Top White House officials manipulated the scientific findings of independent experts to “seriously lowball the amount of oil leaking from the BP Deepwater Horizon,” according to a group of federal, state, and municipal employees.
Not long after the Deepwater Horizon exploded on April 20, 2010, people in the coastal areas of Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida began complaining of respiratory irritation, headaches, dizziness, and other symptoms they believe were linked to the noxious fumes of the BP oil spill. Now a new government report about the pollution emitted from the spill and the attempts to clean it up may support such claims.
When Bonny Schumaker flew her small plane over the Gulf of Mexico to conduct a survey of whale sharks, her search instead turned up a massive oil slick that stretched for miles on the surface. The oil appeared to be emanating from the exact site of BP’s blown-out Macondo well, which gushed oil for months and created the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history.
BP’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was successfully capped a year ago, but hundreds of miles of Gulf coast beaches and marshlands are still contaminated by oil from the blown-out Macondo well. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), oil ranging in form from sticky crude to a light sheen covers about 491 miles of Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi coastline. Approximately 1,100 miles of coast have been covered with oil since BP’s Deepwater Horizon platform exploded April 20, 2010.
Unusually high numbers of dolphins have been washing ashore in Alabama and other Gulf states since BP’s offshore rig exploded and sank in the Gulf of Mexico a year ago, creating the biggest oil spill and environmental catastrophe the United States has ever seen. Now, despite a government order to keep their findings confidential, scientists examining the dolphins have linked many of their deaths to the massive oil spill.
Louisiana state and Plaquemines Parish officials took journalists on a tour of Barataria Bay last week to showcase how oily sludge from BP’s Gulf spill is being covered up and neglected in this and other ecologically sensitive areas of the state’s coastline.
Oceanographers and scientists have been warning that only time will reveal how much damage BP’s massive oil spill and its use of chemical oil dispersants in the Gulf of Mexico have done to the environment and marine ecology. This week a troubling sign has emerged in the form of an astonishingly large mass of floating dead fish just west of the Mississippi River in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s newly released fisheries report finds New Bedford, Massachusetts, and Dutch Harbor-Unalaska, Alaska, remaining at the top in 2009 for value and amount of fish landed, but the inclusion of several Gulf fisheries among last year’s top ten underscores just how much was lost in 2010 – for both the Gulf Coast and the national economy as a whole — in the wake of BP’s oil spill.
New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu told an audience at the National Press Club in Washington D.C. on Thursday that he lacks faith in BP and doesn’t trust the company to do the right thing in the aftermath of the oil spill.
Researchers have discovered that oil from BP’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico extends further east than previously thought. The extent of the spill isn’t visible from the surface because as much as 80 percent of the oil is on the sea floor, stretching from the blown-out well site south of New Orleans to 40 miles south of Panama City, Florida.
