbes consumed maybe 10 percent of the total discharge, the rest of it we don't know," Joye said, later adding: "there's a lot of it out there."


One more note about the "magic microbes." When they first appeared, we noted that the "more optimistic" studies referred to above were funded this way.
The research was supported by an existing grant with the Energy Biosciences Institute, a partnership led by the University of California Berkeley and the University of Illinois that is funded by a $500 million, 10-year grant from BP.


Should we ask Judge Barbier to determine whether or not the microbes are "independent" too?

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