http://www.desmogblog.com/2015/04/21/five-years-after-bp-oil-spill-gulf-coast-residents-say-bp-hasn-t-made-things-right
[video, links and images in on-line article]
Five Years After The BP Oil Spill, Gulf Coast Residents Say “BP Hasn’t
Made Things Right”
By Julie Dermansky • Tuesday, April 21, 2015 - 21:31
If you ask Dean Blanchard, the largest shrimp buyer and wholesaler in
the region surrounding Grand Isle, Louisiana, things “went from paradise
to hell” in the five years following the BP oil disaster.
But BP's advertisements insist the company is making things right. A BP
report on the State of the Gulf five years after the spill claims there
is no lasting damage to the ecosystem.
Behind the industry public relations spin, many coastal residents,
including Blanchard, have seen their livelihoods destroyed and their
health comprised.
“Things continue to get worse,” Blanchard said.
On April 9, tar balls were readily found every few feet along the
beaches of Grand Island and nearby Elmer's Island. Blanchard says there
is a cleanup crew still around, but he never sees them picking anything up.
“Everyone knows that the claim BP has made the Gulf whole is just a
bunch of bullshit,” Kindra Arnesen, resident of Venice, LA, told DeSmogBlog.
“If they had tried as hard to make the Gulf whole as they tried to spin
the truth, maybe we would be on our way to recovery.”
Blanchard concurs, quipping that “BP stands for British Pinocchio.”
Blanchard and Arnesen have spoken out about the injustice they and their
communities have faced since the early days of the largest oil spill in
American history. Five years after the Deepwater Horizon platform blew
up, taking the lives of 11 men and causing a yet to be determined amount
of environmental damage, neither of them believes the region will ever
be the same.
“I have been to a funeral now every month since July,” Arnesen told
DeSmogBlog. “Everyone around me is sick.”
She is tired of her children suffering from rashes and headaches, and
she wonders how much longer her husband, a fisherman who worked as an
oil spill cleanup worker, can go on due to constant illnesses.
Friends who have left the area tell her their children's health improved
soon after. Arnesen wants to move her family away, but she can't afford
to. Her house has been on the market since 2012, and the bulk of her
business claim against BP is held up in court, leaving her finances in
shambles and the idea of relocating an impossible dream.
“Everyone around me is dying,” Blanchard said. “The Coast Guard can be
bought off. It is a very sad situation. Everything you believe America
to be, it is not.” Referring to Corexit, the dispersant that BP dumped
on the spill, Blanchard added, “I thought I paid taxes for the
government to protect me, not to try to kill me. I never thought they'd
let them spray poison all over us.”
Blanchard's sale of shrimp this year is down 75% and fish sales are off
90%. As for getting restitution for his business losses from BP, she
isn’t optimistic.
“Five years after the spill and I still don't have a court date,” he
said. “There is no such thing as a speedy trial when you are fighting an
oil company.”
Arnesen received some money from the BP claims process, but the bulk of
her family’s business loss claim has been under investigation for the
last year and a half. ”How much time should it take to review 55
documents?” she asks.
Many think BP is delaying payment to try to wear people down or, in some
cases, outlive them.
In March, on the day BP released its glowing report on the state of the
Gulf, Blanchard's brother Greg took a camera crew to East Grand Terre, a
barrier island five miles off the coast of Grand Isle, where a BP
cleanup crew was removing a large tar mat. Had Blanchard not spotted the
cleanup effort the day before, news of the tar mat likely would have
gone unreported.
WWL-TV’s cameraman filmed the cleanup effort. From the time the cleanup
began until March 17, 2,200 pounds of weathered oil and sand were
removed, according to the Coast Guard. He also filmed a mother dolphin
pushing a dead calf around in Barataria Bay, in the waters off East
Grand Terre.
The dolphin population in Barataria Bay was the focus of a peer-reviewed
study that is part of the ongoing Deepwater Horizon Natural Resource
Damage Assessment (NRDA). The study showed live dolphins in the bay had
health problems consistent with exposure to petroleum products. The
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration also reported that
dolphins have experienced a greatly increased mortality rate along the
Gulf Coast since the oil spill.
But BP issued a statement claiming the dolphin population was already
experiencing a high mortality rate in the months before the spill, and
there is no definitive proof the company is responsible for the higher
rate, it claims.
BP Vice President Geoff Morrell shifted the blame for the tar mat. “At
Grand Terre II [also known as East Grand Terre], the state continued
with a beach replenishment program as oil came ashore in 2010, burying
the oil under layers of sand,” Morrell stated.
It seems BP's paid scientists and consultants find a way to deflect
blame on everything connected to the spill, according to Kyle Graham,
Louisiana's Trustee for NRDA.
“They would like us to believe that it is purely coincidence that these
mortality events have a higher occurrence in the areas that experience
the highest level of oiling,” Graham told WWL News. “Independent
scientists have taken a look at this and do believe the two are linked.”
On March 31, Restore the Mississippi River Delta Coalition, a coalition
of environmental groups, took members of the media to the site where the
tar mat cleanup took place on East Grand Terre. The group found another
tar mat in the same location. BP cleanup workers either missed some of
the tar mat found weeks before, or a new one had been uncovered.
On April 9, Blanchard visited the same spot with DeSmogBlog and found
the tar mat the coalition observed was still there.
Scientists and NRDA commission trustees have said it is too soon to know
the full extent of the damage caused by the spill. “It is inappropriate
as well as premature for BP to reach conclusions about impacts from the
spill before the completion of the assessment, ” the NRDA wrote in
response to BP's report.
“The oil is still there,” Linda Hooper Bui, an entomologist at Louisiana
State University, told DeSmogBlog, and it is “being remobilized by storms.”
Previously un-oiled areas in the marsh along Barataria Bay became oiled
after Hurricane Gustav in 2012. The remobilization of the oil tells her
the oil spill is not an acute event — it is chronic — and just “how
devastating this chronic event is, is yet to be determined.”
Bui was happy to report that beginning in November 2014, she found signs
the ant population was rebounding. However, because the spill
constitutes a chronic event, she said, “It is impossible to know if the
ant population will continue to thrive.”
Bui is alarmed by conversations about how things might be handled if
there is another spill. “There can't be a next time,” Bui said. She
doesn't think the already stressed ecosystem could handle it. “In some
places we might have dodged a bullet; in other places I'm not so sure.”
When it comes to continued oil drilling in the Gulf, according to Bui,
“the safety mechanicals, whatever their cost might be, must be put in
place.” But she doesn't believe things are moving in that direction.
President Obama tabled a proposal to allow drilling in the Atlantic
following the BP oil spill. Almost five years later, he put his proposal
back on the table, despite the fact the government's damage assessment
from the BP spill has not been completed.
“The people pushing for drilling along the Atlantic are the ones who are
getting money from BP,” Blanchard said. “Those East Coast congressmen
and senators want the same millions the ones in Louisiana and Texas get.”
The use of Corexit taught Blanchard that BP never intended to do the
right thing. According to Blanchard, the dispersant was used so BP
wouldn't have to pick up the oil. The reactive cleanup that did take
place lined the pockets of the companies connected to the oil and gas
industry that were tasked to handle it.
If BP wanted to do the right thing, Blanchard wonders, why hasn’t a
single person from the company sat down and talked to him in his office.
Never one to suppress the reality, he sums up his experience dealing
with the aftermath of the spill: “The oil business is controlling the
whole world.”
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