Disenfranchised Citizen

So then it's agreed? The dolphins are all committing suicide in protest of fewer deep sea oil platforms to swim around. Wonderful...Bob, you good with that? Great. Okay, bring the Coast Guard in here...

It just keeps getting funnier, except it’s not…

In this past week, it has been reported how, in the immediate aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon explosion, British Petroleum had demanded via e-mail that it’s own expert be kept quiet when he gave his opinion stating 82,000 barrels of  crude a day were coming from the Macondo Well. In fact, two days after ordering his silence, BP publicly announced their estimate that the flow rate was only 1,000 barrels per day. And of course, this report comes on the heels of another showing how the White House had been trying to get the United States Geologic Survey to downgrade its flow rate estimates in public statements too, reducing the USGS estimate of at least 25,000 barrels of oil per day coming from the well to a number the NIC thought sounded better, 12,000 to 25,000 barrels or better still, the estimate a White House Communications officer suggested, 12,000 – 19,000 barrels per day. Oh, and who can forget the wrongful termination lawsuit being filed by August Walters where he claims to have been fired by BP a couple of months back because he wouldn’t modify clean-up data  to make the beaches appear cleaner on paper than they in fact truly were, thus allowing BP to say they’d turned the corner and in light if this data, come to an agreement with the Coast Guard to officially move from cleanup to restoration, all while eagerly anticipating the stock bump to come from such an announcement.

Yes, these are the assholes in charge making things right along the Gulf Coast, and yes, the oil company mentioned in the above paragraph is the same British Petroleum putting out all those feel good commercials telling you how everything is just swell now. Hey! The economy, the seafood and the jobs are back!

And now, today even, when it comes to that same oil company and that same government, I’m sure if you asked, they’d go on and on to tell you how it would be impossible for the low-balling of flow-rate numbers that lead to a potentially flawed cleanup response based on their bad data, and how the fact there is still more unaccounted for oil in the Gulf of Mexico than was spilled from the Exxon Valdez…yeah, they’ll tell you how none of this has anything to do with more dead dolphins…even if there still is oil along the Louisiana coast.

Of course not.

That would be fucking ridiculous, and potentially unprofitable…

However:

“Since the beginning of the month, 14 marine mammals, including a dozen dolphins, have been found along the northern Gulf of Mexico. Half of the dead dolphins washed up on the Louisiana coast. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) calls it an “Unusual Mortality Event” in the northern Gulf and next month will mark two years since it began. The tally so far: 630 dead.

The event started in February of 2010 – two months before the oil spill began. Still, the deaths raise a red flag with the Gulf Restoration Network. “The ongoing death of these dolphins speaks to the idea that we haven’t seen all of the impacts from the BP oil drilling disaster end yet,” said Dan Favre of the Gulf Restoration Network.

Ridiculous, indeed…

Read the article:

More dead dolphins wash up on Southeast Louisiana coast

Have a nice day.

GCCF Policy

Rocky Kirstner, writing on his blog for the NRDC, speaks to several fishermen who highlight the ongoing problems in the Gulf:

The all important white shrimp season opened a week ago and some fishermen say it too will be a disaster, perhaps worse than the brown shrimp season that ended in July and was a disappointment to many. “It’s the worst I’ve ever seen by a long shot,” says Grand Isle’s Dean Blanchard, once the largest shrimp buyer on the coast. “The white shrimp are born right here near the coast. They can’t make it through this oil. These are born to die conditions.”

Blanchard says fishermen continue to report dead dolphins in the area on a daily basis, something he says was unheard of in previous years. And on Thursday he took a trip to some oyster beds in nearby Barataria Bay that had been seeded with oyster spat to try to encourage them to come back to life. Instead they found death and devastation. “Everything was dead and the cages were full of oil. No one down here is being held accountable.”

Dean Blanchard, like many along the Gulf, also continue to have problems being compensated for the damages they have suffered from BP’s oil spill, despite all those promises from BP:

Dean Blanchard says he has given up on getting help from BP or the government. He says his business lost at least $6 million due to impacts of the BP blowout, yet BP has paid him just $1 million so far. He’s had to lay off more than half of his employees and now is wondering if he just may have to shut down altogether. “BP has turned by life upside down, and I don’t know what’s coming next. I may have to close down and go into the oil business because that seems to be the only thing left.”

And through it all, Feinberg maintains his actions with the GCCF have been “vindicated,” that the Gulf is heading towards a fast recovery, that if people, including most of those in the seafood industry, don’t raise revenues by 5% each quarter, their interim payments will be cut back and hey, final payments could be reduced in the future as well.

