Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Sea of Dead or Any One Thing

It's August. Time once again to take a look at that Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone. How did we do this year?

The annual low-oxygen "dead zone" along the coasts of Louisiana and Texas covers 6,765 square miles, larger than average and bigger than the state of Connecticut, but is below the size predicted by scientists as a result of the record-breaking Mississippi River floodwaters entering the Gulf of Mexico this spring and summer, said Nancy Rabalais, chief scientist for the just-completed, annual Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium monitoring cruise.
Bigger than average but not quite record breaking. This year's annual hypoxic mass of dead Gulf water is only the size of Connecticut. Woo-hoo? The sea life seems less enthusiastic for some reason.


Louisiana Gulf fishery (actual photo)

Of course there's always time to work on the extra credit. Undoubtedly there are other fish in the sea to kill, but not everyone thinks to go after the ones hiding out upriver as well.

Several thousand aquatic species in the Pearl River from Bogalusa down into St. Tammany Parish were observed dead or dying over the weekend. And as federal, state and local agencies descended on the river to test it, word circulated that the Bogalusa paper mill may have been the cause.

Then on Sunday, the owners of the Bogalusa paper mill, Temple-Inland, admitted that their mill in Bogalusa had exceeded its allowed wastewater discharge levels and that may have lowered oxygen levels in the river enough to cause fish deaths. Temple-Inland shutdown the mill on Saturday evening.

The Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality did not release a statement until Monday morning, warning the public to avoid foam on the river and any discolored water, and not to eat dead or floating fish.

That statement noted “a slug of partially treated or untreated wastewater reached the river and may have caused or contributed to the fish kill,” but did not name Temple-Inland directly.

A follow-up phone conversation with DEQ communication’s director Rodney Mallett confirmed the wastewater did come from the Bogalusa paper mill but Mallett strongly cautioned that the DEQ cannot yet determine whether that wastewater release was the cause of the fish deaths.

We cannot say that any one thing caused the fish kill at this one moment,” Mallett said.


Sorry about the long quote there. But it's important to note just how cautious these agencies are being before they assign blame for this massive die off to "any one thing" even if there does happen to be a pipeline of dark frothy paper mill goo discharging directly into the Pearl River. As always there could be other "things" to consider.

What if the fish were forced into poorly oxygenated waters because they were swimming away from the sludge, for example? That might be something we could classify as a completely separate "thing". We've already established that when oyster beds are killed by fresh water diversion, we can't blame that solely on the gushing petroleum that water may have been released to counteract. Just like if you were to step into the path of an oncoming bus to get out of the way of the rifle I'm aiming at you, can we really blame this death on "any one thing"? Just who was that negligent bus driver texting, anyway? The point is, these things (all the possible things) must be handled delicately when the reputations of big dirty job creators are at stake.

Sometimes, we get lucky, though. In the case of determining whether or not frothy black sludge is a significant enough "any one thing" to merit our concern the investigation isn't expected to last longer than a week. And that's actually pretty quick for a fish kill investigation. Look how far away we still are from "certainty" regarding the cause of this disease.
Jim Cowan, professor of oceanography at Louisiana State University, has analyzed many of these diseased fish.

"When one of these things comes on deck, it's sort of horrifying," Cowan said. "I mean, there these large dark lesions and eroded fins and areas on the body where scales have been removed. I'dimagine I've seen 30 or 40,000 red snapper in my career, and I've never seen anything like this. At all. Ever."

Cowan can't say with certainly the cause of these lesions.

Cowan said, "We think from chronic exposure to some environmental stressor, and I think the likely assumption that it has something to do with the spill is there."

But the 200 million gallons of crude spilled from the Deepwater Horizon last year is at the top of the list because the highest rate of sick fish are being found in the areas of the Gulf that were the most affected by the oil.

"This whole issue seems to be centered between Galveston and Panama City..." Cowan said. "In fact, almost 50 percent of the red snapper that we caught on some of these reefs had had these secondary infections."

These so-called "hot spots" are of particular interest to University of South Florida researcher Dr. Steve Murawski. Bell caught up to him on the choppy waters 11 miles off the coast of Pensacola, Fla., while he conducted his research.

Murawski said, "What we're going to do is establish a baseline for fish disease. So, even if we don't find any potential pathology now, we can go back two or three or four years from now and see if there was some slow time bomb that was going off."


Also difficult to pin down is the "any one thing" that might be affecting the health of these dolphins.

A key question researchers are trying to answer is whether oil that washed into the Barataria Basin in the months after the April 2010 spill may be to blame for the strandings of 85 premature, stillborn or neonatal bottlenose dolphins that occurred between January and June, said Teri Rowles, director of NOAA's Marine Mammal Health and Stranding Response Program.

In addition, a dead adult dolphin found in June in the bay tested positive for oil from BP's well on its skin, she said. A second dolphin carcass found in July also was stained with oil, but the results of tests to determine its source are not yet complete, she said.

The scientists will be testing many of the samples for polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, a chemical component of oil that is believed to cause birth defects and could be linked to the baby dolphin deaths.

Determining a link is complicated by the fact that a percentage of dolphin pregnancies normally end in stillbirth or abortion, Brosnan said.


Each of these studies is a part of the National Resource Damage Assessment tasked with determining which effects upon the Gulf Coast can be tied directly to BP's Macondo "any one thing" event. The Times-Picayune's Bob Marshall wrote about NRDA back in April.

Fourteen agencies from the federal government and five states, joined by contractors working for BP, are engaged in the Natural Resource Damage Assessment, a process mandated by the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 that eventually will result in a huge repair bill to the oil giant. The research work already has cost BP hundreds of millions of dollars, the parties said.


