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The coral reefs you never heard of, in the path of Trump's drilling plan.
Flower Garden Banks sanctuary is home to 180 species and miles of colorful corals in the Gulf of Mexico. An expansion plan, 10 years in the making, is now at risk.
Flower Garden Banks sanctuary is home to 180 species and miles of colorful corals in the Gulf of Mexico. An expansion plan, 10 years in the making, is now at risk.
Marianne Lavelle
BY MARIANNE LAVELLE
FOLLOW @MLAVELLES
MAY 19, 2017
Flower Garden Banks Marine Sanctuary is considered critical fish habitat in the Gulf of Mexico. An effort to expand its limited protections to more coral reefs may be in danger under the Trump administration. Credit: NOAA
One of the planet's most unique coral reef systems happens to be nestled in one of the world's most active oil and gas production areas. And for a decade, federal agencies and outside experts have studied how to better protect this fragile marvel, the only national marine sanctuary in the Gulf of Mexico.
Now, President Donald Trump's executive order to unleash offshore drilling threatens to derail their solution: an expansion of the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary, from 56 square miles to as much as 935 square miles.
The sanctuary, home to more than 180 species, is blanketed with a forest of corals, where schools of young grouper, snapper and other fish find protection from predators. The area is considered "essential fish habitat," vital for ensuring the survival of highly sought reef fish, which make up a significant part of the commercial and recreational catch in the Gulf.
The sanctuary expansion was proposed by the Obama administration last year and was to be finalized by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in early 2018. It drew on 30 years of scientific research, public meetings and comments, as well as the recommendations of task forces convened after BP's 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster.
While Flower Garden Banks did not suffer direct impacts from the worst oil spill in U.S. history 400 miles to the east, the oil and chemical dispersants ravaged surrounding reefs and banks. Some of those areas would become part of the preserve, if the proposal's most extensive option is approved. The coral reefs are also under stress from climate change: Flower Garden Banks suffered the worst bleaching in its known history last year.
"They're getting beat up on both ends," said Jaclyn Lopez, a staff attorney with the conversation group Center for Biological Diversity. "And we don't know the tipping point."
Trump's April 28 "America-First Offshore Energy" order halts expansion of any national marine sanctuary until the government conducts a study of its energy potential, a move consistent with the president's no-holds-barred fossil fuel development agenda. The provision appears to target Flower Garden Banks—the only sanctuary in a drilling zone with a planned expansion.
The oil industry has strongly opposed expansion of Flower Garden Banks to include more reefs and banks, which it insists are not as unique as the coral system in the current sanctuary. The industry has also said that NOAA underestimates the amount of fossil fuel buried beneath the seabed.
There is oil and natural gas under the preserve—the equivalent of 5 million barrels—according to NOAA. And some 8 million more barrels would be subject to new regulation if Flower Garden Banks were expanded to 383 square miles, the middle-range alternative favored by the agency. To put that in perspective, Gulf oil production is on track to average a record 1.8 million barrels per day this year. The United States consumes about 19 million barrels of oil a day.
NOAA, which was to release its final environmental analysis of the plan as early as this month, is awaiting guidance from the administration. "We only know what the language [of the order] says," said George Schmahl, the sanctuary superintendent. He said a straight reading of Trump's order does not mean the expansion is dead; it calls for study of resources, which already is underway.
White House officials did not respond to a request for comment.
Environmentalists see the order potentially derailing what they believe is a modest plan to limit drilling in a sliver of the Gulf. There are five active platforms in NOAA's favored expansion plan, with 11 companies holding leases to drill there. Extending the sanctuary wouldn't necessarily bar drilling but would restrict discharge of pollutants and add measures to control waste.
"From my way of thinking, oil and gas is essentially throwing a temper tantrum," said Brandt Mannchen, a Sierra Club volunteer in Houston who has been working on protection of the Flower Garden Banks since the 1970s. "They've been able to drill everywhere they want to go in the Gulf of Mexico, even in the Flower Gardens. It's like c'mon guys, how much more do you want?"
A crinoid with feathery fronds reaches out to grab plankton, alongside black corals, soft corals and branching corals in the reefs near Flower Garden Banks. NOAA has 360-degree images here: https://sanctuaries.noaa.gov/vr/ Credit: NOAA
A Living Carpet of Coral at Risk
At Flower Garden Banks, the northernmost coral reef system on the U.S. continental shelf, at least 20 species of coral create an extraordinary living carpet punctuated in red, purple and green.
