Hot on the heels of the announced Halliburton settlement comes this, making me think that there is still more covered up. From the New York Times:NEW ORLEANS — In the four years since the blowout on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig killed 11 workers and sent millions of barrels of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, BP has spent more than $28 billion on damage claims and cleanup costs, pleaded guilty to criminal charges and emerged a shrunken giant.The rest of the piece is HERE.
But through it all, the company has maintained that it was not chiefly responsible for the accident, and that its contractors in the operation, Halliburton and Transocean, should shoulder as much, if not more, of the blame.
On Thursday, a federal judge here for the first time bluntly rejected those arguments, finding that BP was indeed the primary culprit and that only it had acted with “conscious disregard of known risks.” He added that BP’s “conduct was reckless.”
By finding that BP was, in legal parlance, grossly negligent in the disaster, and not merely negligent, United States District Court Judge Carl J. Barbier opened the possibility of $18 billion in new civil penalties for BP, nearly quadruple the maximum Clean Water Act penalty for simple negligence and far more than the $3.5 billion the company has set aside.
Scientists at Penn State University have discovered two new coral reefs near the site of BP’s historic 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and the impacts to those reefs from the spill have been greater than expected, according to research released Monday.
The two additional reefs found by the PSU team were both farther away and deeper than the one coral reef that had previously been found to have been impacted by the spill. That indicates not only that marine ecosystems may be more greatly affected, but that some of the 210 million gallons of oil that BP spilled into the Gulf is making its mark in the deep sea.
“The footprint of the impact of the spill on coral communities is both deeper and wider than previous data indicated,” PSU biology professor Charles Fisher, who led the study, said.
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — The U.S. Supreme Court says BP must continue paying claims from a fund established after the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill while the company appeals terms of its settlement with some businesses.
The justices on Monday let stand without comment lower court refusals to halt payments while BP PLC appeals lower court rulings that businesses don't have to prove they were directly harmed by the spill to collect money.
The 5th Circuit and a district court have ruled that BP must stand by its agreement to pay such business claims without requiring strict proof that the spill caused losses.
The order indicates that the high court is unlikely to hear BP's appeal, said Loyola University law professor Blaine LeCesne, who is not involved in the case. BP contends that that the claims administrator is misinterpreting its agreement with many businesses.
"It's obviously a major victory for the plaintiffs, who can now proceed with processing these business economic loss claims," he said. "Given the several months interim before the Supreme Court rules on the appeal, likely many of these claims will have been processed and paid."
Steve Herman and Jim Roy, lead attorneys for businesses and individuals who have filed claims against BP, said in a one-sentence statement that the order "will allow businesses to continue to receive the compensation they're rightly entitled to according to the objective, transparent formulas agreed to by BP."
Motorists in Delaware were buzzing with one of the most unusual police alerts ever: “Transient bee swarms in the area.”
A tractor-trailer hauling 460 hives from Florida to Maine overturned on a northbound on-ramp on I-95 in Newark, Del., releasing between 16 million and 20 million bees and causing police to advise drivers to avoid the area.
The driver, 55, and two passengers in their 20s suffered minor injuries in the crash, but were each stung by between 50 and 100 bees.
"(They) were running down the street covered in bees, receiving multiple bee stings," Lawrence Tan, chief of New Castle County Paramedics, told WPVI. The station also sent out a photo of the accident scene:
The three were taken to a hospital and are in stable condition, according to multiple reports in the local media.
The state police have had a contingency plan in place for the removal of bee swarms for 14 years, but until now, it's just been words on paper. (bolding mine)
"This is the first time we've actually activated the plan," Sgt. Paul G. Shavack told Delaware Online.
With so many bees around the truck, it took at least an hour before police could even get near it -- so they called in experts, as the plan advises.
“Having traveled up from Florida, up here they’re probably thirsty, now they’re all disoriented and angry I’m sure,” beekeeper Dave Feinberg told CBS Philadelphia.
"They've been traumatized so they're pretty upset now," Paul Dill, another beekeeper, told CSNPhilly.com.
Beekeepers advised police not to attempt to round them up but to disperse them with water. Video of the scene shows firefighters spraying the wreck.
The bees were being brought to Maine to pollinate blueberries, NBC Philadelphia reports. But it's estimated that 90 percent of the bees were lost as a result of the accident.
It's not a total loss for everyone, though. Local beekeepers are being allowed to keep whatever bees they can roundup.
