MNeagle
20th May 2010, 02:13 PM
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Oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill is infiltrating the coast of Louisiana.
.The Environmental Protection Agency said Thursday it has ordered BP PLC to use a different chemical dispersant to break up oil gushing out of a broken underground pipe in the Gulf of Mexico.
BP has been using a dispersant called Corexit, made by Nalco Holding Co. The EPA authorized BP to use Corexit last week, but EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson had said that she was pushing the company to consider other dispersants that might be less harmful.
BP conceded Thursday that more oil than it estimated is gushing into the Gulf as heavy crude washed into Louisiana's wetlands for the first time, feeding worries and uncertainty about the massive monthlong spill.
A BP spokesman said that 5,000 barrels of oil a day were being collected through a mile-long tube the company inserted over the weekend, and acknowledged that there was still more oil leaking. A spokesman with the Unified Command, a unit established by the U.S. Coast Guard, BP, Transocean Ltd. and several U.S. agencies involved in responding to the spill, said that there was still an undetermined amount of oil leaking into the Gulf.
"The visible oil plume escaping from the riser pipe has noticeably declined," although it is impossible to give an exact measure of how much oil is still flowing into open water, the BP spokesman said.
The leak followed the April 20 explosion and later sinking of Transocean's Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, which was drilling for London-based BP about 40 miles from the Louisiana coast.
Scientists said water samples taken from far below the water's surface showed oil, and lawmakers in Congress raised concerns about the toxicity of the dispersants that BP is spraying on the spill.
Dispersants are traditionally used to break up oil slicks on the sea surface. The risks of underwater use over long periods of time are unknown. Initial testing of Corexit on small fish, conducted earlier this week, produced survival rates of 80% to 90%, the EPA chief told reporters Wednesday, but those tests don't measure long-term effects.
EPA spokeswoman Adora Andy confirmed that the agency ordered a switch. She said more details would come later. The EPA's decision was announced earlier by Rep. Ed Markey (D., Mass.), who has been warning that the release of large volumes of chemicals into the Gulf could be an "aggressive experiment."
The manufacturer of Sea Brat 4, Alabaster Corp. of Pasadena, Texas, said Wednesday that BP had ordered about 100,000 gallons. A BP spokesman said he didn't immediately know whether the EPA had ordered a switch. The chemical used at present is a version called Corexit 9500.
Last week, the EPA and the Coast Guard authorized chemical dispersants to be used undersea, saying that dispersants are generally less harmful than the "highly toxic oil leaking from the source." Officials have said that the government was put into an impossible situation of choosing between the shores and the seas.
BP's choice of Corexit came under heavy fire on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, where Democratic lawmakers questioned the use of the chemical and said that other dispersants on a government-approved list would be more effective and less harmful. Mr. Markey warned Monday that "the release of hundreds of thousands of gallons of chemicals into the Gulf of Mexico could be an unprecedented, large and aggressive experiment on our oceans."
Meanwhile, Louisiana officials reported the landfall of thick pockets of brownish oil in several parts of the state's fragile coastline, which they've dreaded since the blast.
"We knew it was coming," said PJ Hahn, Plaquemines Parish's Coastal Zone Manager. Mr. Hahn saw the crude first-hand on Wednesday in the sensitive Pass-a-Loutre Wildlife Management Area.
"It was just thick, gooey oil in pools all up against the marsh," he said. The marshes, which teem with wildlife, help keep erosion at bay, and if they're damaged by the crude, officials fear that even more of Louisiana's rapidly disappearing coastline would melt away into the Gulf.
"We haven't seen the worst of it," said Billy Nungesser, president of Plaquemines Parish, the area where the Mississippi empties into the gulf and the bulk of the beached oil has been found.
In an effort to stave off damage until a solution could be found, BP hired local fishermen to lay plastic piping, known as "boom," in spots along the Gulf coast. BP and federal officials have acknowledged that they don't have enough boom to wall off the entire coastline, a jagged jumble of inlets, islands and bays. So they are playing triage, deciding which areas are the most important to block off as winds and currents constantly shift.
Mr. Nungesser warned that more oil probably would wash ashore in coming days unless BP and state and federal officials moved fast to approve a plan from his parish to dredge and spray sand on submerged barrier islands along its coastline, in a frantic bid to build them up.
Plaquemines officials informed BP on Tuesday that they had spotted an oily sludge in the marshes. Cleanup crews still hadn't arrived by early Thursday morning, though they were expected later in the day, he said.