Feinberg maintains all will be well in the Gulf by 2013.

He continues to condition final payments upon claimants waiving their rights to sue BP, the no-sue clause, thus rendering said claimants ineligible for any further compensation from BP on an unknown future.

In fact, despite the troubles fishermen are reporting with their catches, Feinberg shrugs his shoulders and tightens up GCCF interim claims saying that since all federal and most state fishing grounds have been reopened this shows improvement in the seafood industry’s ability to get back to a way of life stolen from them by BP. He also reports an increase in catches of shrimp in the first few months of 2011…a brown shrimp season many shrimpers call a disaster.

Hey Ken?

The Gulf of Mexico is still in trouble and you are not protecting claimants, you are protecting BP, and along with BP you are morally culpable.

Read the article from Rocky Kirstner:

A Storm of Anxiety About Fresh Oil Batters the Gulf

Have a nice day.

British Petroleum? Nah...they've made things right already...free cars for everyone in the studio audience!

Most everybody’s aware by now there were an abnormal amount of dead dolphin calves washing ashore this year, as well as a much larger than usual number of turtles dying, and there is of course the red snapper, with the NOAA recommending if fishermen catch the fish, or any other kinds of fish with lesions, fin rot or other assorted maladies they not touch them with bare hands and throw them overboard, all while they continue to maintain the seafood is safe to eat. But, with all these strange events, it would seem to make sense that these occurrences, when placed side by side could be readily explained by a certain oil spill, and a certain dumping of dispersants into the Gulf of Mexico to combat said oil spill…but if you buy that explanation, you’d be wrong.

Dolphins? Probably an algae bloom.

Turtles? Damned shrimpers trawling.

Red Snapper? Well, bacteria obviously.

Okay, then how about the sand dollars and starfish washing ashore along Florida beaches?

From the Pensacola News Journal:

“At first glance, it looks like a coin machine exploded on the shoreline. Thousands of sand dollars cover the beach from the Fort Pickens gate area to at least a mile west. And they’re also directly across Santa Rosa Sound from that area, on the south shore of Gulf Breeze.

The nickel- and quarter-sized sand dollars are all dead. They’re not white; rather, they’re tinged green like a coin left in water. The mass die-off is raising concerns about what killed or is killing the sand dollars and hundreds of sea stars mixed in with them.”

And then we get to the quotes from the locals, a type of quote that those following the events of the Gulf are becoming far too familiar with, uncomfortably so:

“This is not a normal thing,” Mary Lynn White 53, said. “I’ve lived in Gulf Breeze all my life. I grew up on the water, and I always take notice of changes. Something is killing them. I’d definitely say it is related to the oil spill.”

Or this one:

“I had a bait net, and I was able to scoop up the net full of them over and over and over,” said Berta Hurston, 56, of Gulf Breeze. “I’ve never seen anything like this. And I grew up in the area and I live on the water. It’s really disturbing to me.”

I seem to remember many similar statements made about the amount of dead dolphins, (never seen it like this before) turtles (no, not like this) and the condition of some of the fish being caught in the Gulf (been here thirty years and no, never), not to mention the woeful beginning to the brown shrimp season where the shrimp were more  scarce than usual and undersized, leading some shrimpers to call for an early end to the season as it might do more harm than good, and the docks aren’t buying them anyway.

In each and every one of these situations, there is an alternative culprit besides the oil spill that can be named…

But this many deaths across this many species, not to mention the fish kills occurring earlier in the year…could reasonable lead a person to believe one of two things…

Either the oil spill is the culprit, BP’s gotta pay and Feinberg needs to revise his estimation that all will be well in the Gulf by 2012 (good luck proving that in court), or…the Gulf of Mexico is in a real lot of trouble.

Neither option is appealing…but my money’s on British Petroleum being at fault.

Call it a hunch, a hunch constructed of several coincidences, with unfortunately more expected to come.

Have a nice day.

Corexit? Well, I washed Tony Hayward's mouth out with a nice handful of the stuff.

The preliminary findings for a study done by the University of West Florida indicates Corexit may not have been effective and could be more damaging to the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem than the oil alone.

From the article in the Pensacola News Journal:

“When mixed with oil, Corexit, the chemical dispersant used by BP, is toxic to phytoplankton and bacteria — crucial elements in the Gulf of Mexico’s fragile food chain, said Wade Jeffrey, a UWF biologist with the Center for Environmental Diagnostics and Bioremediation.”That (effect) may cascade itself up through other larger organisms as you go up the food web,” he said Tuesday. “It’s one of those small pieces of a big puzzle of effects. We can’t say if we’ve seen big shifts yet. I don’t know that answer yet.”"

