Full armed force on NoDPL

SUBHEAD: Militarized "police" attack on DAPL resistance camp with wide variety of weapons.

By Juan Gonzales on 28 October 2016 for Democracy Now! -
(http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/38178-a-shameful-moment-for-this-country-report-back-on-militarized-police-raid-of-dapl-resistance-camp)


Image above: Helmeted armed police with batons backed up by military outfitted army and armored vehicles face Native Americans and others defending the land from pipeline construction. Still from video below by Unicorn Riot.

We go to Standing Rock, North Dakota, for an update on how hundreds of police with military equipment raided a resistance camp Thursday that was established by Native American water protectors in the path of the proposed $3.8 billion Dakota Access pipeline.

More than 100 officers in riot gear with automatic rifles lined up across a highway, flanked by multiple MRAPs, an LRAD sound cannon, Humvees driven by National Guardsmen, an armored police truck and a bulldozer.

Water protectors say police deployed tear gas, mace, pepper spray and flash-bang grenades and bean bag rounds against the Native Americans and shot rubber bullets at their horses.

"We learned a lot about the relationship of North Dakota to Native people," says Tara Houska, national campaigns director for Honor the Earth. "I was standing next to a group of teenagers that were maced in the face. … I was shot in the face by a bean bag round."


Image above: Masked armed "police" in military attire with shotguns and mace face women protestors of Dakota Access Pipeline construction. Still from video below by Unicorn Riot.

TRANSCRIPT FROM DEMOCRACY NOW!

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We turn now to North Dakota, where on Thursday hundreds of police with military equipment raided a resistance camp established by Native American water protectors in the path of the proposed $3.8 billion Dakota Access pipeline, which has faced months of resistance from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and members of hundreds of other tribes from across the Americas.

On Thursday afternoon, over a hundred officers in riot gear with automatic rifles lined up across North Dakota's Highway 1806, flanked by multiple MRAPs -- that's mine-resistant ambush protected military vehicles -- sound cannon, Humvees driven by National Guardsmen, an armored police truck and a bulldozer.

Water protectors say that police deployed tear gas, mace, pepper spray and flash-bang grenades and bean bag rounds against the Native Americans and shot rubber bullets at their horses. This is a video shot by Unicorn Riot, followed by a Facebook Live video from Sacheen Seitcham of the West Coast Women Warriors Media Cooperative.

SACHEEN SEITCHAM: They've been pepper-spraying. They've maced. They've tasered. They've thrown percussion bombs and smoke grenades at us. All for water. Over 300 pigs. We are protecting the water. They're protecting oil. That's what's happening.

AMY GOODMAN: Water protectors set up a blockade of the highway using cars, tires, fire in order to try to protect their camp, parts of which were demolished by police. Four people locked themselves to a truck parked in the middle of the highway in order to stop the police advance. Elders also led prayer ceremonies in front of the police line. Some were arrested in the middle of prayer. In total, more than 100 people were arrested.

Ahead of the police raid, the Federal Aviation Administration also issued a temporary no-fly zone for the airspace above the resistance camps for all aircraft except for those used by law enforcement. Police appeared to be evicting the frontline camp in order to clear the way for the Dakota Access pipeline company to continue construction.

Company cranes and bulldozers were active Thursday just behind the police line on the site of the sacred burial ground where Dakota Access security guards unleashed dogs on Native Americans on September 3rd. We're going to turn to Dallas Goldtooth of the Indigenous Environmental Network, this clip from the front line.

DALLAS GOLDTOOTH: This is at the front line of the Dakota Access pipeline fight right here. And we are about one -- about two miles from the river to the west here -- or east, sorry. And to the west, right over this hill, Dakota Access is doing construction, trying to get to this road right here. So there is a police line on top of the hill here with Dakota Access workers and police protecting the workers.

AMY GOODMAN: That's Dallas Goldtooth. And before that, you hear the LRAD, the long-range acoustic device.
For more, we're joined by Tara Houska, national campaigns director for Honor the Earth.
Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Tara. Explain what took place yesterday. I mean, the video and the photos that we have of the military hardware arrayed against the protesters.

TARA HOUSKA: Yesterday we saw that -- you know, we saw -- we learned a lot about the relationship of people to fossil fuels. We learned a lot about the relationship of North Dakota to Native people. And we learned a lot about America and where we stand.

Yesterday, we saw folks being maced. I was standing right next to a group of teenagers that were all maced in the face, maced right -- like all kinds of people.

Myself, I actually was almost shot in the face by bean bag round. It ricocheted off a truck right next to my head. These police were actively trying to hurt people, pushing them back to allow construction of the Dakota Access pipeline. They were defending monetary interests as human beings were being physically hurt. You know, I saw -- I saw, right in front of me, a group of police officers pull a protester forward and begin beating him over the head with sticks.

There's video of it that you can see. I mean, this was an all-out war that was waged on indigenous protectors that were doing nothing more than peacefully assembling. There was no fires, there was nothing like that, until the police began their violent attack on us.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Tara, where was this incident in -- for instance, in relationship to the September 3rd dog attacks at the tribal burial site?

TARA HOUSKA: When Dakota Access jumped ahead over 20 miles to destroy the site that had just been identified by the tribe the day before as a sacred place, that happened on September 3rd. That's also the anniversary of the Whitestone Hill massacre.

That was the exact place the day that Dakota Access was basically constructing its pipeline, right in the background, as literally hundreds and hundreds of people came to stand and pray and bring all of their energy forward to stop this from happening.

And it was right at that site where Native American men, women and children had been attacked by private security, by dogs and mace and all the same things that we saw yesterday -- this incredible escalated violence against people that were doing nothing more than trying to stop the destruction of sacred sites right in front of their eyes.

AMY GOODMAN: Tara, you saw rifles aimed directly at people, police aiming those rifles?

TARA HOUSKA: Yes, there were police walking around everywhere with assault rifles. Directly across from us, there was actually a policeman holding his rifle trained on us, directly on us. Bean bag rifle assault -- bean bag non-lethal weapons were also aimed at us. Every time we put our hands up, they'd put them down.

As soon as our hands came down, they would aim back at us. Police officers were smiling at us as they were doing these things.

There were police officers filming this, laughing, as they -- as human beings were being attacked, being maced. I mean, it was a nightmarish scene.

And it should be a shame to the federal government, it should be a shame to the American people, that this is happening within U.S. borders to indigenous people and to our allies, to all people that are trying to protect water. Yesterday was a really shameful moment for this country and where we stand.

AMY GOODMAN: And the number of people you estimate were arrested, Tara?

TARA HOUSKA: I saw dozens of people being arrested. I mean, they were just pulling people out and arresting them. You know, I saw -- I actually had to get pulled back from a group that -- I mean, the police were pushing forward and just grabbing people at will.

We had a number of lockdowns, like that were right in front of us in this truck in the middle of the road, that was used to attempt to blockade these police from advancing forward. There were five people, actually, that were locked to that.

They attempted to construct a tipi in the middle, right behind people that were praying and singing. And they -- there were folks that locked down to that tipi, or attempted to. The police ripped that tipi down and ripped those people out. It was -- it was a really horrible scene yesterday.


Video above: Unicorn Riot film of standoff between military "police" and NoDAPL protestors. From (https://vimeo.com/189264404).


Video above: More of Unicorn Riot film of standoff between military "police" and NoDAPL protestors. From (https://vimeo.com/189249968).

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: NoDAPL reclaim new frontline 10/24/16
Ea O Ka Aina: How far will North Dakota go? 10/23/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Amy Goodman "riot" charge dropped 10/17/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Amy Goodwin to face "Riot Charge" 10/16/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Shutdown of all tar sand pipelines 10/11/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Why Standing Rock is test for Oabama 10/8/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Why we are Singing for Water 10/8/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Labor's Dakota Access Pipeline Crisis 10/3/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Standing Firm for Standing Rock 10/3/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Contact bankers behind DAPL 9/29/16
Ea O Ka Aina: NoDAPL demo at Enbridge Inc 9/29/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Militarized Police raid NoDAPL 9/28/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Stop funding of Dakota Access Pipeline 9/27/16
Ea O Ka Aina: UN experts to US, "Stop DAPL Now!" 9/27/16
Ea O Ka Aina: No DAPL solidarity grows 9/21/16
Ea O Ka Aina: This is how we should be living 9/16/16
Ea O Ka Aina: 'Natural Capital' replacing 'Nature' 9/14/16
Ea O Ka Aina: The Big Difference at Standing Rock 9/13/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Jill Stein joins Standing Rock Sioux 9/10/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Pipeline temporarily halted 9/6/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Native Americans attacked with dogs 9/5/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Mni Wiconi! Water is Life! 9/3/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Sioux can stop the Pipeline 8/28/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Officials cut water to Sioux 8/23/16 
.

Mni Wiconi! Water is Life!

SUBHEAD: No oil pipeline! To indigenous Lakota protecting the water is equal to saving the world.

By By Kelly Hayes & Deseree Kane on 3 September 2016 for TruthOut -
(http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/37475-whatever-it-takes-another-day-on-the-front-lines-of-nodapl)


Image above: Dale American Horse shackled himself to construction equipment at the North Dakota Access Pipeline construction site on Native American Lakota Territory. Photo by Deseree Kane from original article.

On Wednesday, the struggle waged by Indigenous Water Protectors against the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline raged on when a surprise act of civil disobedience halted construction for 6.5 hours.

Dale American Horse, known to community members as Happi, played a pivotal role in the action by using a blockade apparatus to attach himself to a piece of equipment, forcing a shutdown of all construction equipment in the area. For hours, officials attempted to remove Happi in a variety of dangerous ways that included the use of a reciprocating saw -- which is not a precision tool -- and an ill-conceived effort to lift Happi with a hydraulic crane.

As thousands of Natives from around the country continue to gather and rally at Standing Rock, it has become clear that a historic stand worthy of song and story is being made in North Dakota.

The first proposed path of the Dakota Access pipeline was scrapped, in response to complaints that it would endanger the drinking water of North Dakota's capital. The route was subsequently revised, such that the pipeline would cross the Missouri River -- a half-mile north of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation.

This exercise in erasure and Native disposability has been squarely rejected both by the Standing Rock Sioux and by Natives who have flocked from around the country to join their cause.

For those who are paying attention, the question of whether or not Indigenous peoples can repel the Dakota Access pipeline has begun to embody one of the larger questions of our time: Will non-Native people finally hear Indigenous voices, and help shift the course of history?

It's no secret that all life on Earth stands imperiled, during a period that many scientists have described as the world's sixth mass extinction event.

We have been told, again and again, that our entire way of living and our entire culture of energy dependence must be transformed if we are to have any hope. And yet, greed has kept us on a global collision course with catastrophe.

At Standing Rock, the camps that have formed to stop the pipeline carry many lessons. They carry the wisdom of elders. They carry the stories of struggles past. They hold the vibrancy of their youth who have stepped into struggle for the first time. And Wednesday, they carried the power of a fierce resistance.