This process is of paramount importance to Louisianians concerned about the future of our delicate coastal wetlands especially since the findings will determine just how much money BP will be made to contribute to that future. So, of course, it shouldn't surprise anyone that BP has involved itself in influencing what these findings eventually tell us.

(Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority Chairman Garrett) Graves also complained that BP must sign off on activities conducted by the Natural Resource Damage Assessment, a consortium that includes BP, Louisiana and other Gulf states as well as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Graves called on Congress to end this "inherent conflict" between the financing sources and government agencies.

"I think the equation needs to be flipped over," Graves said. "I think the public needs to be in the driver's seat. By being able to control the checkbook, you can control what's in these workplaces, how the assessments are conducted, the timelines of the assessments."


More interesting, though, is the effort directed at limiting our understanding of the scope of the term "coastal restoration."
Before the oil gusher was even capped last summer, BP labeled their recovery efforts associated with the Deepwater Horizon “incident” as “Gulf Coast restoration.” Surely the term was carefully chosen to appeal to Louisianans who associate the word with rebuilding the coast. But that’s bogus, a warping of language right out of George Orwell’s 1984. BP’s efforts to help the region recover from an oil disaster fall well short of coastal restoration, a vastly larger project. Cleaning oiled vegetation isn’t tantamount to replacing wetlands sliced and diced with oil service canals and lost to salt water and petrochemical pollution. To rhetorically link oil disaster recovery to coastal restoration, as usually defined, imbues BP’s work with a significance it doesn’t deserve. And by abusing common parlance to inflate its work, BP obscures the greater coastal crisis Louisiana faced long before last year’s blowout. A crisis the oil and gas industry has greatly accelerated.


So BP is fine with calling whatever activities they're eventually compelled to fund "coastal restoration" projects so long as they're only paying to "restore" (or at least prop up) what was there before their "any one thing" well exploded in 2010. But since Louisianians already know too well that oil and gas concerns like BP have contributed far more than just "any one thing" to the destruction of our coastline, now seems a strange time for them to demand such a narrow focus.

Post-script plug:
If you're going to Rising Tide this year (Only 10 days away! Register here!) you'll be able to hear these issues discussed by the panel of experts listed in this post.
Re-capping the well. The aftermath of the Macondo oil disaster and the future of the Gulf Coast: A discussion about how what's just happened over the past year will affect the land and the people for years to come. Moderated by Alex Woodward.

Alex Woodward is a staff writer with New Orleans alt-media Gambit, covering the environment, arts and culture of south Louisiana. With Gambit since 2008 he has covered everything from marching bands and cold cases to the effects of the BP disaster on the Gulf Coast.

Anne Rolfes is the founding director of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade. Anne began her organizing career in West Africa as a Peace Corps volunteer in Togo. It was there that she first witnessed the destruction of oil production. After six years of working on Nigerian issues, Anne returned to Louisiana in 1999 to protect her home state from petrochemical pollution. Anne was born and raised in Lafayette, Louisiana where many people made their fortunes from the oil industry. She has seen the wealth and the poverty created by oil production and seeks to make the industry more equitable. In October 2007 Anne was recognized by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation as a Community Health Leader.

David Hammer is an award-winning reporter for The Times-Picayune in New Orleans. He led the paper's investigation of what went wrong on the Deepwater Horizon rig and broke several stories about key engineering decisions that contributed to the BP well blowout. His beats since the oil spill also include the drilling moratorium and Kenneth Feinberg's administration of spill claims. He was part of a team of journalists that won the Naonal Journalism Awards’ 2010 Edward J. Meeman Prize for environmental reporting and The Associated Press Managing Editors’ Frank Allen Award for the year’s best overall news writing in Louisiana and Mississippi. Hammer is a seventh-generation New Orleanian and a graduate of Harvard University. He worked five years for newspapers in New England and four years with The Associated Press. In 2005, he won the Dallas Press Club's Katie Award for best wire feature story of the year. After Hurricane Katrina, Hammer returned to his hometown paper to cover Louisiana's multi-billion-dollar recovery programs and won the 2007 Louisiana Press Association award for best coverage of government. As hurricane recovery money flowed to the local level, Hammer shifted to covering New Orleans City Hall. His investigation of bribery in the city's technology office earned him the 2009 Frank Allen Award.

This year Hammer was also recognized by the Society of Environmental Journalists for his coverage of the Deepwater Horizon event.

Bob Marshall is The Times-Picayune's Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has spent much of his career chronicling the people, stories and issues of Louisiana's wetlands culture. Although best known as outdoors editor of the newspaper, Marshall's 35-year career includes extensive work as a reporter and columnist covering professional, college and Olympics sports, feature writing, op-ed columns, and special projects specializing in environmental issues.

In 1997 Marshall was a member of the T-P's three-man team that won a Pulitzer Prize for the series "Oceans of Trouble" which examined the plight of the world's fisheries.

In 2005 Marshall's investigations into Corps of Engineers missteps in building the New Orleans levees and floodwalls was part of the T-P reporting package that won the Pulitzer for its coverage of Hurricane Katrina. In addition, Marshall was a finalist for the Investigative Editors and Reporters award and the Polk Award for his on-going coverage into the causes of the disaster.

In 2007 Marshall was co-author of the series entitled "Last Chance: The Fight to Save a Disappearing Coast," about Louisiana's coastal erosion problems, which won the 2007 John H. Oakes Prize for Distinguished Environmental Reporting from Columbia University.

Dr. Len Bahr is the former director of the Governor's Applied Coastal Science Program who currently publishes the La Coast Post website.

Drake Toulouse is a BP and Gulf Coast Claims Facility critic who writes at Disenfranchised Citizen.


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