Divers peering through the sea fans, branching sponges, and mounds of brain coral can see shrimp, spiky sea urchins and starfish. But their attention is likely to be caught by colorful parrotfish and angelfish, as well as manta rays, sea turtles and whale sharks—the largest fish in the sea. Corals cover more than half of the Flower Garden Banks. In comparison, coral cover in the Florida Keys is just 15 percent, and in Australia's Great Barrier Reef, it's now 14 percent, down from 28 percent in the 1980s.
At this latitude, such corals should not be able to thrive. But the reefs rest on huge salt domes. As a result, the water is shallow enough to provide the sunlight the corals need. Ancient salt deposits are common throughout the Gulf and are often scouted out by the oil and gas industry as potential petroleum reservoirs.
Only recently have scientists begun to understand the connections among Flower Garden Banks and dozens of other reefs and banks the northwestern Gulf. Through water circulation, the movement of fish and geology, their health is intertwined.
Experts agree there are acute and chronic threats to that health, not only from oil and gas drilling and potential spills, but also from climate change.
Flower Garden Banks seemed to experience it all last year. In May, there was a spill of 88,200 gallons of oil from a pipeline at a Shell subsea facility about 200 miles from the sanctuary. Although the reefs suffered no direct impact, NOAA officials were concerned enough about their preparedness that they did a practice drill simulating an oil spill later that month. Soon after, and apparently unrelated, the reefs experienced an unprecedented mass die-off of corals, sponges, sea urchins, brittle stars, clams and other invertebrates. Scientists believe it was related to a major intrusion of freshwater and runoff into the Gulf in a year that saw record rainfall events in Texas and Louisiana. Then, beginning in August, the worst coral bleaching in the reefs' known history whitened portions of Flower Garden Banks, as sea surface temperatures surged over 86 degrees Fahrenheit for 85 days last summer and fall.
"It was a perfect storm of events at the same location," said Schmahl. He said that although dead areas remain, most of the corals are recovering.
"The concern is that if these events keep happening, and if they happen in consecutive years or to a greater extent, they may not be able to recover as they have in the past," Schmahl said "At least for the recent event, we appear to have dodged a bullet."
There are about 3,000 active oil and gas leases in the 25,000 square miles of the Gulf of Mexico that the U.S. has leased for drilling. Reefs, like these blushing star corals, cover some of that seafloor. Credit: NOAA
Sanctuary Status Doesn't Mean No Drilling
Federal officials have sought to accommodate the oil and gas industry in the management of Flower Gardens Banks since it was made a marine sanctuary under President George H.W. Bush in 1992. At the time, they rejected proposals for a bigger sanctuary or stricter regulations on drilling.
Drilling was never banned in the sanctuary, something environmentalists fought for. There is one natural gas rig that lies within the sanctuary, built in 1982, which ceased production in 2012 and is being decommissioned. Whether to keep it as an artificial reef is under discussion. As recently as 2000, new wells were drilled from the platform, with special protections required by NOAA.
According to NOAA, the reserves that would be within its mid-range expansion would amount to 0.25 percent of the 5.3 billion barrels of reserves in the Gulf of Mexico.
The largest expansion, at 935 square miles, would be 17 times larger than the current sanctuary and would contain the equivalent of 98.9 million barrels of oil and gas, 1.9 percent of Gulf reserves.
At least some in the oil industry dispute those figures.
"We believe that billions of barrels of oil and gas are likely trapped 3-6 miles below the seafloor on the flanks of the many salt domes that caused the seafloor banks that you are potentially including in the various alternatives for boundary expansion," John Seitz, chairman of the board of Gulfslope Energy, a small exploration company, wrote to NOAA. Other oil companies that wrote letters objecting to NOAA's plan were Shell, Fieldwood Energy, Noble Energy and W&T; Offshore.
The offshore drillers argue that NOAA has overstated the risk of drilling near the sanctuary, noting that Flower Garden Banks is widely viewed as one of the world's healthier reef systems, even though it's surrounded by rigs and pipelines. "Our industry has successfully co-existed within and around the [sanctuary] since its designation... and is vested in [its] protection and health," said the American Petroleum Institute (API), the NOIA (National Ocean Industries Association), and other industry groups in a letter last August on NOAA's environmental review of the plan.
The expansion "jeopardizes multi-million-dollar business decisions that impact [Gulf of Mexico] commerce, which has implications for the nation's economic vitality," the industry groups said.
They argued that many of the reefs and banks that would be added to the sanctuary under NOAA's larger expansion alternatives are neither of "special national significance" or "unique," as required by the National Marine Sanctuaries Act.