Happi's mother, Cheryl Angel, who supported her son's choice to get arrested in the action, explained in an interview, "Sometimes you have to put yourself out there if you want people to understand what you're doing. It seems like the state of North Dakota doesn't understand that the people who have lived here for a millennia have a relationship with water."

Across the Earth, Indigenous peoples are leading struggles to hold back humanity's assault on the natural world. In North Dakota, protesters -- some of whom prefer to be called "Water Protectors" -- are using prayer, community building, art and action to make the world at large aware of their struggle to preserve what they cherish.

"Water is sacred to us. We use it every day not just to live, but for ceremonies, for spiritual cleansing, for healing and for blessing," said Angel.


Image above: Dale North Dakota State police move in, telling Water Protectors that they are obstructing a governmental function. Officers yell, "Move or you're going to jail" as community members lock arms. Moments later there were multiple arrests. Photo by Deseree Kane from original article.

A total of eight Water Protectors were arrested over the course of Wednesday's action. While awaiting her son's release, Angel spoke of his sacrifice as being grounded in a cultural understanding of water, and our human relationship with the Earth.

"In our Lakota language we use the word Mni Wiconi, which means 'water is life.' Protecting the water is equal to saving the world. I honor that, Happi honors that. Everyone standing with Standing Rock understands that no one can live without water."
.

What would Sitting Bull do?

SUBHEAD: “Let us put our minds together to see what kind of future we can make for our children.”

By Winina LADuke on 29 August 2016 for Yes Magazine -
(http://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/an-oil-pipeline-and-a-river-what-would-sitting-bull-do-20160829)


Image above: Standing Rock Sioux and others demonstrating against the Dakota access Pipeline. Still frame from video below.

It’s 2016, and the weight of American corporate interests has come to the Missouri River, the Mother River. This time, instead of the Seventh Cavalry, or the Indian police dispatched to assassinate Sitting Bull, it is Enbridge and Dakota Access Pipeline.

In mid-August, Standing Rock Tribal Chairman Dave Archambault II was arrested by state police, along with 27 others, for opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline. In the meantime, North Dakota Gov. Jack Dalrymple called for more police support.

Every major pipeline project in North America must cross indigenous lands, Indian Country. That is a problem.

The road west of Fargo is rarely taken. In fact, most Americans just fly over North Dakota, never seeing it.

Let me take you there.

My head clears as I drive. My destination is the homeland of the Hunkpapa Oceti, Standing Rock Reservation. It is early evening, the moon full. If you close your eyes, you can remember the 50 million buffalo—the single largest migratory herd in the world. The pounding of their hooves would vibrate the Earth, make the grass grow.

There were once 250 species of grass. Today the buffalo are gone, replaced by 28 million cattle, which require grain, water, and hay. Many of the fields are now in a single GMO crop, full of so many pesticides that the monarch butterflies are dying off. But in my memory, the old world remains.

If you drive long enough, you come to the Missouri River.

Called Mnisose, a great swirling river, by the Lakota, she is a force to be reckoned with. She is breathtaking. “The Missouri River has a fixed place in the history and mythology” of the Lakota and other Indigenous nations of the Northern Plains, author Dakota Goodhouse would explain.

In the time before Sitting Bull, the Missouri River was the epicenter of northern agriculture, the river bed so fertile. The territory was known as the fertile crescent of North America.

That was then, before the treaties that reduced the Lakota land base. But the Missouri remained in the treaty—the last treaty of 1868 used the Missouri as a boundary.

Then came the theft of land by the U.S. government, and the taking of the Black Hills in 1877, in part as retaliation against Sitting Bull’s victory at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. In a time prior to Black Lives Matter or Native Lives Matter, great leaders like Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse were assassinated at the hands of police.

One truth: the Lakota people have survived much.

Forced into the reservation life, the Lakota attempted to stabilize their society, until the dams came. The 1944 Pick Sloan project flooded out the Missouri River tribes, taking the best bottom lands from the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara, the Lakota and Dakota.

Over 200,000 acres on the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River reservations in South Dakota were flooded by the Oahe Dam itself, forcing not only relocation, but a loss of the Lakota world. The Garrison, Oahe, and Fort Randall dams created a reservoir that eliminated 90 percent of timber and 75 percent of wildlife on the reservations.
That is how a people are made poor.

Today, well over two thirds of the population of Standing Rock is below the poverty level—and the land and Mother River are what remains, a constant, for the people. That is what is threatened today.
Enbridge and partners are preparing to drill through the riverbed. The pipeline has been permitted in sections from the west and from the east. The northern portion was moved away from the water supply of Bismarck, into the watershed of Standing Rock. That was unfortunate for the Lakota.

Despite Lakota legal and regulatory objections, the Dakota Access Pipeline construction began in May 2016. If finished it will snake through North and South Dakota, Iowa, and Illinois, where it will link to a 774-mile pipeline to Nederland, Texas.

More than 570,000 barrels of Bakken crude oil will pass through the pipeline daily, along with 245,100 metric tons of carbon daily—enough carbon to combust the planet to oblivion.

The pipeline would span 200 water crossings, and in North Dakota alone would pass through 33 historical and archeological sites. Enbridge just bought the Dakota Access pipeline, noting that the proposed Sandpiper route—Minnesota’s 640,000 barrel per day Bakken line—is now three years behind schedule.

In late July, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe represented by Earthjustice, filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Standing Rock claims the project violates federal and treaty law. Standing Rock also filed an intervention at the United Nations, in coordination with the International Indian Treaty Council.

As Chairman Archambault explained in a New York Times story:

“The Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of the Interior and the National Advisory Council on Historic Preservation supported more protection of the tribe’s cultural heritage, but the Corps of Engineers and Energy Transfer Partners turned a blind eye to our rights. The first draft of the company’s assessment of the planned route through our treaty and ancestral lands did not even mention our tribe.

The Dakota Access pipeline was fast-tracked from Day 1 using the Nationwide Permit No. 12 process, which grants exemption from environmental reviews required by the Clean Water Act and the National Environmental Policy Act by treating the pipeline as a series of small construction sites.

Without closer scrutiny, the proposal breezed through the four state processes.”

In Iowa where work on the pipeline is underway, three fires erupted causing heavy damage to equipment and an estimated $1 million in damages. Investigators suspect arson, according to Jasper County Sheriff John Halferty.

In October 2015, three Iowa farmers sued Dakota Access LLC and the Iowa Utilities Board in an attempt to prevent the use of eminent domain on their properties to construct the pipeline.

The health of the Missouri River has been taken for granted.

Dammed in the Pick Sloan Dam projects, each project increases contamination and reduces her health. Today, the Missouri is the seventh most polluted river in the country. Agricultural run-off and now fracking have contaminated the river. My sister fished a gar out of the river, a giant prehistoric fish, only to find it covered with tumors.

Here’s just one case: In a January 2015 spill, saltwater contamination from a massive pipeline spill reached the Missouri River. In the baffling way of state and federal agencies, North Dakota’s Health Director David Glatt did not expect harm to wildlife or drinking water supplies because the water was diluted. The saying is: “The solution to pollution is dilution.” That is convenient, but not true.

Blacktail Creek and the Little Muddy River were contaminated after nearly 3 million gallons of saltwater with elevated levels of chloride contamination. All was diluted. But then there was that gar fish with the tumors.

There are pipelines everywhere, and fewer than 150 Pipeline Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) pipeline inspectors in the whole country.

And now comes the risk from oil.

The pipeline companies generally discuss a 99 percent safety record, but studies have found that to be grossly inaccurate. A former Scientific American Editor, Trudy Bell, reports that PHMSA data from 2001 to 2011 suggest the average pipeline “has a 57% probability of experiencing a major leak, with consequences over the $l million range in a ten year period.”
Not good odds.

At Standing Rock, as the number of protesters grew from 200 to 2000, state law enforcement decided to put up a safety checkpoint and rerouted traffic on Highway 1806 from Bismarck to Standing Rock, hoping to dissuade people from coming and put the squeeze on Standing Rock’s Prairie Knights Casino, which is served by that road.

We just drove around; the scenic route is beautiful. And as supporters surge in numbers, the casino hotel and restaurants are full.

While North Dakota seeks to punish the Lakota, Chairman Archambault expresses concerns for everyone. From the New York Times:

“I am here to advise anyone that will listen that the Dakota Access Pipeline project is harmful. It will not be just harmful to my people but its intent and construction will harm the water in the Missouri River, which is one of the cleanest and safest river tributaries left in the Unit States. To poison the water is to poison the substance of life.

Everything that moves must have water. How can we talk about and knowingly poison water?”

In the meantime, North Dakota Gov. Dalrymple announced a state of emergency, making additional state resources available “to manage public safety risks associated with the ongoing protest of the Dakota Access Pipeline.” He may have exceeded his scope of authority and violated civil and human rights to water.

Chairman Archambault’s interpretation:

“Perhaps only in North Dakota, where oil tycoons wine and dine elected officials, and where the governor, Jack Dalrymple, serves as an adviser to the Trump campaign, would state and county governments act as the armed enforcement for corporate interests.”

There are a lot of people at Standing Rock today who remember their history and the long standoff at Wounded Knee in 1973. In fact, some of those in Standing Rock today were there in 1973 at Wounded Knee, a similar battle for dignity and the future of a nation.

I am not sure how badly North Dakota wants this pipeline. If there is to be a battle over the pipeline, it will be here. For a people with nothing else but a land and a river, I would not bet against them.
The great Lakota leader Mathew King once said,

“The only thing sadder than an Indian who is not free, is an Indian who does not remember what it is to be free.”

The Standing Rock protest camp represents that struggle for freedom, and the future of a people. All of us. If I ask the question “What would Sitting Bull do?” —the answer is pretty clear. He would remind me what he said 150 years ago:

 “Let us put our minds together to see what kind of future we can make for our children.”

The time for that is now.


Video above: Interview with Winona LaDuke on Democracy Now! on Enbridge Corporation pipeline through Standing Rock Sioux territory. From (https://youtu.be/kooD44norew).

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: This is how we should be living 9/16/16
Ea O Ka Aina: 'Natural Capital' replacing 'Nature' 9/14/16
Ea O Ka Aina: The Big Difference at Standing Rock 9/13/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Jill Stein joins Standing Rock Sioux 9/10/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Jill Stein supports Standing Rock Sioux 9/10/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Pipeline temporarily halted 9/6/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Native Americans attacked with dogs 9/5/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Mni Wiconi! Water is Life! 9/3/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Sioux can stop the Pipeline 8/28/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Officials cut water to Sioux 8/23/16
 
.

BP Gulf Spill Ignored

SUBHEAD: Five years after the BP oil disaster a barrier island for nesting birds is still devoid of life.

