BP oil spill 10 years later: Kemp's ridleys even more endangered

A new National Wildlife Federation report, 10 Species, 10 Years Later: A Look at Gulf Restoration after the Deepwater Horizon Disaster, looks at the latest information available about ten wildlife species that were affected by the BP oil spill as well as the restoration underway. The report describes several species that are still struggling a decade later including corals, coastal bottlenose dolphins and Kemp's ridley sea turtles.

NWF says that the endangered Kemp's ridley sea turtle’s once-promising recovery seems to have halted in 2010. Before 2009, Kemp’s ridley nests were burgeoning at a rate of about 19 percent a year; nesting has been erratic since the spill. Coastal bottlenose dolphins in oiled areas are still sick and dying a decade later. Successful births remain less than a quarter of normal levels. Corals in several locations — including some colonies that are more than six centuries old — still show signs of oil damage and are not expected to recover.

In a press call recently, David Muth, director of Gulf of Mexico restoration, said: "This was an extraordinary event, the largest oil spill in U.S. history and it caused extraordinary harm, triggered an extraordinary response."

The BP oil spill that began April 20, 2010 caused 11 men to die from the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig off the Lousiana coast. The battle to cap the Macondo well caused a scramble on the part of both British-based petroleum behemoth BP and the U.S. government. It was finally capped 87 days later, after a horrific cost to the Gulf of Mexico - from wildlife to marine life to the environment and residents.

The report describes restoration activities underway on behalf of Gulf wildlife, such as how restored barrier islands in Louisiana are providing a nesting habitat for brown pelicans and laughing gulls, as well as other coastal birds harmed by the oil spill such as terns and skimmers; and how endangered Kemp’s ridley sea turtles are benefiting from a multi-faceted project, which includes funding for protecting a nesting beach in Texas, and enhancing capacity to assist injured sea turtles Gulf-wide.

Jessica Bibza, policy specialist on the National Wildlife Federation’s Gulf of Mexico restoration program, said, “Many questions about the impacts of the oil spill on wildlife and habitats remain unanswered to this day.”

And Muth said: “Right now, we have an unprecedented opportunity to meaningfully improve the health and resilience of the Gulf of Mexico. Great projects are being put in the ground from Texas to Florida. We need to continue to focus on helping Gulf wildlife and their habitats recover from the oil spill while increasing their resilience to sea-level rise and increasingly extreme storms. We also need to make sure that all restoration investments are based on sound science.”

A 2016 Department of Justice settlement with BP resulted in the largest environmental bill in U.S. history, $20.8 billion, with the five Gulf coast states. So far, Muth says only $4b has been spent. He looks forward to putting the rest of the money to good purpose. "It is an opportunity we cannot afford to squander."

To read the report, visit: https://restorethegulf.nwf.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/nwf_gulfreport2020_web.pdf

Photo: By NPS Staff (Padre Island National Seashore, Division of Sea Turtle Science and Recovery) - NPGallery, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=80049956. NOTE: The area where these Kemp's ridleys exist is miles from where the spill occurred, but there is evidence of migration from other parts of the Gulf.

BP oil spill 10th anniversary: still unanswered questions concerning Corexit, human and wildlife toll

Ten years ago 11 rig workers lost their lives working on the Deepwater Horizon out in the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of Louisiana. Their names were Jason Anderson, Aaron Dale Burkeen, Donald "Duck" Clark, Stephen Ray Curtis, Gordon Jones, Roy Wyatt Kemp, Karl Kleppinger, Keith Blair Manuel, Dewey Revette, Shane Roshto and Adam Weise. I offer my deepest condolences to their families and ask that the public remember them.

They were not the only victims of the BP oil spill.

I reported on the effects of the tragedy for Examiner.com, and was even invited to speak about my coverage at the University of Georgia for "Building Bridges in Crisis" along with reporters from NPR and The New York Times. During my speech that day in January 2011 I spoke about the horrors that occurred, how I had "colored out of the lines" to find sources, including sick Gulf residents and their children. I talked about conference calls with those in charge of the spill, namely Admiral Thad Allen, who told me, "Issues related to offshore drilling and the moratorium ...are really above my pay grade." He said he would leave policy to the policy makers.

I said I was excited to interview biogeochemist Samantha Joye from University of Georgia, under the headline "Academics Help Keep Feds Honest". And in the quest for honesty, I never bought one aspect of the "recovery" and that was the use of Corexit. Shirley Tillman, an activist, took remarkable photos of turtles and bird parts. She was convinced that the foamy water that surrounded these perished wildlife and marine life was evidence that Corexit was still being used in the Gulf long after the feds officially had stated it was occurring.