Both the API and NOIA declined requests for comment. Both reported in their disclosure forms (API, NOIA) that they lobbied members of Congress in the first quarter of the year on the Flower Garden Banks proposed expansion.
NOAA, for its part, is in a familiar role of trying to strike a compromise.
"The fact that at the existing Flower Garden Banks, where there's intensively developed oil and gas, we have not seen a direct detrimental impact to the coral, demonstrates they can co-exist if regulated properly," said Schmahl, the sanctuary superintendent.
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Judge OKs $1.24 billion Halliburton, Transocean settlement from Gulf oil spill; lawyers' get 10%.
A federal judge this week approved two settlements involving punitive damages for private claimants in the April 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Halliburton and Transocean came to terms in June 2016 with a $1.24 billion payout, and U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier made the arrangement official Wednesday (Feb. 15).
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Judge OKs $1.24 billion Halliburton, Transocean settlement from Gulf oil spill; lawyers' get 10%
Greg LaRose, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune By Greg LaRose, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune
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on February 17, 2017 at 4:57 PM, updated February 17, 2017 at 4:58 PM
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A federal judge this week approved two settlements involving punitive damages for private claimants in the April 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Halliburton and Transocean came to terms in June 2016 with a $1.24 billion payout, and U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier made the arrangement official Wednesday (Feb. 15).
Halliburton was in charge of pouring cement during the drilling of BP's Macondo oil well. Transocean owned the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig that exploded and sank after the Macondo well's blowout preventer failed to function properly. Eleven rig workers were killed in the accident, and oil continued to flow from the undersea rupture for nearly three months.
BP has paid out an estimated $13 billion worth of economic and medical claims as part of an uncapped settlement, in addition to a $20 billion settlement for federal, state and local government economic and environmental claims.
This week's settlements with Halliburton and Transocean include $124 million for the lawyers representing claimants. That 10 percent cut is larger than the 4.3 percent portion given to attorneys in the BP economic and medical settlement, although the bigger pie provided $555 million for plaintiffs' legal costs.
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Oil and Water: 11,700 Gulf oil spills since BP raise new fears.
Recent discoveries of illegal, unreported oil discharges and systematic dumping of chemicals from rigs and platforms have raised new fears about environmental damage in the Gulf of Mexico, more than six years after the worst oil spill in U.S. history.
Recent discoveries of illegal, unreported oil discharges and systematic dumping of chemicals from rigs and platforms have raised new fears about environmental damage in the Gulf of Mexico, more than six years after the worst oil spill in U.S. history.
Tracking of federal data by the environmental watchdog group SkyTruth shows more than 11,700 oil spills have been reported in the Gulf of Mexico since the BP oil spill ended in July 2010.
But the rate of spills also has slowed significantly, from 245 a month in 2012 to 80 in October 2016.
As a part of its series “Oil & Water,” WWL-TV is taking a fresh look at how these often-overlooked spills – and an unknown number that never get reported at all – might affect the Gulf environment.
The station aired shocking video last month from a whistleblower who recorded his supervisors on an oil rig in 2014 opening a valve on a deep sea oil pipe and brazenly letting pollutants flow into the Gulf for 90 minutes, then talking about how they could cover it up.
The evidence was used to convict the oil company, Walter Oil & Gas, of a felony. There have been several other illicit violations of the Clean Water Act prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New Orleans in the years since BP.
Gifford Briggs of the Louisiana Oil & Gas Association said such illegal actions are “inexcusable,” but he doubts they are widespread.
“Our employees live in coastal Louisiana and when they get off the platform, they get in their boat and they go hunting, and they go fishing, and they go into the wetlands, and that’s where they raise their families, so we are as committed to the environment as anybody is,” he said.
He also said there’s no proof that the many smaller spills since the BP disaster have had any significant impact on the environment.
“Many of the incidents that get reported are very small in nature, have very quick, immediate responses and there is no immediate impact,” Briggs said.
Confronted with SkyTruth’s findings of 10,000 oil spills in the first five years after BP, averaging an aggregate of 1 million gallons of crude in the Gulf each year, Briggs said it may sound like a lot but is actually a tiny amount, especially compared with the 20 billion gallons of crude his industry safely produces in the Gulf each year. That works out to about 20,000 gallons of oil produced for each gallon spilled.
What’s more, thousands of separate spills in different locations may have polluted the Gulf with a total of 1 million gallons of crude each year since BP, but that is 200 times less than what spewed out of BP’s well, from one location over 87 days.
Jeff Short, a former government biochemist who has studied the impact of oil spills on the marine environment for decades, is publishing a new study that finds the BP spill had a cascading negative impact down the whole Gulf food chain – an impact from which certain fish species may never recover.