By Julie Dermansky 19 April 2015 for DeSmogBlog -
(http://www.desmogblog.com/2015/04/19/five-years-after-bp-oil-disaster-barrier-island-nesting-birds-devoid-life)


Image above: Cat Island, Mississippi, on May 22, 2010, nesting pelicans are seen as oil washes ashore from BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill. From (http://www.spokesman.com/picture-stories/gulf-oil-spill-one-year-later/#867).

Cat Island, off the Gulf Coast in Louisiana's Plaquemines Parish, was home to a vibrant bird rookery inhabited by brown pelicans, seagulls, spoonbills, and egrets before BP's Deepwater Horizon oil disaster. Five years after the largest oil spill in American history, the barrier island has just about disappeared.

Despite ongoing efforts by former Plaquemines Parish coastal zone manager PJ Hahn to restore the island, only the needed building permits and an engineering plan have been completed.
"Cat Island was ground zero of the oil spill," Hahn told DeSmogBlog.

He thought that the restoration of the island was a no-brainer since, while much of the oil spill's damage was underwater and invisible, the damage to Cat Island was easy to prove. According to Hahn, not only would the island's restoration be necessary for the birds, but it would provide a great public relations move for anyone who helped in the process.

At the time of the spill, Cat Island was approximately five and a half acres, covered by a dense forest of black mangrove trees which were occupied by nesting birds. All that remains now are two small strips of land — less than an acre combined. Mangrove stumps jut out from the broken, shell-covered sandy remains of the island, at times fully submerged during high tide.

"The island was a treasure and it deserves to be restored," Hahn told DeSmogBlog. He continues to advocate for the restoration project he spearheaded.

"It's a hard sell for many since the island doesn't serve as storm protection like other barrier islands that are in the process of being restored since the spill," Hahn said.

But Cat Island and other small barrier islands, some of which have completely eroded since the spill, were perfect bird habitats because they were free of predators. Hahn believes the $6 million restoration price tag is a good investment, one that will pay for itself in dollars generated by the tourism industry. "Bird watchers from all over will come to visit the island," he said.

So far, the parish has raised $3 million of the $6 million needed before the rebuilding process can begin.
Shell, the only oil company to contribute, donated $1 million. Other contributors include the American Bird Conservancy and the federal Coastal Impact Assistance Program. The parish hopes to get the rest of the needed funds from the state's "Restore Act Fund," made up of money from that part of the BP settlement that has already been paid.

Billy Nungesser, Plaquemines Parish president during the spill who is now running for lieutenant governor, had been famous for his fierce criticism of BP. But now it seems he's changed his tune.

During a town hall meeting hosted by Rush Radio in St. Tammany Parish, where residents turned out to express their concerns about the possibility of the first fracking project in their area, Nungesser gushed over the great relationship Plaquemines Parish has with the oil industry, no longer singling out BP as a bad player as he had in the past.

Though he believes residents should have a say regarding what type of industry is welcomed in their community, he said oil companies that operate in his parish "do the right thing."

Referencing the "horrible pictures of the pelicans covered in oil," Nungesser claimed that in the case of "a safety incident or something spilling from a platform, every company has gone beyond the call of duty in our parish to make it right. Oil companies are rebuilding those islands."

But Cat Island is a perfect example that Plaquemines Parish "has not been made whole," according to Hahn. "BP was asked to contribute to rebuilding Cat Island multiple times," Hahn said, "but they haven't given anything to help the project."


Image above: Cat Island on April 8, 2011 photo, dead mangrove is seen on an eroding point of Cat Island, heavily damaged by oil from the BP oil spill. The island remains unrestored. From ((http://www.spokesman.com/picture-stories/gulf-oil-spill-one-year-later/#867).).

Cat Island was not mentioned in a BP report on the condition of the Gulf issued in March which paints a picture of the Gulf Coast on the mend. According to the report, "Available data does not indicate the spill caused any significant long-term population-level impact to species in the Gulf," and "affected areas are recovering faster than predicted."

State and federal agencies involved in the Natural Resources Damage Assessment (NRDA) took issue with BP's report.

"It is inappropriate as well as premature for BP to reach conclusions about impacts from the spill before the completion of the assessment," an NRDA report states. NRDA will determine how much BP and its subcontractors owe for the environmental damages.

When asked what specifically BP has done to restore Cat Island, BP media spokesperson Jason Ryan sent out a statement about other coastal restoration projects the company has contributed to.  

BP agreed to pay for restoration projects in advance of NRDA's assessment, which it was not required to do. Several of the projects are underway, but rebuilding Cat Island is not one of them.

The statement from BP points out: "The state loses about a football field worth of wetlands every hour," and that "with regard to Cat Island specifically, it was rapidly eroding before the spill, primarily due to the impacts of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita."

Though BP wouldn't give a "Yes" or " No" as to whether it has contributed to rebuilding Cat Island, the company wrote: "We are studying shoreline erosion on marshes and barrier islands, including Cat Island, to determine if there was any acceleration due to the spill."

The BP spill "totally accelerated" the erosion of Cat Island," Linda Hooper Bui, an entomologist at Louisiana State University, told DeSmogBlog.

Bui has been working on studies of insect life in Barataria Bay that she began prior to the BP oil spill, making her a witness to the ongoing erosion process impacting the island. When plants are stressed they can't hold on to sediment, she explained. And that is what happened when the oil covered the plant life on Cat Island. "You lose the mangrove, you lose the sediment," Bui said.

"Heavily-oiled marshes erode at double the rate of a non-oiled marsh," Melanie Driscoll, Director of Bird Conservation for the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi flyway for the Audubon Society, told DeSmogBlog, citing a scientific peer-reviewed study done after the BP spill.

"Every year there is a delay restoring the island, there is less area for nesting," Driscoll said. " We need restoration to proceed as soon as possible."

On March 31, a trip arranged by Restore the Mississippi River Delta Coalition gave members of the media a chance to document what little remains of Cat Island. The National Wildlife Federation, a key player in the coalition, released a report about the health of the Gulf five years after the spill that paints a completely different picture than BP's.

The NWF report cites several scientific studies that document the negative impact the spill had on 20 different species, including the brown pelican, which were Cat Island's main inhabitants.

"The tragedy is brown pelicans were taken off the endangered species list the year before the spill," Hahn said. "If there is no habitat, there are no birds. Who knows if they will come back when we finally get the island rebuilt?"






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Exxon Arkansas Pipeline Spill

SUBHEAD: Exxon shuts Pegasus Pipeline after rupture sends tens of thousands of gallons of crude into suburban Arkansas.

By Kristen Hayes on 31 March 2013 for Huffington Post -
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/31/arkansas-oil-spill-2013-exxon_n_2986754.html)


Image above: A river of stinking crude oil works its way between two houses in suburban Arkansas from Exxon oil pipeline. From (http://www.treehugger.com/energy-disasters/oil-spill-arkansas-exxon-pipeline-breaks-spilling-84000-gallons-dangerously-close-lake-conway.html).

Exxon Mobil on Sunday continued cleanup of a pipeline spill that spewed thousands of barrels of heavy Canadian crude in Arkansas as opponents of oil sands development latched on to the incident to attack plans to build the Keystone XL line.

Exxon spokesman Alan Jeffers said on Sunday that crews had yet to excavate the area around the pipeline breach, a needed step before the company can estimate how long repairs will take and when the line might restart.

"I can't speculate on when it will happen," Jeffers said. "Excavation is necessary as part of an investigation to determine the cause of the incident."

Exxon's Pegasus pipeline, which can carry more than 90,000 barrels per day (bpd) of crude from Patoka, Illinois to Nederland, Texas, was shut after the leak was discovered late Friday afternoon in a subdivision near the town of Mayflower. The leak forced the evacuation of 22 homes.

Exxon also had no specific estimate of how much crude oil had spilled, but the company said 12,000 barrels of oil and water had been recovered - up from 4,500 barrels on Saturday. The company did not say how much of the total was oil and how much was water.

Allen Dodson, Faulkner County judge who is the top executive for the county where the spill occurred, told Reuters in an interview on Sunday that the smell of crude was less potent on Sunday as cleanup efforts continued, saying it was weaker than the smell of fresh asphalt laid on a road.

"The freestanding oil on the street has been removed. It's still damp with oil, it's tacky, like it is before we do an asphalt overlay," he said.

Exxon said it staged the response to handle 10,000 barrels of oil "to ensure adequate resources are in place."

Officials from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Transportation's Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) also were on site to investigate the spill.

Fifteen vacuum trucks remained on the scene for cleanup, and 33 storage tanks were deployed to temporarily store the oil.

The pipeline was carrying Canadian Wabasca Heavy crude at the time of the leak. An oil spill of more than 1,000 barrels into a Wisconsin field from an Enbridge Inc pipeline last summer kept that line shuttered for around 11 days.

The 848-mile (1,381 km) pipeline used to transport crude oil from Texas to Illinois. In 2006 Exxon reversed it to move crude from Illinois to Texas in response to growing Canadian oil production and the ability of U.S. Gulf Coast refineries to process heavy crude.

The Arkansas spill drew fast reaction from opponents of the 800,000 bpd Keystone XL pipeline, which also would carry heavy crude from Canada's tar sands to the Gulf Coast refining hub.

Environmentalists have expressed concerns about the impact of developing the oil sands and say the crude is more corrosive to pipelines than conventional oil. On Wednesday, a train carrying Canadian crude derailed in Minnesota, spilling 15,000 gallons of oil.

"Whether it's the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, or ... (the) mess in Arkansas, Americans are realizing that transporting large amounts of this corrosive and polluting fuel is a bad deal for American taxpayers and for our environment," said Representative Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat.

Supporters of Keystone XL and oil sands development say the vast Canadian reserves can help drive down fuel costs in the United States. A report from the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association, put together by oil and gas consultancy Penspen, argued diluted bitumen is no more corrosive than other heavy crude.

A year ago Exxon won a court appeal to charge market rates on the Pegasus line, or rates that are not capped and that can change along with market conditions without prior approval from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

That decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington D.C. said the Pegasus pipeline is now the "primary avenue" to move Canadian crude oil to the Gulf Coast. The ruling also said Exxon moves about 66,000 barrels per day on the line.

Last week PHMSA proposed that Exxon pay a $1.7 million fine over pipeline safety violations stemming from a July 2011 oil spill from its Silvertip pipeline in the Yellowstone River. The line, which carries 40,000 barrels per day in Montana, leaked about 1,500 barrels of crude after heavy flooding in the area.

Exxon has 30 days from the March 25 order to contest those violations.

According to PHMSA, the U.S. has 2.3 million miles of pipelines.

Exxon said that by 3 a.m. Saturday there was no additional oil spilling from the pipeline and that trucks had been brought in to assist with the cleanup. Images from local media showed crude oil snaking along a suburban street and spewed across lawns.

Twenty-two homes in the affected subdivision remained evacuated on Sunday, though Mayflower police were providing escorts for residents to temporarily return to retrieve personal items.