A divided panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Monday that businesses seeking money as part of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill settlement need not prove they were directly harmed by the accident and its aftermath to collect payments. The ruling is likely to be appealed by BP to the full 5th Circuit Court or the U.S. Supreme Court.
The decision was immediately criticized by BP. "BP disagrees with today’s decision," said Geoff Morrell, a senior vice president for BP America. "BP had asked the court to prevent payments to business economic loss claimants whose alleged injuries are not traceable to the Deepwater Horizon accident and oil spill. BP believes that such ... claimants are not proper class members under the terms of the settlement and is considering its appellate options."
The Plaintiff Steering Committee, made up of attorneys representing claimants, praised the decision. "Today's ruling makes clear that BP can't rewrite the deal it agreed to," said a joint statement by lead attorneys Steven Herman and James Roy Monday's ruling is the latest in a series by two three-judge panels of the 5th Circuit concerning the way U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier has overseen the approval of the settlement and its implementation by court-appointed claims administrator Patrick Juneau. Within a week of the settlement agreement's approval in early 2013, as it became clear that the claims payouts would exceed the company's original estimate of $7.8 billion, BP began questioning its application of the settlement agreement. By July, the company's estimate had risen to $9.6 billion.
But in Monday's ruling, written by Judge Leslie Southwick with Judge James Dennis issuing a separate concurring opinion, the 5th Circuit panel agreed with Barbier's Dec. 24 opinion that the language contained in the settlement agreement and its exhibits was in line with federal court rules governing settlements in class action lawsuits. Barbier said those rules recognize that the purpose of such settlements in large damage cases is in part to reduce the expense and burden that would be involved by holding individual trials for each claimant. In the case of the oil spill, the number of claimants could easily reach 200,000.
Barbier also ruled that BP's demand that all business claimants prove "causation" before being paid was an improper reversal of the company's original strategy in the settlement. BP asserted that the payments were improper long after the company's attorneys agreed during court proceedings that many businesses and other claimants living closest to coastal areas directly affected by the spill would be assumed to be damaged by the spill.
Sydney (AFP) - An expedition to a remote part of northern Australia has uncovered three new vertebrate species isolated for millions of years, with scientists Monday calling the area a "lost world".
Conrad Hoskin from James Cook University and a National Geographic film crew were dropped by helicopter onto the rugged Cape Melville mountain range on Cape York Peninsula earlier this year and were amazed at what they found.
It included a bizarre looking leaf-tail gecko, a gold-coloured skink -- a type of lizard -- and a brown-spotted, yellow boulder-dwelling frog, none of them ever seen before. "The top of Cape Melville is a lost world. Finding these new species up there is the discovery of a lifetime -- I'm still amazed and buzzing from it," said Hoskin, a tropical biologist from the Queensland-based university.
"Finding three new, obviously distinct vertebrates would be surprising enough in somewhere poorly explored like New Guinea, let alone in Australia, a country we think we've explored pretty well."
The virtually impassable mountain range is home to millions of black granite boulders the size of cars and houses piled hundreds of metres high, eroded in places after being thrust up through the earth millions of years ago.
While surveys had previously been conducted in the boulder-fields around the base of Cape Melville, a plateau of boulder-strewn rainforest on top, identified by satellite imagery, had remained largely unexplored, fortressed by massive boulder walls. Within days of arriving, the team had discovered the three new species as well as a host of other interesting finds that Hoskins said may also be new to science.
The highlight was the leaf-tailed gecko, a "primitive-looking" 20 centimetre-long (7.9 inches) creature that is an ancient relic from a time when rainforest was more widespread in Australia. The Cape Melville Leaf-tailed Gecko, which has huge eyes and a long, slender body, is highly distinct from its relatives and has been named Saltuarius eximius, Hoskin said, with the findings detailed in the latest edition of the international journal Zootaxa.
"The second I saw the gecko I knew it was a new species. Everything about it was obviously distinct," he said. Highly camouflaged, the geckos sit motionless, head-down, waiting to ambush passing insects and spiders.
The Cape Melville Shade Skink is also restricted to moist rocky rainforest on the plateau, and is highly distinct from its relatives, which are found in rainforests to the south.
Also discovered was a small boulder-dwelling frog, the Blotched Boulder-frog, which during the dry season lives deep in the labyrinth of the boulder-field where conditions are cool and moist, allowing female frogs to lay their eggs in wet cracks in the rocks.