"This thing is not organized," Mr. Nungesser said of the cleanup effort. "They're trying," he said of BP officials, but "every day it keeps getting worse." BP officials were not immediately available for comment.
Until recently, government officials fighting the spill were expressing optimism. Spraying chemicals on the oil to break it up, collecting the oil with machines known as skimmers, and burning parts of the slick were containing the spill offshore, Benjamin Cooper, a Coast Guard commander helping lead the oil-spill response, told a gathering of shrimpers in south Louisiana on May 13.
"It's not the worst-case scenario we could have imagined," he said. "That's because of the efforts offshore,"
But now, the arrival of waves of thick oil is sparking a new round of criticism that BP and the government haven't properly deployed even the limited amount of boom that they have.
Rough weather over the past few days has broken up much of the boom that has been laid on the water, making it ineffective in blocking incoming oil, Mr. Nungesser said. "They have probably deployed the same boom ten times. It ends up on the beach," he said of BP and its contractors.
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal has endorsed a plan by Plaquemines Parish to do the boom one better. The idea is to dredge and spray area sand onto the top of barrier islands that now sit just below the surface of the gulf. Proponents say whatever oil washed up onto those beaches would be easier to clean up than oil that nestled in the marshes.
Mr. Nungesser said he believed the buildup of the barrier islands could be finished in 10 days if federal officials granted the necessary approvals. But the plan has been the subject of debate for some two weeks. Some environmental groups have expressed concerns that building up the islands would divert the natural flow of water along the coastline, potentially causing long-term environmental damage. They point to the way that Louisiana's decades-old levee system has contributed to erosion.
Further west, Terrebonne Parish spokesman Brennan Matherne said that "heavy brown oil" washed up on Fourchon Beach late Wednesday, covering about half of the 15-mile beachfront. Although no new oil had appeared on Thursday morning, "yesterday you could see it in the waves coming on," he added.
Both Messrs. Matherne and Hahn speculated that the oil may have been traveling underwater, raising concerns that it could be eluding the 1.4 million feet of boom lines deployed to contain it. "Booms are not doing it," Mr. Hahn said.
Link to Article (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703559004575256110885560980.html?m od=WSJ_hps_MIDDLESecondNews)
EDIT: Changed long link to named link to prevent horizontal scrolling. -Gaillo
Oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill is infiltrating the coast of Louisiana.
.The Environmental Protection Agency said Thursday it has ordered BP PLC to use a different chemical dispersant to break up oil gushing out of a broken underground pipe in the Gulf of Mexico.
BP has been using a dispersant called Corexit, made by Nalco Holding Co. The EPA authorized BP to use Corexit last week, but EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson had said that she was pushing the company to consider other dispersants that might be less harmful.
BP conceded Thursday that more oil than it estimated is gushing into the Gulf as heavy crude washed into Louisiana's wetlands for the first time, feeding worries and uncertainty about the massive monthlong spill.
A BP spokesman said that 5,000 barrels of oil a day were being collected through a mile-long tube the company inserted over the weekend, and acknowledged that there was still more oil leaking. A spokesman with the Unified Command, a unit established by the U.S. Coast Guard, BP, Transocean Ltd. and several U.S. agencies involved in responding to the spill, said that there was still an undetermined amount of oil leaking into the Gulf.
"The visible oil plume escaping from the riser pipe has noticeably declined," although it is impossible to give an exact measure of how much oil is still flowing into open water, the BP spokesman said.
The leak followed the April 20 explosion and later sinking of Transocean's Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, which was drilling for London-based BP about 40 miles from the Louisiana coast.
Scientists said water samples taken from far below the water's surface showed oil, and lawmakers in Congress raised concerns about the toxicity of the dispersants that BP is spraying on the spill.
Dispersants are traditionally used to break up oil slicks on the sea surface. The risks of underwater use over long periods of time are unknown. Initial testing of Corexit on small fish, conducted earlier this week, produced survival rates of 80% to 90%, the EPA chief told reporters Wednesday, but those tests don't measure long-term effects.
EPA spokeswoman Adora Andy confirmed that the agency ordered a switch. She said more details would come later. The EPA's decision was announced earlier by Rep. Ed Markey (D., Mass.), who has been warning that the release of large volumes of chemicals into the Gulf could be an "aggressive experiment."
The manufacturer of Sea Brat 4, Alabaster Corp. of Pasadena, Texas, said Wednesday that BP had ordered about 100,000 gallons. A BP spokesman said he didn't immediately know whether the EPA had ordered a switch. The chemical used at present is a version called Corexit 9500.
