Here is the second message from Steve Cardiff and Bob and Lucy Duncan. Also
in the last couple of days, there have been several threads concerning
rehabilitation, including the ethics involved. A number of references have
been posted citing journal articles on the effects of oil removal on the
birds and the likelihood of subsequent survival. Again, I urge interested
members of this list to subscribe to LABIRDS-L. Here's the URL:
http://www.museum.lsu.edu/LABIRDSintro.html
Also, I urge everyone to take note of Steve's plug for the ABA's Gulf Oil
Disaster Fund. They are pledging to deliver 95% of donated funds to
recovery projects in the Gulf area. Hardly any charitable organization can
top that. Here's the URL for that:
http://www.aba.org/gulf.php
<http://www.aba.org/gulf.php>Bob
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Steven W. Cardiff <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sat, May 15, 2010 at 8:17 PM
Subject: Re: [LABIRD-L] Birds and Oil Report, Grand Isle to Timbalier
Islands
To: Bob Powell <[log in to unmask]>
Bob-
By all means. While you are at it, please plug the ABA's "95% cash
back Gulf Oil Disaster fund" (if you haven't done so already).
Basically, BP is "in the mix" at all levels and possibly dictating much of
what's going on and what's getting out to the public. There's a general
"gag order" on the Feds disseminating info. BP can apparently control
access to oiled beaches. A lot of that is speculation on my part plus some
informed source leaks. We were getting regular updates out of Venice from
the USFWS liaison until the oil actually came ashore, and then there's been
silence. That's all you need to know.
I'm pasting below something that Bob and Lucy Duncan (FL panhandle) sent
regarding the Minerals Mis-Management Service. Also, you may have heard of
the hypothesis that the oil volume could be 10X higher than we've been led
to believe, and that much of the released oil may still be lurking in large
pools deep under the surface. Check out:
*
http://www.aolnews.com/nation/article/not-just-the-slick-oil-plume-found-below-gulf-of-mexicos-surface/19477682
*
I realize that this isn't "hard news," regarding the disaster, but...
Sorry for being so depressing. I'll post additional messages if I can get
back down to the coast- at least until BP has me locked up!
Steve
################
*The following article describes the lack of oversight and regulation of
gulf drilling and operations, and is a scathing condemnation of the Minerals
Management Service practices. I wanted to highlight some of the text - the
parts that are just appalling - but the whole thing would have been in
dayglo.
Lucy Duncan
**http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/14/us/14agency.html
* <*http://www.nytimes.com/*>
*U.S. <http://www.nytimes.com/pages/national/index.html> **
*May 13, 2010
*U.S.** Said to Allow Drilling Without Needed Permits
*Those approvals, federal records show, include one for the well drilled by
the Deepwater Horizon rig, which exploded on April 20, killing 11 workers
and resulting in thousands of barrels of oil spilling into the gulf each
day.
The Minerals Management Service <*
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/m/minerals_management_service/index.html?inline=nyt-org
*> , or M.M.S., also routinely overruled its staff biologists and engineers
who raised concerns about the safety and the environmental impact of certain
drilling proposals in the gulf and in Alaska , according to a half-dozen
current and former agency scientists.
Those scientists said they were also regularly pressured by agency officials
to change the findings of their internal studies if they predicted that an
accident was likely to occur or if wildlife might be harmed.
Under the Endangered Species Act <*
http://www.fws.gov/endangered/pdfs/ESAall.pdf*> and the Marine Mammal
Protection Act <*http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/pdfs/laws/mmpa.pdf*> , the
Minerals Management Service is required to get permits to allow drilling
where it might harm endangered species or marine mammals.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, is responsible
for protecting endangered species and marine mammals. It has said on
repeated occasions <*
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/national/14agency/2-NOAABi-Op.June-2007.pdf
*> that drilling in the gulf affects these animals, but the minerals agency
since January 2009 has approved at least three huge lease sales, 103 seismic
blasting projects and 346 drilling plans. Agency records also show that
permission for those projects and plans was granted without getting the
permits required under federal law.
“M.M.S. has given up any pretense of regulating the offshore oil industry,”
said Kierán Suckling, director of the Center for Biological Diversity <*
http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/*> , an environmental advocacy group in
Tucson , which filed notice of intent to sue the agency over its
noncompliance with federal law concerning endangered species. “The agency
seems to think its mission is to help the oil industry evade environmental
laws.”
Kendra Barkoff, a spokeswoman for the Minerals Management Service, said her
agency had full consultations with NOAA about endangered species in the
gulf. But she declined to respond to additional questions about whether her
agency had obtained the relevant permits.
Federal records indicate that these consultations ended with NOAA
instructing the minerals agency that continued drilling in the gulf was
harming endangered marine mammals and that the agency needed to get permits
to be in compliance with federal law.
Responding to the accusations that agency scientists were being silenced,
Ms. Barkoff added, “Under the previous administration, there was a pattern
of suppressing science in decisions, and we are working very hard to change
the culture and empower scientists in the Department of the Interior <*
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/i/interior_department/index.html?inline=nyt-org
*> .”
On Tuesday, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar <*
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/ken_salazar/index.html?inline=nyt-per
*> announced plans to reorganize the minerals agency to improve its
regulatory role by separating safety oversight from the division that
collects royalties from oil and gas companies. But that reorganization is
not likely to have any bearing on how and whether the agency seeks required
permits from other agencies like NOAA.
Criticism of the minerals agency has grown in recent days as more
information has emerged about how it handled drilling in the gulf.