In the absence of water, the tadpole develops within the egg and a fully formed frog hatches out.There is more HERE.
Aside from my increased knowledge of the Cuttlefish, the days creep by with no new information or stats from the doctors. Waiting for reports to file claims for disability and other benefits I may be entitled to in my present situation.
WASHINGTON, Sept 24 (Reuters) - The muddy deep-sea ecosystem around the massive 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill could take decades to recover from the effects of the disaster, researchers reported on Tuesday.So, the fat lady isn't even warming up to sing and won't be for a while.
The oil spill from BP Plc's Macondo well had its most severe impact on the ecosystem in an area about nine square miles (24 square km) around the wellhead, the report in the online scientific journal PLoS One said.
Moderate effects were seen at 57 square miles (148 square km). The sea bottom's rich biodiversity was greatly reduced by the oil plume, which was up to 200 yards (183 meters) thick and 1.2 miles (1.9 km) wide, it said.
"Given deep-sea conditions, it is possible that recovery of deep-sea soft-bottom habitat and the associated communities in the vicinity of the DWH blowout will take decades or longer," the report concluded.
The April 20, 2010 disaster aboard the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig killed 11 workers and ruptured the Macondo well, triggering the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history.
The research was carried out for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Paul Montagna, an ecosystems professor at Texas A&M University, said on NOAA's website that normally pollution was found within 300 to 600 yards (meters) of an offshore well.
In the Macondo case, it was found nearly two miles (3.2 km) from the well, he said.
Jeff Baguley, an expert on tiny marine and freshwater invertebrates from the University of Nevada, said on the NOAA website that the samples showed that the dominant group in affected areas had become nematode worms.
The research team included members from University of Nevada-Reno, Texas A&M, NOAA's National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science and representatives from BP.
WASHINGTON — Imagine a mini-raccoon with a teddy bear face that is so cute it's hard to resist, let alone overlook. But somehow science did – until now.
Researchers announced Thursday a rare discovery of a new species of mammal called the olinguito. The reddish-brown animal is about 14-inches long with an equally long tail and weighs about 2 pounds.
It belongs to a grouping of large creatures that include dogs, cats and bears.
The critter leaps through the trees of mountainous forests of Ecuador and Colombia at night, according to a Smithsonian researcher who has spent the past decade tracking them.
But the adorable olinguito (oh-lihn-GEE'-toe) shouldn't have been so hard to find. One of them once lived in the Smithsonian-run National Zoo in Washington for a year in a case of mistaken identity.
"It's been kind of hiding in plain sight for a long time" despite its extraordinary beauty, said Kristofer Helgen, the Smithsonian's curator of mammals.
The little zoo critter, named Ringerl, was mistaken for a sister species, the olingo. Before she died in 1976, Ringerl was shipped from zoo to zoo in Louisville, Ky., Tucson, Ariz., Salt Lake City, Washington and New York City to try to get it to breed with other olingos.
She wouldn't.
"It turns out she wasn't fussy," Helgen said. "She wasn't the right species."
The discovery is described in a study in the journal ZooKey.
Helgen first figured olinguitos were different from olingos when he was looking at pelts and skeletons in a museum. He later led a team to South America in 2006.
"When we went to the field we found it in the very first night," said study co-author Roland Kays of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. "It was almost like it was waiting for us."
It's hard to figure how olingos and onlinguitos were confused for each other.
"How is it different? In almost every way that you can look at it," Helgen said.
Olinguitos are smaller, have shorter tails, a rounder face, tinier ears and darker bushier fur, he said.
"It looks kind of like a fuzzball ... kind of like a cross between a teddy bear and a house cat," Helgen said.
It eats fruit and has one baby at a time. Helgen figures there are thousands of olinguitos in the mountainous forest, traveling through the trees at night which makes them hard to see.
While new species are found regularly, usually they are tiny things like insects and not mammals, the warm-blooded advanced class of animals that have hair, live births and mammary glands in females.
Outside experts said this discovery is not merely renaming something, but a genuine new species – with three new subspecies. It's the type of significant find that hasn't happened in the Americas for about 35 years.
"Most people believe there are no new species to discover, particularly of relatively large charismatic animals," said Case Western Reserve University anatomy professor Darin Croft. "This study demonstrates that this is clearly not the case."