Though British Petroleum claimed Corexit was no more harmful than dish soap and that the chemical would break up the oil and make it easier for the natural bacteria in seawater to swallow up harmful hydrocarbons, the study indicates the opposite occurred.

While the dispersant did break up the oil into smaller droplets, the hydrocarbons were not eradicated, the smaller droplets were still as toxic and made much easier for animals to absorb or consume.

This could be responsible for the die off of the young dolphins this past year:

“… the oil and dispersants appear to have disrupted the food chain and prevented dolphin mothers from building up insulating blubber to weather the cold…”

Also presenting her findings was Susan Laramore, an assistant research professor at Florida Atlantic University, who is studying the effects of oil and Corexit on shrimp, oysters and conch from larval stages through adulthood. And she found:

“…test subjects in younger life stages are more sensitive than older ones, and that they were more sensitive to dispersed oil.

“The dispersants make the oil very much smaller droplets and they’re very much more available to the animals,” Laramore said. “The dispersed oil was supposed to be less toxic…”

Less toxic.

But, it wasn’t.

Shall we just count this as one more thing British Petroleum was wrong about? Or perhaps they weren’t wrong at all, maybe they even suspected or knew. In any case, as many of us were writing last summer, dispersed oil worked in favor of British Petroleum regardless of ecosystem effect because dispersed oil doesn’t come rolling into the beaches to make all the papers.

Dispersed oil only kills below the surface.

So it’s probably a good thing that the Louisiana Senate panel OKs ban on Gulf oil spill dispersants.

Read the articles:

Spill study sees cloudy results

Scientists find Corexit made BP Gulf catastrophe worse is not news

Have a nice day.

Here's looking at you, baby...

Hey, I thought this whole oil spill deal was all kinda, you know…over.

At least that’s the impression I got watching all them there sparkly British Petroleum commercials, but man, over the past two days, the news has been flying pretty serious again in the Gulf, and between you, me, the courts and the water…I think this has just begun…Maybe I just got distracted by the hockey playoffs…

What? What do you want? I never said I wasn’t from the north…

So, shall we begin year two with a prayer?

Archbishop Gregory Aymond got on bended knees and put his arms around two women, listened to the damage BP and the GCCF have wrought and did his best to console them. The women had come to Catholic Charities in Violet for counseling and help with their spill damage claims.

Turns out one of the women, Lois Neville of Violet is yet another one of those people who Ken Feinberg, BP paid administrator of the GCCF and $20 billion escrow fund is saying…well, golly gosh gee, must have slipped through the cracks…hey, mistakes get made, do you know how many claims we’ve received, we’re working as fast as we can…etc…ad nauseum.

Funny thing though, BP was helping her financially, but all payments stopped when Feinberg took over…and she filed for her final settlement, and well past the 90 day time limit Feinberg gave himself to present final offers, she is still waiting…

In her words from David Hammer’s article in the Times-Picayune:

“I’m barely making ends meet with my savings and rental income, and I’m depressed, I’m stressed out,” Neville said. “I get very angry. I hate to even watch the news because there are other people in a worse predicament than me.”

Depressed and stressed out…like thousands of others, yet BP has closed the coffers on funding for mental health in the Gulf Coast…maybe when they said, making things right…they meant everything but the mind.

And hey, why might Ms. Neville still be waiting for her final claim?

It’s been a year since the oil spilled.

Well, on the GCCF front…Feinberg will tell any reporter who listens how he has paid out $3.9 billion dollars of that escrow fund…and apparently, he is quite proud of this fact…lord knows why…after all that means…he hasn’t paid out $16 billion dollars…and of that 3.9, it’s mostly quick payments…very few final offers, and even fewer interim payments…so what gives? Oh…right, right: mistakes get made, do you know how many claims we’ve received and we’re working as fast as we can…got it. Um, bullshit? Not to mention, how convenient was it for Feinberg, the day before the anniversary, the day before the press was to descend all over the Gulf Coast, to suddenly issue the largest final offer to date to Omega Protein Corp, $44.8 million dollars total. I’m sure the timing of this was coincidental, of course…Feinberg couldn’t possibly be such a cynical asshole to present this offer as some sort of distraction to the press, you know, so the coverage might be a bit more balanced as the press goes out to find the countless Lois Neville’s across the Gulf Coast, the ones seeking counseling because they are struggling not to lose everything, again, a year later…