Jeffers said a couple of homes "appear to have small amounts of oil on their foundations," but he had no information on damage estimates or claims. Exxon had established a claims hotline for affected residents and said about 50 claims had been made so far.

Dodson said oil that made it to the street went into storm drains that eventually lead to a cove connected to nearby Lake Conway, known as a fishing lake stocked with bass, catfish, bream and crappie.

He said local responders that included firemen, city employees, county road crews, police quickly built dikes of dirt and rock to block culverts along that path that stopped crude from fouling the lake.

"We were just in the nick of time," he said.

Exxon later deployed 3,600 feet of boom near the lake as a precaution.

Dodson said crude also got into several homeowners' yards, which will take longer to clean up.

"We've just gotten used to having pipelines go through cities and counties, and you hope something like this doesn't happen. My heart goes out to all of the people personally impacted," Dodson said.


Video above: Video showing the oil spewing out of the ground right beside peoples' homes. From (http://youtu.be/ECKYz00aouo).

The spill was dangerously close to Lake Conway, but Arkansas' KARK reports that the spill has so far been prevented from reaching the lake:

More from Diane Sweet at Crooks and Liars:

"In 2009, Exxon modified the capacity of the Pegasus pipeline, increasing the capacity to transport Canadian tar sands oil by 50 percent, or about 30,000 barrels per day. In a 2012 report, Bloomberg News reported the pipeline daily capacity to be 96,000 barrels of oil per day."

According to the Arkansas Times the spill could have been much worse:

The break was in the same Exxon Mobil 20-inch pipeline that carries Canadian crude to Texas refineries across 13 miles of the Lake Mamelle watershed and crosses the Maumelle River at three places.

Had the spill occurred on either Lake Maumelle or the Maumelle River, this would have been a huge disaster for Arkansas.

Arkansas Senator Mark Pryor was one of one the seventeen Democrats that joined all the Republican Senators in voting for symbolic approval of the Keystone XL pipeline. Pryor has claimed the pipeline will help create jobs in Arkansas, where some of the pipe is manufactured, however as Bloomberg reported recently, the project will only create 20 full time jobs, not the thousands that Pryor, TransCanada and other supporters like to talk about.

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Chevron screws Amazon

SUBHEAD: Chevron blames victims of its deliberate contamination of Amazon rainforest in Ecuador. By Kerry Kennedy on 16 January 2012 for Bloomberg News - (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kerry-kennedy/chevron-equador-amazon_b_1209408.html) Image above: An oil flare reflects in a pool of toxic heavy metals and crude oil at Cheron's Guanta Well. Photograph by David Gilbert From (http://davidgilbertphotography.com/index.php/gallery/amazon-crude).

In Christmas 2010, I took my three daughters -- Cara, Mariah and Michaela -- to Ecuador's Amazon to take part in a "Toxi-tour" and stand witness to what could be the worst environmental disaster on the planet. This is the awful mess that Chevron left behind at the headwaters of the Amazon after drilling for oil for almost three decades on the ancestral lands of five indigenous groups.

Chevron, via the Texaco brand, dumped billions of gallons of toxic waste into the Amazon waterways that local inhabitants used for drinking water. Several independent health evaluations show that cancer rates in the area have skyrocketed. The magnitude of the damage -- recently confirmed by a three-judge appellate panel in Ecuador that relied on extensive scientific evidence -- makes the impact of BP's recent spill in the Gulf of Mexico seem small by comparison.

We looked at pools of oily muck abandoned in the early 1970s that still drain toxic soup into nearby streams used for drinking water, fishing, and washing. We visited the home of an elderly woman who told us about the skin lesions that covered the bodies of her son, daughter, and grandson. She had built the family home on a field Texaco claimed to have cleaned. In fact, the oil giant had merely covered up the poisonous pond with four feet of dirt and a thin layer of grass. We smelled the fumes emanating from water Chevron claims is now clean. All this is part of the massive environmental damage and accompanying cancer clusters, lung disease, skin lesions and other injuries left behind by a U.S. multinational corporation.

Chevron's irresponsible operational practices are now responsible for a catastrophe that has cost untold lives and destroyed an area of pristine rainforest the size of Rhode Island. Chevron lost the legal case in Ecuador, and a U.S. appellate court recently blocked efforts by the company to prevent enforcement of the judgment. The company is on its last legs after battling to deny the claims of indigenous groups for almost two decades since the was filed in 1993.

This helps explain why Chevron is now turning to personal attacks. In the company's latest salvo, it seeks to intimidate anybody who wants to help the rainforest communities or advocate on their behalf. This is the classic Chevron template: blame the victim, change the subject, and distract from the evidence. Chevron attacks those working to hold the company accountable for the damage it caused. It feigns moral outrage that I, an advocate for human rights, should actually be compensated.

While I was paid a modest fee for the time I spent on the case, I have never and will never have a financial interest in the outcome of the litigation. Chevron's notion that I was to receive a huge success fee if the rainforest communities recover the funds to which they are entitled is utter fiction. What is true is that Chevron's management is using this lie in a desperate attempt to try to change the subject from its awful environmental disaster and devastating legal setbacks.

Over the years, Chevron has behaved in a way that reinforces the worst stereotypes about large corporations: it has cynically avoided responsibility for its past and watched in indifference as more people become sick and die because of its failure to deal with its legacy environmental issues. Today's public distrust of large corporations obviously can go too far, but it is often rooted in real abuses of the type Chevron engages in to cover up its obvious misconduct in Ecuador.

Chevron's failure to adhere to basic standards of decency undermines the credibility of our capitalist model and diminishes confidence that our judicial system can serve the poor as well as the rich. Chevron's conduct in Ecuador has been so reprehensible and profoundly cynical that it reflects poorly on our country and its values. I would call that kind of behavior unpatriotic. Chevron must mend its ways in Ecuador or risk being viewed by peoples worldwide as a rogue oil company unworthy of a license to operate in oil-producing nations.

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The Search for BP's Oil

SUBHEAD: Found - Recently deceased coral, oiled crab larvae, bizarre sickness in the phytoplankton and bacteria. By Naomi Klein on 13 January 2011 in The Nation - (http://www.thenation.com/article/157723/search-bps-oil) Image above: Weather research vessel The Weatherbird II at dock. From (http://www.eyefetch.com/image.aspx?ID=986345).

Dolphins off the bow!"

I race to the front of the WeatherBird II, a research vessel owned by the University of South Florida. There they are, doing their sleek silvery thing, weaving between translucent waves, disappearing under the boat, reappearing in perfect formation on the other side.

After taking my fill of phone video (and very pleased not to have dropped the device into the Gulf of Mexico), I bump into Gregory Ellis, one of the junior scientists aboard.

"Did you see them?" I ask excitedly.

"You mean the charismatic megafauna?" he sneers. "I'll pass."

Ouch. Here I was thinking everyone loves dolphins, especially oceanographers. But it turns out that these particular marine scientists have issues with dolphins. And sea turtles. And pelicans. It's not that they don't like them (a few of the grad students took Flipper pictures of their own). It's just that the charismatic megafauna tend to upstage the decidedly less charismatic creatures under their microscopes. Like the bacteria and phytoplankton that live in the water column, for instance, or 500-year-old coral and the tube worms that burrow next to them, or impossibly small squid the size of a child's fingernail.

Normally these academics would be fine without our fascination. They weren't looking for glory when they decided to study organisms most people either can't see or wish they hadn't. But when the Deepwater Horizon exploded in April 2010, our collective bias toward cute big creatures started to matter a great deal. That's because the instant the spill-cam was switched off and it became clear that there would be no immediate mass die-offs among dolphins and pelicans, at least not on the scale of the Exxon Valdez spill deaths, most of us were pretty much on to the next telegenic disaster. (Chilean miners down a hole—and they've got video diaries? Tell us more!)

It didn't help that the government seemed determined to help move us along. Just three weeks after the wellhead was capped, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) came out with its notorious "oil budget," which prompted White House energy czar Carol Browner to erroneously claim that "the vast majority of the oil is gone." The White House corrected the error (the fate of much of that oil is simply unknown), but the budget nonetheless inspired a flood of stories about how "doom-mongers" had exaggerated the spill's danger and, as the British Daily Mail tabloid indignantly put it, unfairly wronged "one of Britain's greatest companies."

More recently, in mid-December, Unified Area Command, the joint government-BP body formed to oversee the spill response, came out with a fat report that seemed expressly designed to close the book on the disaster. Mike Utsler, BP's Unified Area Commander, summed up its findings like this: "The beaches are safe, the water is safe, and the seafood is safe." Never mind that just four days earlier, more than 8,000 pounds of tar balls were collected on Florida's beaches—and that was an average day. Or that gulf residents and cleanup workers continue to report serious health problems that many scientists believe are linked to dispersant and crude oil exposure.

By the end of the year, investors were celebrating BP's stock rebound, and the company was feeling so emboldened that it revealed plans to challenge the official estimates of how much oil gushed out of its broken wellhead, claiming that the figures are as much as 50 percent too high. If BP succeeds, it could save the company as much as $10.5 billion in damages. The Obama administration, meanwhile, has just given the go-ahead for sixteen deepwater projects to resume in the gulf, well before the Oil Spill Commission's safety recommendations have a hope of being implemented.

For the scientists aboard the WeatherBird II, the recasting of the Deepwater Horizon spill as a good-news story about a disaster averted has not been easy to watch. Over the past seven months, they, along with a small group of similarly focused oceanographers from other universities, have logged dozens of weeks at sea in cramped research vessels, carefully measuring and monitoring the spill's impact on the delicate and little-understood ecology of the deep ocean. And these veteran scientists have seen things that they describe as unprecedented.

Among their most striking findings are graveyards of recently deceased coral, oiled crab larvae, evidence of bizarre sickness in the phytoplankton and bacterial communities, and a mysterious brown liquid coating large swaths of the ocean floor, snuffing out life underneath. All are worrying signs that the toxins that invaded these waters are not finished wreaking havoc and could, in the months and years to come, lead to consequences as severe as commercial fishery collapses and even species extinction.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the most outspoken scientists doing this research come from Florida and Georgia, coastal states that have so far managed to avoid offshore drilling. Their universities are far less beholden to Big Oil than, say, Louisiana State University, which has received tens of millions from the oil giants. Again and again these scientists have used their independence to correct the official record about how much oil is actually out there, and what it is doing under the waves.

One of the most prominent scientists on the BP beat is David Hollander, a marine geochemist at the University of South Florida. Hollander's team was among the first to discover the underwater plumes in May and the first to trace the oil definitively to BP's well. In August, amid the claims that the oil had magically disappeared, Hollander and his colleagues came back from a cruise with samples proving that oil was still out there and still toxic to many marine organisms, just invisible to the human eye.

This research, combined with his willingness to bluntly contradict federal agencies, has made Hollander something of a media darling. When he is not at sea, there is a good chance he is in front of a TV camera. In early December, he agreed to combine the two, allowing me and filmmaker Jacqueline Soohen to tag along on a research expedition in the northern Gulf of Mexico, east of the wellhead.

