Messy cleanup of BP oil spill damages the Gulf

The 5,600 vessels taking part in the oil spill operation on the Gulf of Mexico make up the largest fleet assembled since the Allied invasion of Normandy, according to the Coast Guard.

Hordes of helicopters, bulldozers, Army trucks, ATVs, barges, dredges, airboats, workboats, cleanup crews, media, scientists and volunteers have descended on the beaches, blue waters and golden marshes of the Gulf Coast.

That's a lot of propellers, anchors, tires, and feet for a fragile ecosystem to take, and a tough truth is emerging: In many places, the oil cleanup itself is causing environmental damage.

Part of that is inevitable — the oil has to get cleaned up somehow, and BP and the government will be subject to second-guessing no matter what.

"Absolutely nothing you do to respond to an oil spill is without impacts of its own," said Lisa Jackson, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded April 20, killing 11, and oil began gushing into the Gulf, federal, state and BP officials say they have been guided in their response by picking the less damaging cleanup method.

Still, environmentalists and veterans of other spills say the torrent of untested cleanup methods rushed into practice by panicked officials and unqualified experts is wreaking havoc and, at least in spots, may be unnecessary.

"The more you disperse (with chemicals), the more you bring in these big machines, the more you bring in inexperienced people and the more sand berms you build, the less chance you have of letting Mother Nature and skimmers and booms do the job," said Mike Brewer of Buras, La., who ran an oil spill response company and is working on the BP cleanup.

For starters, the EPA allowed BP PLC to spray a chemical dispersant, a product called Corexit, to break up oil right as it came out of BP's broken well nearly a mile below the surface. The idea is to save shorelines from being clobbered with vast waves of crude.

In practice, the use of dispersants that had never been tested that far beneath the surface has made the oil much more difficult to track than it would have been in a single, massive slick. And environmentalists and marine biologists still aren't convinced the chemicals are safe for sea life.

The EPA halted underwater spraying while it tested samples collected by BP, then allowed it to resume once the results came back to the agency's satisfaction. Further tests are ongoing, and crews quit spraying dispersant once the well was contained this week, Jackson said.

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Urban farming is catching on in New Orleans

As enthusiasm for urban farming continues to spread beyond its established stronghold in the West, hundreds of New Orleans residents are now growing their own produce, keeping backyard chickens, and even experimenting with other livestock in a city whose laissez-faire regulatory environment and long hours of sunshine make ideal conditions for a new breed of urban pioneer.

"There's a huge amount of enthusiasm for urban farming right now," said Alicia Vance, project manager at the New Orleans Food and Farm Network, a nonprofit group established in 2002 to improve access to fresh food throughout the city.

Vance's organization leads community gardening classes, works with would-be urban farmers to establish raised beds and proper backyard growing conditions, and demonstrates animal husbandry techniques.

"It would be great if everyone on this block had some kind of animal and grew vegetables. We could be almost self-sufficient," said Frank Carter, an engineering technician who trained with the farm network and keeps 12 chickens with his wife, Laura Reiff, in a 60-by-50-foot foot pen in their backyard in Algiers. Their chicken breeds include Rhode Island Reds, Brown Leghorns, and even a Buff Orpington -- ordered via the U.S. Postal Service from a breeder in Texas.

"The post office called us at 8 o'clock in the evening and said, 'We have your live chickens,' " Carter said. " 'They're peeping.' "

As well as the chickens, Carter and Reiff grow peaches, grapefruit, peppers, watermelons, blueberries, tomatoes, persimmons, figs and bananas. They also have a bee hive that produced 50 pounds of honey this year.

The chickens are "very entertaining to watch," Reiff said, although there is still some resistance among the couple's friends to taking the eggs. Some say they'll eat only white eggs, not the blue eggs from the Brown Leghorns. Others are concerned about cracking an egg open to find a chicken embryo, which is impossible unless a broody hen has sat on a fertilized egg for at least a month.

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From a Gulf Oyster, a Domino Effect

In Gulf of Mexico waters deemed safe, at least for now, the two metal claws of a weather-beaten flatboat rake the muck below for those prehistoric chunks of desire, oysters. Then the captain and his two deckhands, their shirts flecked with the pewter mud of the sea, dump the dripping haul onto metal tables and begin the culling.

They hammer apart the clumps of attached oysters and toss back the empty shells and stray bits of Hurricane Katrina debris. They work quickly but carefully; a jagged oyster will slice your hand for not respecting its beautiful ugliness.

The men sweep their catch onto the boat’s floor, not far from a pile of burlap sacks. Their day will be measured by the number of full sacks their boat, the Miss Allison, carries to shore. Each 100-pound sack means $14 for the captain and $3 apiece for the deckhands.

