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Oil Leaks All Over The Gulf–BP And Coast Guard At Odds (video and picture)
by Monica Davis
BP and the Coast Guard continue to duke it out over the clean up of oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico. To hear BP tell it, the clean up is “Mission Accomplished”, and the job is all done.
Not so, says the US Coast Guard:
The Coast Guard has scaled back its clean-up response to the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, but that scale-back is not as extensive as BP indicated in a news release issued Tuesday, an irritated Capt. Thomas Sparks told the state Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority on Wednesday. READMOREHERE
onathan Henderson of New Orleans-based Gulf Restoration Network is flying Louisiana’s coast looking for oil. As usual, he’s found some.
“Just in the last year, I have filed 50 reports for different leaks and spills unrelated to the BP disaster.”
- Jonathan Henderson, Gulf Restoration Network
“I just noticed something out of the corner of my eye that looks like a sheen that had some form to it,” he says. “We’re going to go take a closer look and see if there’s a rainbow sheen.”
It’s a target-rich environment for Henderson, because more than 54,000 wells were planted in and off this coast — part of the 300,000 wells in the state. They’re connected by thousands of miles of pipelines, all vulnerable to leaks.
And leak they do. Louisiana admits to at least 300,000 barrels spilled on its land and in its waters each year, 20 percent of the nation’s total. But those figures come from a system that depends largely on oil companies to self-report.
The problem went mostly unnoticed until the largest spill in U.S. history back on April 20, 2010, drew environmental groups to the coast looking for BP’s oil.
“I started noticing, towards the end of 2010, other leaks that were unrelated to the BP disaster,” Henderson says. “I would find wellheads that were leaking or platforms that were leaking. Just in the last year, I have filed 50 reports for different leaks and spills unrelated to the BP disaster.”
Under the Clean Water Act, when a company spills any amount of oil in the water, it must file a report with the National Response Center run by the Coast Guard. But when Henderson checked, he found many of those smaller spills were not making that list. morehere