"Let's go fishing for oil," Hollander says with a broad smile as we get on the boat. A surfer and competitive bike racer in his youth, he is still something of a scrappy daredevil at 52. On the last cruise Hollander slipped and seriously injured his shoulder, and he has been ordered to take it easy this time. But within seconds of being on deck he is hauling equipment and lashing down gear. This is a particularly important task today because a distinctly un-Floridian cold front has descended and winds are whipping up ten-foot swells in the gulf. Getting to our first research station is supposed to take twenty-four hours, but it takes thirty instead. The entire time, the 115-foot WeatherBird II dips and heaves, and so do a few members of the eleven-person scientific team (and yeah, OK, me too).

Luckily, just as we arrive at our destination, about ninety nautical miles from the wellhead, the clouds part and the sea calms. A frenzy of floating science instantly erupts. First to be lowered overboard is the rosette, a cluster of four-foot-high metal canisters that collect water samples from different depths. When the rosette clangs back on deck, the crew swarms around its nozzles, filling up dozens of sample bottles. It looks like they are milking a metal cow. Carefully labeled bottles in tow, they are off to the makeshift laboratory to run the water through an assembly line of tests. Is it showing signs of hydrocarbons? Does it fluoresce under UV light? Does it carry the chemical signature of petroleum? Is it toxic to bacteria and phytoplankton?

A few hours later it's time for the multi-corer. When the instrument, twelve feet high and hoisted by a powerful winch, hits the ocean floor, eight clear cylinders shoot down into the sediment, filling up with sand and mud. The samples are examined under microscopes and UV lights, or spun with centrifugal force, then tested for signs of oil and dispersant. This routine will be repeated at nine more locations before the cruise is done. Each stop takes an average of ten hours, and the scientists are able to sneak in only a couple of hours of sleep between stations.

The WeatherBird II is returning to the precise coordinates where University of South Florida researchers found toxic water and sediment in May and August. At the second stop, Mary Abercrombie, who is testing the water under UV light in a device called a spectrofluorometer, sees something that looks like hydrocarbons from a sample collected seventy meters down—shallow enough to be worrying. But the other tests don't find much of anything. Hollander speculates that this may be because we are still in relatively shallow water and the recent storms have mixed everything up. "We'll probably see more when we go deeper."

Being out in the open gulf today, I find it is impossible not to be awed by nature's capacity to cleanse and renew itself. At the height of the disaster, I had looked down at these waters from a Coast Guard aircraft. What I saw changed me. I realized that I had always counted on the ocean to be a kind of outer space on earth, too mysterious and vast to be fundamentally altered by human activity, no matter how reckless. Now it was covered to the horizon in gassy puddles like the floor of an auto repair shop. Shouting over the roaring engines, a fresh-faced Coast Guard spokesman assured the journalists on board that within months, all the oil would be gone, broken down by dispersants into bite-size morsels for oil-eating microbes, which would, after their petroleum feast, promptly and efficiently disappear—no negative side effects foreseen.

At the time I couldn't believe he could feed us this line with a straight face. Yet here that body of water is, six months later: velvety smooth and, according to the tests conducted on the WeatherBird II, pretty clean, at least so far. Maybe the ocean really is the world's most powerful washing machine: throw in enough dispersant (the petrochemical industry's version of Tide), churn it around in the waves for long enough, and it can get even the toughest oil spills out.

"I despise that message—it's blindly simplified," says Ian MacDonald, a celebrated oceanographer at Florida State University. "The gulf is not all better now. We don't know what we've done to it."

MacDonald is arguably the scientist most responsible for pressuring the government to dramatically increase its estimates of how much oil was coming out of BP's well. He points to the massive quantity of toxins that gushed into these waters in a span of three months (by current estimates, at least 4.1 million barrels of oil and 1.8 million gallons of dispersants). It takes time for the ocean to break down that amount of poison, and before that could happen, those toxins came into direct contact with all kinds of life-forms. Most of the larger animals—adult fish, dolphins, whales—appear to have survived the encounter relatively unharmed. But there is mounting evidence that many smaller creatures—bacteria, phytoplankton, zooplankton, multiple species of larvae, as well as larger bottom dwellers—were not so lucky. These organisms form the base of the ocean's food chain, providing sustenance for the larger animals, and some grow up to be the commercial fishing stocks of tomorrow. One thing is certain: if there is trouble at the base, it won't stay there for long.

According to experiments performed by scientists at the University of South Florida, there is good reason for alarm. When it was out in the gulf in August, the WeatherBird II collected water samples from multiple locations. Back at the university lab, John Paul, a professor of biological oceanography, introduced healthy bacteria and phytoplankton to those water samples and watched what happened. What he found shocked him. In water from almost half of the locations, the responses of the organisms "were genotoxic or mutagenic"—which means the oil and dispersants were not only toxic to these organisms but caused changes to their genetic makeup. Changes like these could manifest in a number of ways: tumors and cancers, inability to reproduce, a general weakness that would make these organisms more susceptible to prey—or something way weirder.

Before we left on the cruise, I interviewed Paul in his lab; he explained that what was so "scary" about these results is that such genetic damage is "heritable," meaning the mutations can be passed on. "It's something that can stand around for a very long time in the Gulf of Mexico," Paul said. "You may be genetically altering populations of fish, or zooplankton, or shrimp, or commercially important organisms.... Is the turtle population going to have more tumors on them? We really don't know. And it'll take three to five years to actually get a handle on that."

The big fear is a recurrence of what happened in Prince William Sound after the Exxon Valdez spill. Some pink salmon, likely exposed to oil in their larval stage, started showing serious abnormalities, including "rare mutations that caused salmon to grow an extra fin or an enlarged heart sac," according to a report in Nature. And then there were the herring. For three years after the spill, herring stocks were robust. But in the fourth year, populations plummeted by almost two-thirds in Prince William Sound and many were "afflicted by a mysterious sickness, characterised by red lesions and superficial bleeding," as Reuters reported at the time. The next year, there were so few fish, and they were so sick, that the herring fishery in Prince William Sound was closed; stocks have yet to recover fully. Since Alaskan herring live for an average of eight years, many scientists were convinced that the crash of the herring stocks was the result of herring eggs and larvae being exposed to oil and toxins years earlier, with the full effects manifesting themselves only when those generations of herring matured (or failed to mature).

Could a similar time bomb be ticking in the gulf? Ian MacDonald at Florida State is convinced that the disturbances beginning to register at the bottom of the food chain are "almost certain to ripple up through other species."

Here is what we know so far. When researchers from Oregon State University tested the waters off Grand Isle, Louisiana, in June, they found that the presence of carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) had increased fortyfold in just one month. Kim Anderson, the toxicologist leading the study, described the discovery as "the largest PAH change I've seen in over a decade of doing this." June is spawning season in the gulf—the period, beginning in April, when enormous quantities of eggs and larvae drift in nearly invisible clouds in the open waters: shrimp, crabs, grouper, bluefin tuna, snapper, mackerel, swordfish. For western Atlantic bluefin, which finish spawning in June and are fished as far away as Prince Edward Island, these are the primary spawning grounds.

John Lamkin, a fisheries biologist for NOAA, has admitted that "any larvae that came into contact with the oil doesn't have a chance." So, if a cloud of bluefin eggs passed through a cloud of contaminated water, that one silent encounter could well help snuff out a species already on the brink. And tuna is not the only species at risk. In July Harriet Perry, a biologist at the University of Southern Mississippi, found oil droplets in blue crab larvae, saying that "in my forty-two years of studying crabs I've never seen this." Tellingly, this vulnerability of egg and larvae to oil does not appear to have been considered when the Macondo well was approved for drilling. In the initial exploration plan that BP submitted to the government, the company goes on at length about how adult fish and shellfish will be able to survive a spill by swimming away or by "metaboliz[ing] hydrocarbons." The words "eggs" and "larvae" are never mentioned.

Already there is evidence of at least one significant underwater die-off. In November Penn State biologist Charles Fisher led a NOAA-sponsored expedition that found colonies of ancient sea fans and other coral coated in brown sludge, 1,400 meters down. Nearly all the coral in the area was "dead or in the process of dying," Fisher told me. And he echoed something I heard from many other scientists: in a career of studying these creatures, he has never seen anything like this. There were no underwater pools of oil nearby, but the working theory is that subsea oil and dispersants must have passed through the area like some kind of angel of death.

We may never know what other organisms were trapped in a similarly lethal cloud, and that points to a broader problem: now that we are beyond the oil-covered-birds phase, establishing definitive links between the spill and whatever biogenetic or ecological disturbances are in store is only going to get harder. For instance, we know the coral died because of all the bodies: ghostly coral corpses litter the ocean floor near the wellhead, and Fisher is running tests to see if he can find a definitive chemical link to BP's oil. But that sort of forensics simply won't be possible for the much smaller life forms that are even more vulnerable to BP's toxic cocktail. When larval tuna or squid die, even in huge numbers, they leave virtually no trace. Hollander uses the phrase "cryptic mortality" to describe these phantom die-offs.

All this uncertainty will work in BP's favor if the worst-case scenarios eventually do materialize. Indeed, concerns about a future collapse may go some way toward explaining why BP (with the help of Kenneth Feinberg's Gulf Coast Claims Facility) has been in a mad rush to settle out of court with fishermen, offering much-needed cash now in exchange for giving up the right to sue later. If a significant species of fish like bluefin does crash three or even ten years from now (bluefin live for fifteen to twenty years), the people who took these deals will have no legal recourse. Even if a case did end up in court, beating BP would be tricky. As part of the damage assessment efforts, NOAA scientists are conducting studies that monitor the development of eggs and larvae exposed to contaminated water. But as Exxon's lawyers argued in the Valdez case, wild fish stocks are under a lot of pressure these days—without a direct chemical link to BP's oil, who's to say what dealt the fatal blow?

In a way, the lawyers will have a point, if a disingenuous one. As Ian MacDonald explains, it is precisely the multiple stresses on marine life that continue to make the spill so dangerous. "We don't appreciate the extent to which most populations are right on the edge of survival. It's very easy for populations to go extinct." He points to the sperm whales—there are only about 1,600 of them in the northern Gulf of Mexico, a small enough population that the unnatural death of just a few whales (which breed infrequently and later in life) can endanger the community's survival. Acoustic research has found that some sperm whales responded to the spill by leaving the area, a development that oceanographers find extremely worrying.