And speaking of unhappy people in the Gulf…well, let the lawsuits begin, and rightfully so…

70,000 people have filed suit in the Gulf in a maritime law proceeding brought by rig owner Transocean, using a form that also expanded the suit to include British Petroleum. This would be on top of the 350 other suits, representing multiple parties already filed. No word on how many of these people are of the 400,000 that Feinberg and the GCCF have not paid yet, or plan not to pay, but Stephen Herman, co-lead attorney for the plaintiffs said, “I think it certainly validates the litigation effort. I also think that it confirms the sentiment out there that Feinberg and the GCCF haven’t really done a great job of giving people what they thought they were entitled to.”

Not to be outdone, British Petroleum filed a suit of their own, going after Cameron International, the company that made the blowout preventer that wouldn’t close. BP would like a court to rule against the company, declaring the device caused or contributed to the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon. Such a ruling would help BP fight against a designation of being “grossly negligent” which if so designated would dramatically raise the amount of fines British Petroleum will have to pay under the Oil Pollution Act.

Perhaps Feinberg knows a judge, to help out his boss, maybe call in some favors perhaps? It’s been a while since he got a raise, and remember the reason the GCCF keeps screwing people? Right, it’s because they’re overworked…not because the GCCF is trying to coerce people into claims attached to a clause where they sign away their rights to sue BP, and not because Feinberg is trying to save BP money, and certainly not because Feinberg is just trying to keep people out of court…cause, that worked out real well…(see above).

Okay…well, at least…all the oil is gone. And that’s important because according to Feinberg’s methodology, all that oil has to be outta there by 2013. If not, if the Gulf isn’t back to normal by then, the entire pay-scale he is using to determine damages for claimants will be off, and not in the claimants favor…so, hey…at least BP and the Coast Guard, they got that one right…oh, what?

Oil still oozing along coastline amid dying marsh grasses

BP oil spill still affecting Louisiana, Gov. Bobby Jindal says

Well, damn…okay, so maybe that’s not working out so well either, but BP’s got another ace in the hole, and it certainly beats the hell out of cleanup workers…

BP Marks Gulf Oil Spill Anniversary With Campaign Contributions

Brilliant!

Besides…something else about political donations…political donations don’t get sick, infected by hydrocarbons and other assorted toxins the way those cleanup workers do…

Gulf Oil Spill Cleanup Workers Report Mysterious Illnesses Year After Disaster

From the article:

“Mike Robichaux is a local doctor who has seen up to 60 patients in recent weeks with a mysterious sickness that some attribute to BP’s oil spill. Dr. Robichaux has been making house calls because many of the “stoic” workers don’t want others to know that they are sick. Yet, Dr. Robichaux tells the AFP, “Ninety percent of them are getting worse… Nobody has a clue as to what it is.”

Reuters reports that the U.S. National Institutes of Health has launched a ten-year study on the health of 55,000 oil spill clean-up workers and volunteers. Perhaps it will take ten years to get an answer for Dr. Robichaux.

Not everyone blames the oil spill for the health problems plaguing Gulf cleanup workers. Namely, BP does not blame the BP oil spill for the health problems plaguing Gulf cleanup workers. In a BP comment to the AFP, the company wrote, “Illness and injury reports were tracked and documented during the response, and the medical data indicate they did not differ appreciably from what would be expected among a workforce of this size under normal circumstances.”

As for compensating sick workers, this would fall under state law and “must be supported by acceptable medical evidence.” Are the 415 Louisianans suffering from respiratory tract infections, nausea, and headaches evidence enough?”

Oh, and as mentioned before…it ain’t just the physical body having problems…a study funded by the National Science Foundation has found that mental health difficulties are likely to linger on the Gulf Coast for the following decade. According to the study, two factors that could cause stresses to persist are delays in compensation for spill damages by the claims process, and possible slow recovery of fishing resources and the fishing industry.

Feinberg, Dudley…your ears burning?

Okay…my bad on all this everybody…I promise to stop watching so much hockey. It really would appear this thing is far from over…that few are doing well in the Gulf at all

In fact…it would appear the only people really doing well these days are British Petroleum…once again paying stock dividends and issuing bonuses to the elite within its company, and Ken Feinberg,who’s sitting on a helluva nice raise from his British Petroleum puppet masters. Yeah, Ken may be taking a lot of criticism these days, but from everything I read, it doesn’t appear to be affecting his psyche at all, in fact he refers to himself as “Bloodied, but unbowed.” And that’s a good thing too, because whereas some of you lightweights out there might want your guy in charge of helping hundreds of thousands of people recover from this catastraphuk to brag about such things as fairness, compassion, generosity and empathy….I like my arbitrator of a compensation fund to talk like he’s trying out for the WWE, you know, to be a bad-ass who don’t take no crap from some fishing type guys and business people who’ve never been to New York.