But he also said there’s a big difference between a singular event like the BP spill, where an immense amount of oil and chemicals were concentrated in one area, and the far more localized and limited effects of thousands of smaller spills.
Briggs contends the impact of reported oil industry spills is comparable to that of millions of naturally occurring seeps, which send oil and gas up from fissures in the seabed, often leaving small oil slicks on the Gulf surface.
Not only have Gulf species survived well amid the seeps, a 2016 study by oceanographers at Columbia University actually found they may benefit vegetative plankton that live near them.
But Jonathan Henderson, who records oil industry pollution on his Vanishing Earth blog, said the “natural seeps” argument is an old industry canard and a false comparison.
“With all these leaks and spills, it means that the infrastructure is aging,” he said. “It means that there’s nobody really watching. There’s no entity out there day by day making sure these problems are dealt with.”
He rejects Briggs’ claim that government and industry do a good job limiting the impact of spills. In spite of several industry-financed groups stood up after the BP spill to improve response capabilities, Henderson said local government officials have been reporting a lack of absorbent boom and other tools for corralling a spill.
SkyTruth criticized the efficacy of skimmers used to clean up a 90,000-gallon Shell oil spill this spring. And Henderson said he has found the Coast Guard lacks the manpower to respond to multiple spills at once.
“I flew out to a pipeline leak down along the coast in Barataria Bay, and on my way back I spotted another leak,” he said. “I called (Coast Guard) Sector New Orleans, and what they told me is that because of this other pipeline leak that they were responding to, it would likely be at least another couple of days until they would have the capacity to get to this other leak.”
Henderson said he takes flights over the Louisiana coast about three times a month and often finds oil sheens on the water. He said he’s reported more than 100 spills to the Coast Guard in the last few years, and sometimes discovers that no oil company has reported the discharge yet, even though they are required by law to report any spill they’re aware of.
“When the companies themselves are on an honor system to report how much oil was discharged, and nobody’s going out to look at it and document that, they can get away with it,” Henderson said.
The best example might be a Taylor Energy well that’s been leaking off the tip of Plaquemines Parish for the last 12 years. Hurricane Ivan caused a mudslide at Taylor’s well in 2004 and the company and government agencies have found no way to stop the steady flow from the collapsed wellhead.
The New Orleans-based company was supposed to report the extent of the leak to the Coast Guard regularly.
But it hasn’t always done so diligently: The firm was caught reporting a 10-mile slick on a day when satellite photos showed it was actually 30 miles long.
Then, an Associated Press investigation in 2015 found the volume of oil spilled was much larger than what
Taylor had been reporting, forcing the Coast Guard to raise its estimate to 20 times the previously reported amount.
“Even when these companies do report spills, they often appear to underreport the quantity of the spills and the government doesn’t appear to question that until you get attention paid to it, like with Taylor Energy or with extreme cases like the BP disaster,” said Raleigh Hoke of Gulf Restoration Network, another group based in New Orleans that monitors pollution.
Adding to the fear for environmentalists is the rise of offshore fracking, a process that shoots chemicals into the sandy formations under the Gulf floor to ease the extraction of oil. The chemicals come back up to the rig or platform, and for years, companies have been disposing of them in the processed water they are allowed to dump overboard.
The Center for Biological Diversity, another watchdog group based in California, had to sue the federal government to force the release of information about the use of chemical “frac packs” in the Gulf of Mexico. The Interior Department still hasn’t shared all of the data, but what it’s released so far shows oil companies used fracking chemicals more than 1,200 times in more than 600 wells between 2010 and 2014.
Briggs said there’s no environmental danger from fracking and the industry is ready and willing to play by any rules to keep the Gulf environment safe.
“The overwhelming majority of what comes back is just water, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t need to be tested and it doesn’t need to be disposed of properly,” he said.
But Center for Biological Diversity attorney Kristen Monsell said the problem is the lack of those rules from the federal government. The Environmental Protection Agency is still studying the effect of the fracking chemicals.
While it imposes limits on oil and grease in the processed water oil companies can dump overboard, the agency has yet to set any similar limits on the volume of fracking chemicals.
“The Gulf of Mexico is home to incredible biological diversity and is home to habitat for whales, for dolphins, for fish and for sea turtles, and yet the EPA is allowing these companies to dump these super-dangerous chemicals directly into those habitats,” Monsell said.
“You can’t see those fracking chemicals,” Henderson adds. “When I fly out over the Gulf, I can spot an oil sheen.
But what’s really frightening is that there’s all this other stuff that’s potentially extremely harmful to the Gulf ecosystem.”