One of the things I am learning aboard the WeatherBird II, watching these scientists test for the effects of invisible oil on invisible organisms, is not to trust my eyes. For a few months last year, when BP's oil formed patterns on the surface of these waters that looked eerily like blood, industrial society's impact on the ocean was easy for all to see. But when the oil sank, it didn't disappear; it just joined so much else that the waves are hiding, so many other secrets we count on the ocean to keep. Like the 27,000 abandoned oil and gas wells in the Gulf of Mexico, and the network of unmonitored underwater pipelines that routinely corrode and leak. Like the sewage that cruise ships are entirely free to dump, under federal law, so long as they are more than three miles from shore. Like a dead zone the size of New Jersey. Scientists at Dalhousie University in Halifax predict that if we continue our rates of overfishing, every commercial fish stock in the world could crash by midcentury. And a study published in Nature in July found that global populations of phytoplankton have declined about 40 percent since 1950, linked with "increasing sea surface temperatures"; coral is bleaching and dying for the same reason. And on and on. The ocean's capacity to heal itself from our injuries is not limitless. Yet the primary lesson being extracted from the BP disaster seems to be that "mother nature" can take just about anything we throw at her.

As the WeatherBird II speeds off to the third research station, I find myself thinking about something New Orleans civil rights attorney Tracie Washington told me the last time I was on the Gulf Coast. "Stop calling me resilient," she said. "I'm not resilient. Because every time you say, 'Oh, they're resilient,' you can do something else to me." Washington was talking about the serial disasters that have battered New Orleans. But if the poisoned and perforated gulf could talk, I think it might say the same thing.

On day three of the cruise, things start to get interesting. We are now in the DeSoto Canyon, about thirty nautical miles from the wellhead. The ocean floor is 1,000 meters down, our deepest station yet. Another storm is rolling in, and as the team pulls up the multi-corer, waves swamp the deck. It's clear as soon as we see the mud that something is wrong. Rather than the usual gray with subtle gradations, the cylinders are gray and then, just below the top layer, abruptly turn chocolaty brown. The consistency of the top brown layer is sort of fluffy, what the scientists refer to as "flocculent."

A grad student splits one of the cores lengthwise and lays it out on deck. That's when we see it clearly: separating the gray and brown layers—and looking remarkably like chocolate parfait—is a thick line of black gunk. "That's not normal," Hollander declares. He grabs the mud samples and flags Charles Kovach, a senior scientist with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. They head to the darkest place on the boat—one of the tiny sleeping quarters crammed with bunk beds. In the pitch darkness they hold an ultraviolet light over the sample, and within seconds we are looking at silvery particles twinkling up from the mud. This is a good indication of oil traces. Hollander saw something similar on the August cruise and was able not only to identify hydrocarbons but to trace them to BP's Macondo well.

Sure enough, after the sediment is put through a battery of chemical tests, Hollander has his results. "Without question, it's petroleum hydrocarbons." The thick black layers are, he says, "rich in hydrocarbons," with the remains of plants and bacteria mixed in. The fluffy brown top layer has less oil and more plant particles, but the oil is definitely there. It will be weeks or even months before Hollander can trace the oil to BP's well, but since he has found BP's oil at this location in the DeSoto Canyon before, that confirmation is likely. If we are fishing for oil, as Hollander had joked, this is definitely a big one.

It strikes me that there is a satisfying irony in the fact that Hollander's cruise found oil that BP would have preferred to stay buried, given that the company indirectly financed the expedition. BP has pledged to spend $500 million on research as part of its spill response and made an early payout of $30 million. But in contrast to the company's much publicized attempts to buy off scientists with lucrative consulting contracts, BP agreed to hand this first tranche over to independent institutions in the gulf, like the Florida Institute of Oceanography, which could allocate it through a peer-review process—no strings attached. Hollander was one of the lucky recipients. This is a model for research in the gulf: paid for by the oil giants that profit so much from its oil and gas, but with no way for them to influence outcomes.

At several more research stations near the wellhead, the WeatherBird II finds the ocean floor coated in similar muck. The closer the boat gets to the wellhead, the more black matter there is in the sediment. And Hollander is disturbed. The abnormal layer of sediment is up to five times thicker than it was when he collected samples here in August. The oil's presence on the ocean floor didn't diminish with time; it grew. And, he points out, "the layer is distributed very widely," radiating far out from the wellhead.

But what concerns him even more are the thick black lines. "That black horizon doesn't happen," he says. "It's consistent with a snuff-out." Healthy sea-floor mud is porous and well oxygenated, with little critters constantly burrowing holes from the surface sand to the deeper mud, in the same way that worms are constantly turning over and oxygenating soil in our gardens. But the dark black lines in the sediment seemed to be acting as a sealant, preventing that flow of life. "Something caused an environmental and community change," Hollander explains. It could have been the sheer volume of matter falling to the bottom, triggering a suffocation effect, or perhaps it was "a toxic response" to oil and dispersants.

Whatever it was, Hollander isn't the only one observing the change. While we are at sea, Samantha Joye, an oceanographer at the University of Georgia, is leading a team of scientists on a monthlong cruise. When she gets back she reports seeing a remarkably similar puddinglike layer of sediment. And in trips to the ocean floor in a submersible, she saw dead crustaceans in the sediment and tube worms that had been "decimated." Ian MacDonald was one of the scientists on the trip. "There were miles of dead worms," he told me. "There was a zone of acute impact of at least eighty square miles. I saw dead sea fans, injured sea fans, brittle stars entangled in its branches. A very large area was severely impacted." More warning signs of a bottom-up disaster.

A week after Hollander returned from the cruise, Unified Area Command came out with its good news report on the state of the spill. Of thousands of water samples taken since August, the report stated, less than 1 percent met EPA definitions of toxicity. It also claimed that the deepwater sediment is largely free from BP's oil, except within about two miles of the wellhead. That certainly came as news to Hollander, who at that time was running tests of oiled sediment collected thirty nautical miles from the wellhead, in an area largely overlooked by the government scientists. Also, the government scientists measured only absolute concentrations of oil and dispersants in the water and sediment before declaring them healthy. The kinds of tests John Paul conducted on the toxicity of that water to microorganisms are simply absent.

Coast Guard Rear Adm. Paul Zukunft, whose name is on the cover of the report, told me of the omission, "That really is a limitation under the Clean Water Act and my authorities as the federal on-scene coordinator." When it comes to oil, "it's my job to remove it"—not to assess its impact on the broader ecosystem. He pointed me to the NOAA-led National Resource Damage Assessment (NRDA) process, which is gathering much more sensitive scientific data to help it put a dollar amount on the overall impact of the spill and seek damages from BP and other responsible parties.

Unlike the individual and class-action lawsuits BP is rushing to settle, it will be years before a settlement is reached. That means more time to wait and see how fish stocks are affected by egg and larvae exposure. And according to Robert Haddad, who heads the NRDA process for NOAA, any settlement will have "reopener clauses" that allow the government to reopen the case should new impacts manifest themselves.

Still, it's not at all clear that NRDA is capable of addressing the dangers being exposed by Hollander and the other independent scientists. The federal damage assessment process is built on the concept of "ecosystem services," which measures the value of nature according to how it serves us. How many fish were fishermen unable to catch because of the disaster? And how many tourism dollars were lost when the oil hit the beaches? Yet when it comes to the place where most of the spill damage was done—the deep ocean—we are in no position to answer such questions. The deep ocean is so understudied that we simply don't know what "service" those dead tube worms and corals would have provided to us. All we know, says MacDonald, is that "the ecosystem depends on these kinds of organisms, and if you start wiping them out, you don't know what happens." He also points out, as many ecologists do, that the entire service model is flawed. Even if it turns out that those tube worms and brittle stars do nothing for us, "they have their own intrinsic value—it matters that these organisms are healthy or not healthy." The spill "is an opportunity for us to find a new way to look at ecological health."

It is more likely, however, that we will continue to assign value only to those parts of nature from which we directly profit. Anything that slips beyond the reach of those crude calculations, either because it is too mysterious or seemingly too trivial, will be considered of no value, its existence left out of environmental risk assessment reports, its death left out of damage assessment lawsuits. And this is what is most disturbing about the latest rush to declare the gulf healthy: we seem to be once again taking refuge in our ignorance, the same kind of willful blindness that caused the disaster in the first place. First came the fateful decision to drill in parts of the earth we do not understand, taking on risks that are beyond our ability to comprehend. Next, when disaster struck, came the decision to use dispersants to sink the oil rather than let it rise to the surface, saving what we do know (the coasts) by potentially sacrificing what we don't know (the depths). And now here we are, squeezing our eyes shut before the results are in, hoping, once again, that what we don't know can't hurt us.

Only about 5 percent of the deep ocean has been explored. The existence of the deep scattering layer—the huge sector of marine life that dwells in the deep but migrates every night toward the surface—was only confirmed by marine biologists in the 1940s. And the revelations are ongoing. Mysterious and otherworldly new species are being discovered all the time.

On board the WeatherBird II, I was constantly struck by the strange simultaneity of discovery and destruction, watching young scientists experiment on fouled sediment drawn up from places science had barely mapped. It's always distressing to witness a beautiful place destroyed by pollution. But there is something particularly harrowing about the realization that we are contaminating places we have never even seen in their natural state. As drilling pushes farther and farther into deep water, risking more disasters in the name of jobs and growth, marine scientists trained to discover the thrillingly unknown will once again be reduced to coroners of the deep, boldly discovering that which we have just destroyed. Video above: Naomi Klein "Addicted to Risk" at TED. From (http://www.ted.com/talks/naomi_klein_addicted_to_risk.html)

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BP Corexit & Coverup

SUBHEAD: The Gulf crisis is not over. It is just hidden and forgotten by the American public.

Image above: Hired boats working deployed oil booms near Louisiana wetland island. Photo by Daniel Beltra for GreenPeace. From (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/gallery/2010/05/12/GA2010051202394.html). By Anne McClintock on 23 August 2010 in CounterPunch - (http://www.counterpunch.org/mcclintock08232010.html)

Three vanishing acts are being played out in the Gulf:

• the disappearing of the oil from the ocean surface by Corexit,
• the disappearing of the story by the media blockade, and
• the disappearing from view of the shadowy private contractors who are making a mint helping BP and the Coast Guard keep a cover on the clean-up.

This triple vanishing trick, collectively choreographed by BP and sundry federal agencies, culminated on August 4th in a report released by NOAA that claimed 75% of the oil spill had been captured, burned, evaporated or broken down. The White House hailed the report as something to celebrate. Energy advisor Carol Browne announced:

“the vast majority of the oil is gone.”

A clamor of outrage immediately rose from the Gulf, as residents refused to dance the crisis-is-over, happy-feet dance. Hundreds of locals furiously insisted that they were still seeing masses of oil on ocean, beaches and marshes, and dead fish, dolphins, sharks, birds and other marine life washing ashore. Then on August 18th scientists from the Universities of Georgia and South Florida produced an open challenge to the White House report, asserting that 70% to 79% of the oil in the Gulf still remained in the water. Charles Hopkinson, a professor of marine science at the University of Georgia declared: “The idea that 75% of the oil is gone and of no concern to the environment is just absolutely incorrect.”