In a letter from September 2009, obtained by The New York Times, NOAA
accused the minerals agency of a pattern of understating the likelihood and
potential consequences of a major spill in the gulf and understating the
frequency of spills that have already occurred there.
The letter accuses the agency of highlighting the safety of offshore oil
drilling operations while overlooking more recent evidence to the contrary.
The data used by the agency to justify its approval of drilling operations
in the gulf play down the fact that spills have been increasing and
understate the “risks and impacts of accidental spills,” the letter states.
NOAA declined several requests for comment.
The accusation that the minerals agency has ignored risks is also being
levied by scientists working for the agency.
Managers at the agency have routinely overruled staff scientists whose
findings highlight the environmental risks of drilling, according to a
half-dozen current or former agency scientists.
The scientists, none of whom wanted to be quoted by name for fear of
reprisals by the agency or by those in the industry, said they had
repeatedly had their scientific findings changed to indicate no
environmental impact or had their calculations of spill risks downgraded.
“You simply are not allowed to conclude that the drilling will have an
impact,” said one scientist who has worked for the minerals agency for more
than a decade. “If you find the risks of a spill are high or you conclude
that a certain species will be affected, your report gets disappeared in a
desk drawer and they find another scientist to redo it or they rewrite it
for you.”
Another biologist who left the agency in 2005 after more than five years and
who now works as an industry consultant said that agency officials went out
of their way to accommodate the oil and gas industry.
He said, for example, that seismic activity from drilling can have a
devastating effect on mammals and fish, but that agency officials rarely
enforced the regulations meant to limit those effects.
He also said the agency routinely ceded to the drilling companies the
responsibility for monitoring species that live or spawn near the drilling
projects.
“What I observed was M.M.S. was trying to undermine the monitoring and
mitigation requirements that would be imposed on the industry,” he said.
Aside from allowing BP and other companies to drill in the gulf without
getting the required permits from NOAA, the minerals agency has also given
BP and other drilling companies in the gulf blanket exemptions from having
to provide environmental impact statements.
Much as BP’s drilling plan asserted that there was no chance of an oil spill<
*
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/o/oil_spills/gulf_of_mexico_2010/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier
*> , the company also claimed in federal documents that its drilling would
not have any adverse effect on endangered species.
The gulf is known for its biodiversity. Various endangered species are found
in the area where the Deepwater Horizon was drilling, including sperm
whales, blue whales and fin whales.
In some instance, the minerals agency has indeed sought and received permits
in the gulf to harm certain endangered species like green and loggerhead sea
turtles. But the agency has not received these permits for endangered
species like the sperm and humpback whales, which are more common in the
areas where drilling occurs and thus are more likely to be affected.
Tensions between scientists and managers at the agency erupted in one case
last year involving a rig in the gulf called the BP Atlantis. An agency
scientist complained to his bosses of catastrophic safety and environmental
violations. The engineer said these complaints were ignored, so he took his
concerns to higher officials at the Interior Department.
“The purpose of this letter is to restate in writing our concern that the BP
Atlantis project presently poses a threat of serious, immediate, potentially
irreparable and catastrophic harm to the waters of the Gulf of Mexico and
its marine environment, and to summarize how BP’s conduct has violated
federal law and regulations,” Kenneth Abbott, the agency scientist, wrote in
a letter to officials at the Interior Department that was dated May 27.
The letter added: “From our conversation on the phone, we understand that
M.M.S. is already aware that undersea manifolds have been leaking and that
major flow lines must already be replaced. Failure of this critical undersea
equipment has potentially catastrophic environmental consequences.”
Almost two months before the Deepwater Horizon exploded, Representative Raúl
M. Grijalva <*
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/raul_m_grijalva/index.html?inline=nyt-per
*> , Democrat of Arizona, sent a letter to the agency raising concerns about
the BP Atlantis and questioning its oversight of the rig.
After the disaster, Mr. Salazar said he would delay granting any new oil
drilling permits.
But the minerals agency has issued at least five final approval permits to
new drilling projects in the gulf since last week, records show.
*Despite being shown records indicating otherwise, Ms. Barkoff said her
agency had granted no new permits since Mr. Salazar made his announcement.
*
Other agencies besides NOAA have begun criticizing the minerals agency.
At a public hearing in Louisiana this week, a joint panel of Coast Guard and
Minerals Management Service officials investigating the explosion grilled
minerals agency officials for allowing the offshore drilling <*
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/o/offshore_drilling_and_exploration/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier
*> industry to be essentially “self-certified,” as Capt. Hung Nguyen of the
Coast Guard, a co-chairman of the investigation, put it.
In addition to the minerals agency and the Coast Guard, the Deepwater
Horizon was overseen by the Marshall Islands , the “flag of convenience”
under which it was registered.
No one from the Marshall Islands ever inspected the rig. The nongovernmental
organizations that did were paid by the rig’s operator, in this case
Transocean <*
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/transocean_inc/index.html?inline=nyt-org
*> .
Campbell Robertson contributed reporting from New Orleans , and Andy Lehren
from New York .
--
Robert D Powell
Congress Farm Research Institute
Wilmington, OH, USA
[log in to unmask]
http://rdp1710.wordpress.com
Nulla dies sine aves
______________________________________________________________________
Ohio-birds mailing list, a service of the Ohio Ornithological Society.
Our thanks to Miami University for hosting this mailing list.
Additional discussions can be found in our forums, at www.ohiobirds.org/forum/.
You can join or leave the list, or change your options, at:
http://listserv.muohio.edu/scripts/wa.exe?LIST=OHIO-BIRDS
Send questions or comments about the list to: [log in to unmask]
|