Last week, the EPA and the Coast Guard authorized chemical dispersants to be used undersea, saying that dispersants are generally less harmful than the "highly toxic oil leaking from the source." Officials have said that the government was put into an impossible situation of choosing between the shores and the seas.
BP's choice of Corexit came under heavy fire on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, where Democratic lawmakers questioned the use of the chemical and said that other dispersants on a government-approved list would be more effective and less harmful. Mr. Markey warned Monday that "the release of hundreds of thousands of gallons of chemicals into the Gulf of Mexico could be an unprecedented, large and aggressive experiment on our oceans."
Meanwhile, Louisiana officials reported the landfall of thick pockets of brownish oil in several parts of the state's fragile coastline, which they've dreaded since the blast.
"We knew it was coming," said PJ Hahn, Plaquemines Parish's Coastal Zone Manager. Mr. Hahn saw the crude first-hand on Wednesday in the sensitive Pass-a-Loutre Wildlife Management Area.
"It was just thick, gooey oil in pools all up against the marsh," he said. The marshes, which teem with wildlife, help keep erosion at bay, and if they're damaged by the crude, officials fear that even more of Louisiana's rapidly disappearing coastline would melt away into the Gulf.
"We haven't seen the worst of it," said Billy Nungesser, president of Plaquemines Parish, the area where the Mississippi empties into the gulf and the bulk of the beached oil has been found.
In an effort to stave off damage until a solution could be found, BP hired local fishermen to lay plastic piping, known as "boom," in spots along the Gulf coast. BP and federal officials have acknowledged that they don't have enough boom to wall off the entire coastline, a jagged jumble of inlets, islands and bays. So they are playing triage, deciding which areas are the most important to block off as winds and currents constantly shift.
Mr. Nungesser warned that more oil probably would wash ashore in coming days unless BP and state and federal officials moved fast to approve a plan from his parish to dredge and spray sand on submerged barrier islands along its coastline, in a frantic bid to build them up.
Plaquemines officials informed BP on Tuesday that they had spotted an oily sludge in the marshes. Cleanup crews still hadn't arrived by early Thursday morning, though they were expected later in the day, he said.
"This thing is not organized," Mr. Nungesser said of the cleanup effort. "They're trying," he said of BP officials, but "every day it keeps getting worse." BP officials were not immediately available for comment.
Until recently, government officials fighting the spill were expressing optimism. Spraying chemicals on the oil to break it up, collecting the oil with machines known as skimmers, and burning parts of the slick were containing the spill offshore, Benjamin Cooper, a Coast Guard commander helping lead the oil-spill response, told a gathering of shrimpers in south Louisiana on May 13.
"It's not the worst-case scenario we could have imagined," he said. "That's because of the efforts offshore,"
But now, the arrival of waves of thick oil is sparking a new round of criticism that BP and the government haven't properly deployed even the limited amount of boom that they have.
Rough weather over the past few days has broken up much of the boom that has been laid on the water, making it ineffective in blocking incoming oil, Mr. Nungesser said. "They have probably deployed the same boom ten times. It ends up on the beach," he said of BP and its contractors.
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal has endorsed a plan by Plaquemines Parish to do the boom one better. The idea is to dredge and spray area sand onto the top of barrier islands that now sit just below the surface of the gulf. Proponents say whatever oil washed up onto those beaches would be easier to clean up than oil that nestled in the marshes.
Mr. Nungesser said he believed the buildup of the barrier islands could be finished in 10 days if federal officials granted the necessary approvals. But the plan has been the subject of debate for some two weeks. Some environmental groups have expressed concerns that building up the islands would divert the natural flow of water along the coastline, potentially causing long-term environmental damage. They point to the way that Louisiana's decades-old levee system has contributed to erosion.
Further west, Terrebonne Parish spokesman Brennan Matherne said that "heavy brown oil" washed up on Fourchon Beach late Wednesday, covering about half of the 15-mile beachfront. Although no new oil had appeared on Thursday morning, "yesterday you could see it in the waves coming on," he added.
Both Messrs. Matherne and Hahn speculated that the oil may have been traveling underwater, raising concerns that it could be eluding the 1.4 million feet of boom lines deployed to contain it. "Booms are not doing it," Mr. Hahn said.
Link to Article (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703559004575256110885560980.html?m od=WSJ_hps_MIDDLESecondNews)
EDIT: Changed long link to named link to prevent horizontal scrolling. -Gaillo