Nope…not going well at all:

Cleanup workers are getting sick, depression is running rampant and suicides are up across the Gulf Coast. There’s still oil out there while BP continues to scale back cleanup. BP is reneging on financial promises to help with the oyster beds while helping their stockbrokers and executives to more money. The health of the Gulf continues to be debated. Dolphins are dying. Fish have sores. There are dead zones on the Gulf seafloor. Allegations exist that BP is trying to taint the science by influencing the research. A year after the Deepwater Horizon blew up, no laws have been passed by Congress to help ensure it doesn’t happen again while experts maintain it very well could happen again. The NOAA, EPA and FDA all claim the seafood from the Gulf is safe to eat, and they finally opened the last fishing area but the country isn’t buying it: what the government says, or the seafood – which leaves the industry far from recovered. Too many people are waiting for Feinberg to do his fucking job…homes are being lost, jobs haven’t come back and businesses continue to go bankrupt.

And the President?

Well, he said some words and stuff, but ah…who cares, or believes that guy anymore…

Anyways…and so on…here we go folks…

Year two…

Have a nice day.

Well, lots of things could be killing these animals...underfishing, uh...a new toxic form of plankton...and zebra carp, don't forget the zebra carp.

Ken Feinberg, of course assured all in his methodology that everything would be fine in the Gulf by 2012…but certain species, even beyond humans might beg to differ…

Just ask the dolphins:

Oiled dead dolphins washing ashore, 8 months after spill

Or ask the sea turtles:

Sea Turtle Deaths Mount in the Gulf

Hell, even ask the dwarf sea horses if ya like:

Dwarf seahorses threatened by BP oil spill, deserve protection, environmental group says

The point simply being, for a body of water that Feinberg has expressed is quickly on the road to recovery, there sure is a lot of death going on, and it would seem to imply that his estimations, those little facts and figures he is trying to base all claims upon, they simply aren’t holding up.

Yet he keeps stalling interim claim payments…the only claims that can take into account ongoing damage in the Gulf, while speeding along quick payments, and now the final payments, both of which leave claimants - people and families – out of luck should things not improve by his timetable.

Course, with all those signed waivers, British Petroleum and its employees need not fear being placed on any endangered species list anytime soon and along with Feinberg, appear to be the only species so secure. 

Funny how that all worked out…

Have a nice day.

We are so, so sorry our screw-up has resulted in more scrutiny to the business and environmental practices of each and every one of your companies...oh, and to those fishing type people too, and um, the dolphins, sorry for the dead dolphins...our bad.

Bob Dudley apologized for the oil spill on Tuesday.

Bob Dudley apologized for the oil spill by saying “BP is sorry. BP gets it,” adding, “We need to earn back your trust, along with that of state and federal leaders and the trust of Gulf Coast residents and customers…we are determined we will once again restore that trust, and I realize this requires action, not words.”

When Bob Dudley apologized for the oil spill, he made this apology at the CERA gathering, speaking to a collection of industry bigwigs in the corporate oil and gas community.

“Actions, not words,” he said.

In light of that statement, it should also be known that in the past couple of weeks Bob Dudley and BP have reneged on promised assistance for the restoration of the oyster beds in Louisiana, they have low-balled requests by Gulf Coast states for money to help boost tourism, they have made no statements on the increasing sicknesses across the Gulf Coast from exposure to toxic fumes and they have also complained that the meager payments to claimants from Ken Feinberg and the GCCF are too high.

“Actions, not words…”

Perhaps more important than a mea culpa at a conference for industry insiders, Bob Dudley should apologize for the oil spill in each and every affected home in Grand Isle, Lousiana, in the fishing communities of Plaquemines Parish, in Gulfport, in the bayou, all across Alabama and Florida and in every other affected community along the Gulf Coast.

I understand it could be argued that this kind of demand is unreasonable, unrealistic and excessive…maybe, but so was the flood of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, the dumping of Corexit dispersants and the loss of life on the Deepwater Horizon.

Making things right is not a generic PR apology to your buddies at an oil industry conference. Sorry Bob, that’s just one more half-assed stunt with no real accountability.

Have a nice day.