Spike Lee, filming in the Gulf, scoffed at what he called the BP/White House “abracabra kawabanga” trick and called on journalists to stay with the story. A few weeks earlier, the triple vanishing act had come together personally for me in a story that Steve, a private contractor, told in the shadows of a southern Louisiana bar.

I call the contractor Steve, though that is not his real name. I cannot tell you his real name because he has assured me that he will kill me if I do. I had been in the Gulf for three days with Karin Hayes, a film-maker, documenting the oil-spill when Steve approached us in the bar, urgently wanting to tell us something.

“It’s as if a nuclear apocalypse has gone off in the Gulf,” he said. “The media is not telling the truth. No one is telling the truth. Let me tell you something. Yesterday on the beach where we work, my crew cleaned up seven hundred bags of oil. Today we went back and the beach was completely covered in oil, as if we had never been there. Today we carried away another seven hundred and fifty bags. Every day we clean up, then the tide brings it in again. The oil is everywhere, deep under the sand. Today I wanted to measure the oil, so I stuck my shovel into the sand and the oil was down there eight inches deep.”

Steve leaned in close, “Do you want to know how long my contract is to work down here?” he asked. “Three years.” His jaw muscles tightened as if he wanted to suck his words back into his mouth, but could not. “They are telling everyone it is not so bad, but clean-up will take many years. I am going to be here a long time.” Steve wiped a hand heavily over his eyes as if they were burning. “Let me tell you something. Today we saw three sharks washed up dead on the beach. The insides of their noses were black with oil. The membranes of their mouths were black with oil. Their eyes were black with oil.”

Steve is a war veteran who has seen a great deal of horror, but he seems to find this memory inordinately upsetting. “I am telling you this for the sake of our grandchildren,” he said. “We have an apocalypse going on and no one is paying enough attention.”

The CTEH Cover Up

A few days later, Steve and I were talking in the chemical-laced dusk of a car park. The Louisiana night was a strange brew of oily vapors and ginger blossom. Steve was slumped against his car, exhausted by his fifteen-hour day. The red tip of his cigarette burned on-off in the dark like a warning signal. As we talked, the nightly, muffled thrup-thrup of distant helicopters began. A number of people had told me about these strange, night flights, as helicopters and planes headed out on mysterious missions. I asked Steve where they were going.

“They are looking for oil,” he said. “The helicopters go out first at dusk. When they spot oil, they radio the gps locations back to the Coast Guard. Then between one and three in the morning, the planes go out and spray the oil with dispersants.”

“Why do they go out at night?” I ask. “They are hiding the oil with dispersants, Steve said. “They don’t want people to know how much oil there is out there. And they don’t want people to know how much dispersants they are spraying. It’s one of the big secrets down here.”

As it happens, Steve knows a good deal about dispersants. Before coming to work on the oil spill, he worked as a contractor for Halliburton; he now works in the Gulf for a company dealing with environmental toxicity and health hazards. It took a couple of hours talking and half a bottle of Southern Comfort before Steve revealed the name of his company. “I work for CTEH,” he said. Then he dragged his hand hard over his eyes. “I can’t believe I just told you that,” he said, but it was clear he wanted to.

Founded in 1997 in Arkansas, CTEH (Center for Toxicology and Environmental Health) specializes in toxicology and risk assessment. According to its website, CTEH “specializes in the specific expertise of toxicology, risk assessment, industrial hygiene, occupational health, and response to emergencies or other events involving release or threat of release of chemicals.” As it happens, CTEH is the company down in the Gulf that is quietly monitoring the levels of chemical toxicity of the oil-spill and its possible impact on the health of offshore workers involved in the clean-up.

CTEH is part of the Joint Unified Command based in Houma, Louisiana, where BP shares its office with the Coast Guard. The CTEH website is frank: CTEH is “proud” of its role in the Unified Command response. The website is less frank, however, about one stunningly important omission. CTEH is being paid by BP.

CTEH, in other word, is monitoring the possible toxic effects on workers of the chemicals BP has unleashed, and it is doing this at BP’s expense. In short, CTEH is being paid by BP to check up on BP. This is a conflict of interest so flagrant it is like a murder suspect hiring the forensic experts who will examine the murder scene.

CTEH has, to boot, an impressively consistent record of unsavory conflict of interest cases, where they have ruled favorably every time on behalf of their corporate clients. CTEH was hired by a coal company after it unleashed a massive coal-ash spill in the Tennessee Valley. CTEH declared everything hunky-dory. CTEH was hired by a paper mill sued by an employee for asbestos exposure. CTEH blamed the employee’s health problems on his lifestyle. Murphy Oil Refinery hired CTEH after spilling one million gallons into a community in St Bernard’s parish, LA. CTEH found nothing there for anyone to worry about.

Now, down in the Gulf, BP is paying CTEH to monitor the toxic levels of the air and water. As Nicholas Cheremisinoff, a former Exxon chemical engineer and expert on pollution prevention says, this means there is “a huge incentive for them to under-report.”

This also means that if anyone sues BP for health problems caused by toxic exposure to oil or chemicals, CTEH will be the expert witness called in on BP’s behalf. Indeed, two Gulf Coast residents, Glynis Wright and Janille Turner, are now filing a class action suit against BP in Alabama, for alleged health problems caused by clean-up chemicals, claiming that Corexit is four times more toxic than the crude oil. Cheremisinoff has said he is “100 per cent certain” CTEH will be called in as expert witness for BP.

Not surprisingly, down in the Gulf CTEH is flying very low under the radar. According to a report filed by the Louisian Bucket Brigade, at a community meeting in New Orleans, CTEH was present, but without any insignia or identifying credentials, repeatedly reassuring residents that the area was safe and that heat was the main hazard facing workers. When the LBB reporter asked the EPA rep why they were working for CTEH, the rep responded: “CTEH?…don’t know them.” When the reporter pulled out a copy of the CTEH website, the EPA rep backtracked: “Oh, yeah, we look at their data.” Asked if that didn’t amount to a conflict of interest, the rep admitted, “Yeah, that is a danger.” Shortly afterwards, he backtracked again: “No, we don’t really do anything with them. Who are they again?”

This crazy, conflict-of-interest carousel--where BP pays CTEH, and the EPA relies on CTEH data to monitor BP--is so flagrant that Rep. Lois Capps (D-CA) has formally requested that President Obama relieve BP of responsibility for protecting the health of workers and local residents.

CTEH and the EPA underplay the hazards, but down in the Gulf people are getting sick. Some men working on the oil spill have become ill and some hospitalized, though we don’t know the full extent because sick workers are contracted by BP not to talk to the media. BP could well stand, not for Beyond Petroleum, but for Beyond Principle. In a particularly nefarious act of cost-cutting and labor control, BP has hired prison inmates to do the clean-up, refusing to let them wear respirators, as this makes it visible that conditions are hazardous. Nor can they carry cell-phones lest they document the damage. Forced labor: slavery déjà vu. And there’s an extra perk for BP. Private companies like BP who use people on work-release get tax rebates of $2,400 for every worker they employ.

I heard many stories of people getting sick. I talked to the wife of a Vietnamese fisherman: “My husband has had chest problems ever since he went to work for BP,” she told me. “A lot of people are getting sick. And when the south wind blows, my asthma gets bad,” she said. In an internet café, I overheard a young man talking loudly into his cell about a blistering rash on his chest. “The doctor thinks it’s over-exposure to the chemicals,” he said.

The Corexit Cover-up

You have to hand it to them: BP’s image makers do a heck of a job looking on the bright side of life. Consider the multi-million dollar ads they regularly place in the New York Times (any one of which would go a long way towards putting an out-of-work fisherman on his feet). Not a drop of oil to be seen from sea to shining sea. Even the skimmers seem to be skimming up stardust. The beach are pristine. Not a dollop of oil to be seen.

As Marci, a private contractor with an energy company, sardonically said to me one evening: “Clean. Clean as a baby’s butt clean. You know why? Dispersants.” Marci asked me: “Why do you think the oil stopped fifteen miles from the Florida coast? All along the Gulf, there is a fifteen-mile wide line where the oil stopped. How did it stop at that magical line?” She told me the same story others had told: “At night they go out with planes and spray it with dispersants. So the beaches look clean. But the oil is still there. Wait until the fall,” she said, “Wait until the weather cools, and the Mississippi drops. Then the oil will rise to the surface. Then the oil will come back.”

Marci was bristling with suppressed anger. ““You have to understand the tides,” she said. “Why do you think the oil is inside the booms, not outside them? It’s because of the dispersants. The dispersants sink the oil under the water. It looks like the oil is gone. But then the tides go in, taking the oil with them, and the oil goes in under the booms. Then the water cools, the oil rises, the tide goes out, and the oil is caught on the inside of the boom. Close to the marshes, close to the birds.” Travelling round Barataria Bay by boat and air, I have seen this for myself and have photos to show for it: islands surrounded by boom, with the oil trapped on the inside.

From the beginning, the use of dispersants has been clouded with controversy and cover-ups. The cutely named Corexit is made by the American company Nalco, and is famously banned in the UK and Europe on the grounds of its lethal toxicity. In April, shortly after the Deep Horizon blowout, Lisa Jackson of the EPA ruled that Corexit should only be used in “extremely rare” cases. Down in Louisiana, for decades there’s been a tightly-knit culture of mutual cronyism where local politicians and oilmen have their hands deep in each others pockets.

On August 1st, the US House of Representatives Committee confirmed that for over three months, in violation of EPA’s official guidelines, the US Coast Guard had fast-tracked 74 permits giving BP the green light to “carpet-bomb” the Gulf. All told, at least 2 million gallons have been dumped into the Gulf, sprayed over the seas, islands and marshes.

The main ingredient in Corexit is 2-Butoxyethenol, which is toxic to blood, kidneys, liver and the central nervous system, also causing cancer, birth defects. Corexit is mutagenic for bacteria, huge amounts of which live in the Gulf of Mexico. Corexit ruptures red blood cells and accumulates as it moves up the food chain. The EPA, reluctant at first to release data, eventually conceded that Corexit is lethal for 50% of any group of test animals that comes in contact with it. Even the Department of Transportation classifies Corexit as Class 6.1: Poisonous Material” for transportation purposes.

The risks of Corexit to humans, the fragile marsh ecosystems and marine life are potentially staggering. Riki Ott, a marine toxicologist and tireless community activist, has testified meeting people all over the Gulf who are showing symptoms: “headaches, dizziness, sorethroats, burning eyes, rashes and blisters that go so deep, they are leaving scars.”

Dispersants have never been used in such quantities before, or at such depths in the ocean, or on open marshland. Dispersants are so dangerous because they accumulate up the food chain. Fiddler crabs absorb the toxins in their muscles and are then eaten by birds. Coyotes and feral pigs eat the bird corpses. Pelicans absorb the toxins from fish and even lightly oiled pelicans ingest the oil through their constant preening. Larger marine life like tuna, dolphins and whales carry the greatest lethal loads. Stories have been told by fishermen finding vast, floating graveyards of birds, dolphins and whale corpses near the Macondo well site, which, they say, are secretly disposed of at night.