BP CEO Robert Dudley told Businessweek in an interviewThursday that continuing to send millions of dollars to people who claim they were hurt by the 2010 disaster is “not good for America.” While BP is trying to halt its paymentsand reduce the amount owed to victims, Dudley claimed the company has been the wronged party:We are still committed to make sure that legitimate claimants and people who were true victims of the spill are paid. [...]Dudley’s claim that BP has in good faith agreed to all of the damages misrepresents the current state of affairs. The company has actually been working to reduce its debts. BP had asked a federal judge to halt spill payments, though the judge decided against BP yesterday. That will not prevent BP from fighting claims with its new hotline that pays watchdogs to report fraud.
Quite frankly, the results have been really strange. The claims going through a claims facility have resulted in absurd results, and millions of dollars are going out to pay people who suffered, in many cases, no losses from the spill. And this is just not right. I don’t think it’s right for America. We’re a big investor in the United States, and we’ve challenged this really strongly. It’s just not right.
Since scientists can’t quite quantify the true environmental or economic consequences of the Gulf Oil spill, exactly who was impacted is still unclear. For instance, tar continues to wash up onto the coast.
Based on the interview, the BP CEO is perplexed as to why Americans perceive the oil industry badly. This negative perception might have something to do with receiving billion-dollar subsidies for a highly profitable industry that charges high gas prices. BP claims it pays too much in taxes, despite receiving an annual $300 million in estimated tax breaks on top of a $12 billion profit last year.
 |
April 21, 2013
Three years after an explosion at British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico killed 11 workers, injured dozens, and set off the worst oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry, the waters along Gulf Coast seems almost back to normal. Much of the oil is gone. New Orleans-based photographer Julie Dermansky says there’s still a lot left. The oil, she says, is often hard to locate because it has a tendency to play hide and seek.
Dermansky, who photographed the spill in 2010 “pretty much non-stop for four months, has been doggedly following the story for the past three years — reading up all the research she can lay her hands on, making trips out to the worst impacted areas in Louisiana every few months, and talking to people from affected communities. In the early days of the spill the spill she was hired by several major publications, including The Times, London, The Washington Post, and Der Spiegel.
But these days she travels without assignment, covering expenses on her own since few publications hire photographers or reporters to cover what’s now an old news story. Last, Dermansky again visited the beaches and marshes along the Louisiana and Mississippi coast — some of the worst hit areas where crews are still cleaning up tar mats and tar balls. I spoke with Dermansky via email and over the phone about her trip and her assessment of the situation in the Gulf Coast.
Maureen Nandini Mitra: What did you find on your recent trip out to Grand Isle, Bay Jimmy in Louisiana, and the Mississippi coast?
Julie Dermansy: There was oil sheen stirred up from the turbulence in the Bay Jimmy PJ Hahn Plaquemines Parish director of coastal zone management, who I accompanied on an oil spotting trip, turned over some of the dead marsh grass and exposed roots covered in hardened oil. There was also hardened oil on top of some of the surface we walked on. With each step on the surface, oil sheen spread around my boots. Much of the vegetation there is now dead. That’s tragic as with less vegetation coastal erosion, already a problem before the spill, has intensified. A rainbow oil sheen has moved over parts of the marsh surface. There were signs of life though: small crabs moving around, snails and, raccoon paw prints.
On Grand Isle, at the state park, I found tar balls ranging from the size of a quarter to eight inches long. The beach was not blanketed in them but you could find one every couple of feet.
On the beach in Mississippi, from Waveland to Pass Christian, I found tar balls and dead animals including a Kemp's Ridely turtle (pictured above). Though finding dead animals on the beach is not uncommon, I find the quantity of dead animals on the shore in Mississippi alarming. How the animals are dying is impossible to say. There is no proof the deaths are BP related as none of the scientific studies done on the dolphins and sea turtles have been released. The results of those studies are controlled by the NRDA [Natural Resources Damage Assessment] and are part the evidence being used in the current civil trial going on against BP in New Orleans.
MNM: You mentioned earlier that this is a difficult story to cover because of the "hide and seek oil plays." Could you elaborate on that?
JD: From the start of covering the spill it was every photojournalists task to find the oil. There would be a sighting one day and if you could get yourself out to those coordinates you very well may have found it gone. Odds are it wouldn't be in the same place. It kept, and keeps, moving with the tides. Last week the tide is higher then usual and there was a south wind, so odds were if you went to Bay Jimmy where the oil had hit the hardest, you wouldn't find anything. When I went on Monday (April 15) with PJ Hahn, he was surprised and saddened we found as much as we did.
Yes, it was a very busy day. Why do you ask?