I am writing this April 20, 2020, during the heat of the greatest catastrophe of my lifetime, Covid-19. Knowing that the coronavirus is especially toxic to the elderly and those with preexisting conditions, it is a natural leap to realize that Corexit, the dispersant banned in England, sickened and even killed individuals along the Gulf. I think of the mother of a young woman I interviewed, 62-year-old Fritzi Presley, a blonde chanteuse from Gulfport, Miss. who very tragically died September 25, 2017. While the official diagnosis was COPD, Presley and her family and friends fought long and hard to prove that Corexit was the culprit. In a video called "Leaving with Grace: A Conversation with Ms Fritzi" Presley, wearing a breathing tube and yet still smiling, explained to the cameraman why she was nearing death. It was not because of COPD, but then, she could not prove her case to the country doctors she'd known all her life. She was kind. She did not blame them. It was clear who she blamed: "“You can’t connect A with C because we have moneyed up B."

Presley grew up in Mississippi, and her heart was in that Gulf. She said she just wanted her family to enjoy the same pleasures she had there, like the "feelin' of the sand stickin' to the backs of your legs when you're runnin' across the beach ...!" It inspired a tear - my mother grew up near the Gulf in South Texas, and I recall fondly frolicking on those shores. That is why, when I heard about the spill, I knew I had to cover it. I also recall exactly how much oil would stick to my feet on a given outing when I was a kid in the 1960s. It is an area rife with deepwater drilling, and yet it never suffered anything as oppressive as the April 2010 disaster: 200 million gallons of crude oil was pumped into the Gulf of Mexico for 87 days, making it the biggest oil spill in U.S. history. Finally on July 15, the Macondo well, site of the gusher, was capped. Yet the cost to the Gulf by air dropping Corexit in the preceding weeks was horrific.

By using Corexit, a dispersant banned in the very country where it was made, the UK, the government and BP aggravated the cost to the Gulf. While it made things prettier at the surface, below marine life and above wildlife and humans suffered greatly. In a report by the Government Accountability Project, the truth about Corexit was exposed. They write: "The only so-­‐called advantage of Corexit is the false impression that the oil disappears – in reality, the more toxic chemical mixture spreads throughout the environment, or settles on the seafloor." In 2012 a study from Georgia Tech and Universidad Autonoma de Aguascalientes in Environmental Pollution showed that Corexit used during the spill had increased the toxicity of the oil by up to 52 times.

In addition to Fritzi Presley, her daughter and her granddaughter Bella, now 6, suffered greatly because of Corexit. Proving this, for whatever reasons, was impossible. Perhaps one need only be reminded of Presley's comment about money. Daughter Daisy Seal, 39, tells me now: "I lived a few blocks away from the beach during the spill. I was on the beach the day of. I had gotten tar all over my feet and nothing would get it off. I finally had to scrub them with gas. I do not go to the beach any more."

Five years ago I wrote about Seal's daughter Bella, who today needs a kidney transplant to save her life, born after her mother suffered innumerable miscarriages. I reported then:

She was born with severe health problems.

"I don't want people to feel sorry for her," the mother says simply, and indeed Bella is a bright and beautiful little girl. But she is underweight, her kidneys haven't worked since birth, Seal says. She has end-stage renal failure and rickets.

It's actually too much for a journalist to even listen to. How can a mother manage?

"She has problems with calcium being too high and it causes her bones to be brittle and for them to twist and not grow properly and her brain not to have a chance to grow like it is supposed to," says Seal. "And her parathyroid hormones might have to be removed because they can't get hormones down."

Seal told me this week via e-mail that, "To this day they still do not know what caused her kidney failure. But she is an awesome kid. She is unable to attend school because of her many medical problems...I am too busy playing nurse and just running everyday errands. We live a few miles from the beach now in an apartment." On a happier note, she has a 17-year-old son, Noah, who will join the Air Force soon, and a four-year-old, Madden, who is healthy apart from ADHD.

It is no accident that in my years of reporting on the spill I covered a Tulane study examining the miscarriages and ill effects on pregnant women following the Gulf disaster. As a reporter I promise to continue following up on studies such as these including studies that look at the impacts of Corexit.

A National Wildlife Federation spokesperson sent me some information including this paragraph from a report they published in 2016, when I asked about Corexit's damage to wildlife and marine life, as opposed to just oil:

"Dispersants May Have Made Things Worse: A National Academy of Sciences study found that chemical dispersants did not accelerate oil biodegradation and may have even suppressed it. A separate Florida State University study found that dispersants were able to eliminate about 21 percent of the oil on the surface of the Gulf, but at the cost of spreading the remaining oil over a 49 percent larger area. As the toxicity of oil often increases when mixed with dispersants, it is likely that the use of dispersants exacerbated the Deepwater Horizon disaster’s impacts on fish and wildlife."

President Obama said in a national address regarding the government and BP's efforts to cap Macondo, in a video Jun 25, 2010,"Stopping it has tested the limits of human technology." And the millions of gallons of oil gushing into the Gulf "were more like an epidemic - one we will be fighting for years."

Tomorrow, the wildlife toll.

PHOTOS: TOP: By Technical Sergeant Adrian Cadiz - US Air Force public affairs story direct link, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10277175; Second - Fritzi Presley and friends John and Cindy; Botton - Daisy and daughter Bella.

To contribute to Bella's health fund, please visit this page.