Oil on the surface is easier to see, easier to retrieve, easier to burn. One study shows that oil mixed with Corexit is 11 times as lethal as the oil alone.

So why use such lethal toxins in the first place?

Dispersants are called dispersants because that’s what they do. They disperse the oil; they don’t destroy it. Dispersants sink the oil below the surface, make it harder to see, and therefore harder to sue BP for liability. On August 20th scientists produced new evidence of vast undersea plumes of oil drifting for miles. This week, another team of scientists in the journal Science confirmed the discovery of a massive 22 mile subsea oil plume the size of Manhattan and, most dismayingly, very little evidence that the oil was being broken down by microbes.

Chris Pinetich, a marine biologist and campaigner with the Sea Turtle Restoration Project, confirmed what Steve and others had told me: that Coast Guard planes were flying out at night spraying Corexit on the water and land. “People need to realize that their water, their air, the sand they are walking on, they things they are touching when they wake in the morning are coated with this stuff,” he said. “We are producing an experiment in the Gulf the likes of which no one has ever seen. Top scientists admit that. We are all part of the experiment.”

Death by dispersants is slow and invisible. Death by dispersants wreaks its havoc over generations. Dispersants are what Rob Nixon has called “slow violence.” We often think of violence as immediate and spectacular, bounded by space and time. Nixon recalls us to violence of a different kind: the “attritional devastation” that takes place gradually over time and space. Slow violence may be less visible, less media-sensational but enacts a toll no less lethal and lasting for being slow and out of sight.

Corexit is a form of slow violence: a conjurer’s trick, an alchemy of deceit, a sorcerer’s bargain with life and death.

And down in Barataria Bay, people cough the BP cough. Workers have rashes and burning eyes. Their ears get infected; their hands get blisters. When the southwind blows, lungs tighten and close. Some fishermen vomit, some struggle to breathe. Some get dizzy, some get diarhorrea. Some have ashthma, some fast-beating hearts. Their chests burn fire; their throats are sore. And their children cough the BP cough.

Slow Violence in the Gulf

Dispersants are not the only form of slow violence wreaked on the Gulf. The Deepwater Horizon blowout was by any standard spectacular violence: a volcanic crimson and grey apocalypse, an ocean in flames, a doomed, industrial colossus slowly pitching and sinking, taking with it nine men dead. But everyone I spoke to in the Gulf, echoed the same refrain: the Deepwater blowout was only the most recent, fast-forward, telegenic calamity on top of the permanent slow-motion catastrophe in the Gulf.

The slow violence of the oil spill comes on top of decades of slo-mo slaughter of the Gulf’s marshes and ocean waters by three forces: industrial dumping, chemical contamination and agricultural run-off; the forced engineering of the marshes by dredging and levees; and the tearing up of the vulnerable marshes by storms and hurricanes.

On July 18th, Karin and I flew in a Coast Guard plane to the Mocondo site. Two days before, BP partially capped the well. But flying over the five great passes where the Mississippi empties into the sea, I could still see great streaks of rust-red oil along the islands, and long white ribbons of dispersants in the foam-line of the currents. I already knew that beneath the Mocondo “ground zero” site lay a vast zone that had been dead for years, dead long before the Deepwater explosion: the Gulf “dead zone,” a stretch of water utterly inhospitable to life as vast as Lake Ontario.

The Gulf is one of the richest and most diverse eco-systems in the hemisphere, our largest wetlands and 40% of our fishing grounds. But since the 1950s, decades of greed and deregulation have turned the Gulf into the United States’ largest industrial wasteland. The Gulf is an immense, watery mausoleum to the hedonistic high-times of the military-industrial petro-era. If a gigantic hand emptied the Gulf like a basin of water, we would see a drowned version of industrial New Jersey: seeping oil-rigs, dumped military ordinance, unexploded bombs, thousands of miles of pipelines, a giant watery wrecking-yard, cluttered with the debris of a century of industrial waste. Miles from anywhere, the spires of an oil rig rise from the marshes, like a church to a demonic god.

Ninety per cent of all drilling for oil and gas in the United States takes place in the Gulf. This statistic hit home for me only when I opened a Hook ‘n Line fishing map. On the map, the Gulf’s waters are marked with thousands of small, red blocks so thickly clustered the map looks like a map with the measles, a map of malady. Each red square marks one of the 4,000 platforms littering the Gulf, many of them abandoned and many leaking.

The Gulf also bears the brunt of agricultural pollution from the heartland: runoff and waste from Midwest cornfields, sewage plants, golf courses, factories, nitrogen from fertilizer drain down the Mississippi into the Gulf every year. And through these damaged and vanishing marshes, massive watery superhighways have been cut, canals and passageways for the barges and huge ships on their way to the Gulf. Every straight line in the marshes is man made and a road to destruction. Every straight line has been forcibly dredged for flood control and shipping, the river and marshes forcibly reengineered by levees and canals to stop flooding, thereby fatally closing off the silt and fresh water that the marshes needs to sustain themselves, and rendering them vulnerable to the yearly slow violence of the hurricanes.

For many people I spoke to, the violence of Katrina was as great as the violence of the oil spill. Southern Louisiana is a half-drowned, shape-shifting, upside-down world, where boats float out of the treetops, and houses tilt out of the water. Everywhere we went, people still lived among the debris of Katrina. Boats flung by Katrina left to rot on the grassy verge of roads, half-wrecked houses, trees stripped bare and leaning arthritic against the evening sky.

Every day, Karin and I would drive past the huge coal and oil refineries, the Port Sulphur toxic dump, rotting boats, sunken cars, abandoned roads lined with methane barrels. Down near Venice, we found a toxic lake so rank with chemicals we can barely breathe. Not for nothing is the Deep Delta where we travelled every day, called “cancer alley,” with highest rates of cancer in the US.

One evening, Karin and I pulled into an unprepossessing marina near a town called Empire, driving carefully past the sleeping BP security guard. A few oyster-boats were festooned with yellow boom, but the rest of the marina wore a forlorn and dilapidated air. From every boat, the useless fishing nets hung like shrouds, dark relics of better times. One man moved slowly about his small houseboat. We got talking and Lloyd Boudreau invited me into his houseboat and unrolled a huge photo of the disaster Katrina had wrought: the picture of his life turned upside down by Katrina. Stubbing fingers blackened by a life on the oil rigs, he pointed to his houseboat, upturned like a toy. Katrina is the ghost he lives with, as if he has no room in his heart to begin to think about the oil spill.

Battered by the accumulated slow violence of decades of corporate greed and mismanagement, dredging, levees, and hurricanes, the Louisiana delta is vanishing before our eyes, slipping into the sea at the rate of one football field every half hour. Since the 1930s, land the size of Delaware has vanished under water.

From Blowout to Blowback

Then BP partially capped the well and the media began to cap the story. NOAA issued its report on August 5th with some implausibly neat arithmetic, declaring 75% of the oil gone. I speak to Steve on the phone. “All the media has left,” he says. “But the oil hasn’t.”

Then blowback starts. Saying 75% of the oil is “gone” sounds cheering (less cheering, of course, if one remembers that 25% of the Deepwater spill is still four times as much as the total Exxon Valdez spill), but down in the Gulf, no one is buying even the 75%-gone story.

“The oil has not gone,” Tony, an out-of-work shrimp fisherman told me, “It’s just below the surface.” “They’re just covering their butts,” says woman at a gas-station. “They want everyone to think it’s over,” Charlotte Randolph, Lafourche Parish president said of the NOAA report: “This week in Lafourche parish we had hundreds of barrels a day washing in.

I call PH Hahn, Director of Coast Zone Management in Plaquemines Parish. “I know there is plenty of oil out there,” Hahn insisted. “They say they have captured 75%, but they don’t even know how much there was to begin with. Figures lie, and liars figure,” he says.

“From the very beginning,” PJ told me, “the Coast Guard went to bed with BP. There was no oversight. They tried to cover for themselves. Now they’re trying to declare a quick ending. If they can get the President to convince everyone that it is over, then that reduces BP’s liability. There are two things working right now: there’s an election coming up and we have a President dying in the polls. They want to tell everyone it’s all ok. Now,” PJ says, “the media has left. They want to kill the story.”

“Last weekend, he continued, “we got stuck on a sandbar. When we gunned the engines, there was nothing but oil behind the boat. Then we dove with the Cousteau group again and there was plenty of oil on the bottom of the ground. The sand just covers it up. On Sunday night, we stopped at a barrier island, and as we were walking back to the boat, black oil spurted out of the hermit-crab holes. We pushed a stick down into the ground, and when we pulled the stick out, the oil began bubbling up. Fresh oil, not weathered oil. Wait till the shrimp boats start going out again. When those trawlers hit bottom, that’s when we will see a lot of things.”

A New Orleans radio poll showed 80% of respondents did not believe the NOAA report. Others offered similar testimony. Steve told me he saw a huge slick about five miles long and one mile wide on his way to work. Bob Marshall, writing for the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported seeing a great deal of oil at South Pass. Fishermen reported oil both inside Barataria Bay and out near the great Mississippi Passes and barrier islands. Riki Ott, flew out over Barataria Bay and afterwards wrote: “Bay Jimmy on the northeast side of Barataria Bay was full of oil. So was Bay Baptiste, Lake Grande Ecaille, and Billet Bay….We followed thick streamers of black oil and ribbons of rainbow sheen….The ocean’s smooth surface glinted like molten lead in the late afternoon sun. Oil. As far as we could see: oil.”

On my last evening down in the delta, fishing guide Dave Iverson took me by boat through Barataria Bay to the pelican rookeries at Queen Bess and Cat Islands near Grand Isle. As we passed through the hauntingly lovely, lacey-green filigree marshland, flocks of snowy egrets and ibis lifted gracefully into the air ahead of us, an explosion of white confetti, an exuberant celebration of life. But returning through the marshes in the twilight through the oil-damaged parts, I saw miles of tangled boom filthy with oil, and inside the boom the black marshes, blackened as if a fire from hell had roared through. And everywhere a great stillness. Not a bird to be seen. I thought of John Keats’s great line: “The sedge is wither'd from the lake and no birds sing.” I thought of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring that launched the modern environmental movement. Will this silence do the same?

On what abacus can we count the slowly dying, the invisibly hurt, the already poisoned but not yet dead? In this, our summer of magical counting. All summer we’ve been counting: numbers of gallons spilled, numbers of toxins released, numbers of birds dying, numbers of fishermen out of work. We are like children counting on our fingers in the dark, trying to ward off the shapeless face of something dreadful has been unleashed and cannot fully understand.

And down in Barataria Bay, the crabs climb out of the burning water and hold their claws to the sky. The creels stand empty; the boats lie still. Nets hang like shrouds. And children cough the BP cough.

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