The rocklike oyster and the burlap sack. As basic as it gets in the gulf, yet both are integral to a complex system of recycling and ingenuity, a system now threatened, along with most everything else, by the continuing oil-spill catastrophe in the gulf.

The disaster’s economic fallout has had a sneaky domino effect, touching the lives of everyone from the French Quarter shuckers who turn oyster-opening into theater to the Minnesota businessman who grinds the shells for chicken-feed supplement. Some victims were unaware that they were even tiles in the game, so removed were they from the damaged waters.

Take the burlap sacks on this oyster boat, for example, bearing the markings of Brazilian, Costa Rican and Mexican coffee companies. They come from a simple business, Steve’s Burlap Sacks, run out of a hot warehouse in Waveland, Miss., 120 miles away. And if you were to go there today, you would find the warehouse quiet, and the work-hardened owner trying very hard to keep it together.

“I don’t think the Lord’s looking this way no more,” he says.

Before a distant and fatal oil-rig explosion nearly three months ago, here is how the symbiotic sack-and-oyster system worked:

Coffee companies in Florida, Louisiana and Texas would unload the raw beans shipped from around the world, then sell their sacks in bulk to just about the only person who wanted them, a callused former oysterman from Louisiana named Steve Airhart.

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Louisiana and Scientists Spar Over How to Stop Oil

With oil hitting Barataria Bay, a vast estuary in southeast Louisiana that boasts one of the most productive fisheries in the country, local parish officials hatched a plan in May to save the fragile ecosystem: they would build rock dikes across several major tidal inlets between the bay and the Gulf of Mexico to block and then capture the oil.

Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana supported the plan, and BP agreed to pay for the project, estimated to cost $30 million. By early June, about 100,000 tons of rock began being loaded onto barges on the Mississippi River for transport to the coast.

But over the weekend, the Army Corps of Engineers denied a permit for the project, citing environmental concerns, in particular the potential for the rock barriers to cause widespread erosion and the breaching of Barataria Bay’s existing barrier islands. The ruling echoed the sentiments of independent experts on coastal wetlands who had strongly objected to the plan.

Now the rock sits on 75 barges on the Mississippi River with no immediate use.

As the gulf oil spill enters its third month, Louisiana officials have grown increasingly enamored of large-scale engineering projects, like sand berms and rock walls, to keep the oil off their coast. But these projects, which demand the swift restructuring of eastern Louisiana’s dynamic and fragile coast, have brought the desires of state and local officials into sharp conflict not only with a complicated federal bureaucracy charged with protecting wetlands and estuaries, but also with an experienced and highly vocal community of local coastal scientists.

“They’re just sitting back criticizing,” said Deano Bonano, the emergency-preparedness director for Jefferson Parish, which borders Barataria Bay. “Where are they when it comes to protecting this bay?”

In a speech on Tuesday in New Orleans, Mr. Jindal said: “No one can convince us that rocks in the water are more dangerous than oil. That is absolutely ridiculous. The only people who believe that are the bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., who can’t see the oil, smell the oil or touch the oil."

The scientists insist the rock plan was misguided.

“There was very strong scientific backing for not doing this,” said Denise Reed, a wetlands specialist and director of the Pontchartrain Institute for Environmental Sciences in New Orleans. “This could really devastate our barrier shoreline, our first line of defense.”

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BP clean-up leaves U.S. vulnerable to another spill

The Obama administration may succeed in pushing through its offshore drilling ban, despite fierce resistance from the oil industry, since a piece of machinery in short supply has left oil companies and the environment glaringly vulnerable to another oil spill.

The offshore skimming devices -- seagoing vessels that suck up spilled crude -- are the first line of defense in the contingency plans that big oil companies are required to submit when they drill in the deep waters of the U.S. Gulf of Mexico.

But the vast majority of skimming capacity listed in "worst case scenario" plans to combat major Gulf spills is already deployed to clean up BP's leak, according to copies of the plans made public by Congress and lists of vessels active in the cleanup that were obtained by Reuters.

With few skimmers in reserve, any new spill could be harder to fight, including one caused by a hurricane during the Atlantic storm season that forecasters say could be one of the most intense on record.

That may give U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar the justification he needs to quickly issue a new deepwater drilling ban after a district court struck a first one down.

"We are working hard to issue a new moratorium in the coming days," Interior Department spokeswoman Kendra Barkoff said, without offering further details.

BP, Exxon Mobil Corp. and Shell Oil Co, among the biggest operators in the Gulf, would rely largely on the same armada of skimmers, according to contingency plans that were released by lawmakers investigating the BP blow-out.

Many of those vessels are among the 58 largest skimmers already cleaning up the biggest Gulf spill ever, one that has forced the closure of more than 80,000 square miles of fishing area and put the future of U.S. offshore drilling in doubt.

For instance, 84 percent of the skimming capacity Shell lists in its Eastern Gulf "worst case scenario" spill contingency plan is engaged in the BP effort, according to an equipment manifest given to Reuters. Two big spill response firms told Reuters that over 90 percent of their resources are already at work on BP's spill.

The bulk of skimmers listed in oil companies' contingency plans are controlled by a single spill response firm, Virginia-based Marine Spill Response Corp. (MSRC), formed and funded collectively by big oil companies after Alaska's Valdez spill in 1989 and run by a former BP executive.

With BP's blow-out still gushing up to 60,000 barrels per day, the Gulf clean-up effort may drag on for months or years, even if BP can plug its blown-out well in August as planned.

Following the Valdez spill, offshore skimming vessels remained in action for more than a year.

"If you don't have the equipment to respond to a spill, you can't be allowed to drill," said Dan Lawn, a former oil safety inspector for Alaska's Department of Environmental Conservation.

"The contingency plans should be revoked because they are worthless right now."

The U.S. Coast Guard, charged with overseeing offshore spill response, did not respond to requests for comment.

U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman of New Orleans last month struck down the Obama administration's first moratorium issued in May -- which halted drilling in waters deeper than 500 feet for six months. Feldman ruled it "arbitrary and capricious."

While any ban is controversial since U.S. Gulf oil projects account for a third of the country's oil production and thousands of jobs, Salazar pledged to press ahead regardless.

Grilled on Wednesday by a Congressman who said a ban would bring irreparable harm to Louisiana's offshore industry, Salazar said: "The greater irreparable harm would be if there was another blowout, when there is not the oil response capability to even deal with the current Horizon event."

FEW SKIMMERS IN RESERVE

More than 7,000 U.S. Gulf-based spill response vessels -- including skimming units -- and around 50,000 people are involved in the Horizon cleanup, the largest and most complex spill response ever. The vessels have recovered more than 28 million gallons of oil-water mixture so far.

The deployment of skimmers at BP's spill has expanded more than fivefold since early June, and 550 skimmers were at work as of Friday, according to a release from spill responders. They expected 750 skimmers in action by August.

In preparation for offshore disasters, scores of skimming vessels are usually kept at staging areas in the Gulf Coast, but few are idle now.

BP's Gulf contingency plans call for racing skimmers to a Gulf spill in as little as 6.5 hours.

A contingency plan for Shell, the No. 2 Gulf producer, shows it could race 24 skimmers with capacity to suck up 162,752 of oil per day to a potential blow-out. At least 16 of the skimmers, and all of the largest ones, are engaged. Those that may still be available could collect less than 25,818 barrels, the vessel lists showed.

Shell declined comment on its Gulf contingency plans.

A person close to the company said Shell's contingency plan for the Gulf envisages an unlikely scenario with multiple spills. There is a "considerable amount" of safety equipment available still available, the person said, and Shell would still rely on a Gulf-based fleet of skimmers.

In addition, Shell could quickly import more boom, dispersant and other safety gear from Europe, the person said.

To be sure, skimmers are no silver bullet. They often collect less than 20 percent of oil that reaches the sea surface, experts say. But used with barges, tugs, absorbent booms and dispersants, skimmers play a major part in keeping oil from fouling beaches, especially if they are deployed fast.

Some support is already arriving from abroad.

One Taiwanese vessel that arrived this week, the so-called A Whale, is a converted supertanker with capacity to process up to 500,000 barrels per day of oil and water mix. It may gain Coast Guard approval to operate this weekend.

But the bulk of the world's offshore skimmers are on standby for spill responses elsewhere. Only 15 foreign response vessels were at work on the Gulf spill last week.

And even the A Whale is unlikely to free up other U.S. skimmers from their ongoing work, since an aggressive spill response requires up to hundreds of agile skimmers to cover the rapidly-expanding area of oil slicks, experts say.

BP's spill is no longer a single slick but a "massive collection of smaller patches of oil," response commanders wrote on Friday.

STORM RISK

Hurricanes bring more risk for oil companies in the Gulf, often requiring the deployment of skimmers after they pass.

In 2005, Katrina ravaged the region, laying waste to several drilling platforms and causing spills of at least 6.5 million gallons, more than half of the Valdez spill volume.

After the Valdez disaster, MSRC deployed seven of its largest, 'responder-class' skimmers during the 2005 storm season.

Today, 12 of the firm's 15 responder-class vessels are dedicated to BP's spill, MSRC spokeswoman Judith Roos said. The firm also operates dozens of smaller skimmers.

"Should another event occur, the Coast Guard has the authority to determine where to direct our resources," Roos said.

Shell, BP and Exxon Mobil's contingency plans all call for relying heavily on MSRC skimmers.

Employees at National Response Corp. and Ampol, the two other response firms listed in all three companies' Gulf response plans, told Reuters they have deployed more than 90 percent of the equipment they had available in the Gulf.

from Reuters