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The Gulf oil spill literally caused wetlands to sink beneath the waves, scientists say.
A new study reports extensive shoreline recession in the Mississippi River Delta and it finds that the spill’s impact was even more widespread than the erosion caused by Hurricane Isaac two years later.
Six years after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill devastated the shore of the Gulf of Mexico, scientists are still taking stock of the damage it caused. And increasingly, they’re reporting that widespread shoreline erosion and loss of wetlands — which can hurt important salt marsh ecosystems and leave coastal areas, and the city of New Orleans, more vulnerable to sea-level rise — was a major side-effect of the disaster.
A new study, published Thursday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, reports extensive shoreline recession in the Mississippi River Delta as a result of the oil spill — and it finds that the spill’s impact was even more widespread than the erosion caused by Hurricane Isaac two years later.
“Erosion is occurring [even] without the oil spill for lots of different reasons throughout the delta,” said Elijah Ramsey III, a research oceanographer with the U.S. Geological Survey who authored the paper along with Amina Rangoonwala of the USGS and Cathleen Jones of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
For decades, shoreline loss in the region has been linked to such factors as sea level rise, damming of the Mississippi River upstream (preventing it from delivering as much sediment to the delta as it once did), and oil and gas extraction. But the researchers wanted to see how these baseline erosion patterns may have changed following the Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010 and the impact of Hurricane Isaac in 2012.
The researchers focused on upper Barataria Bay, off the coast of Louisiana on the western edge of the Mississippi River Delta, which is characterized by marshland and numerous small islands. To document the recent changes it has undergone, the researchers relied on aerial radar data collected by NASA between 2009 and 2012.
Prior to the oil spill, the researchers observed that there was, indeed, some erosion occurring in isolated areas along the shoreline, which is made up of sensitive coastal wetlands composed of grasses, shallow waters and small islands. But these patterns dramatically changed in 2010. Following the spill, the researchers observed widespread erosion throughout the entire study area, in many cases leading to the fragmentation and even near-destruction of islands in the area. Most of the affected areas retreated 4 to 8 meters, although in the most severe cases, the researchers saw shorelines receding by 12 meters or more.
In areas that experienced the heaviest oiling, shoreline recession was most severe and often began to occur almost immediately, while some less severely impacted areas exhibited a slightly delayed response. Over the next two years, shoreline losses tended to remain highest in areas that had experienced the most severe oiling and the highest amounts of shoreline recession, even while the losses declined in places that had been hit less severely. This makes sense, given what scientists know about the way oil affects vegetation in coastal areas.
“What happens is the oiling weakens the roots of the vegetation [along the shore],” said Rangoonwala, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey and the paper’s lead author. Naturally, this effect will be more severe the more oil is present. These roots are what hold the soil in place to begin with, so after they’re lost, the marshland tends to fall apart more easily.
The study “shows that the shoreline erosion is connected to the severity of oiling,” Ramsey said. Other recent studies have come to similar conclusions. A recent paper, which focused on the shorelines of Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi, found that marshes experiencing the most severe oiling after the Deepwater Horizon spill saw significantly accelerated erosion rates — up to 1.4 meters per year higher than normal.
Notably, the erosion experienced by the upper Barataria Bay was more widespread after the oil spill than after Hurricane Isaac, although the hurricane’s effects were actually more severe in the locations where they were observed. Overall, the spatial erosion patterns that occurred after the hurricane were more similar to the baseline patterns observed prior to the oil spill, the researchers note.
This also makes sense: The impact of hurricanes and other storms is likely to be most severe in areas that are exposed to the most wave action, while parts of the bay that are more shielded will experience much less damage.
So the study suggests that, while disasters like hurricanes may cause more severe damage to the shoreline in localized areas, the impact of an oil spill may actually be more widespread along the coast. And this is a big concern for coastal communities that depend on an intact shoreline for protection against flooding.
Indeed, barrier islands and salt marshes provide a key defense against sea-level rise for coastal communities, helping to buffer the mainland against erosion. They’re also important in other ways, filtering pollutants and providing habitat for shellfish and other staples of human fisheries.
Unfortunately, marsh degradation is irreversible in many cases. This means the effects of disasters like the Deepwater Horizon spill can leave a permanent scar on the landscape. This is especially worrying in a time when concerns about rising sea levels worldwide — accelerated by the warming climate — are growing.
The coast of Louisiana is one of the U.S. regions expected to be hit hardest by sea-level rise. Earlier this year, residents of the state’s Isle de Jean Charles garnered national attention as the nation’s first “climate refugees” after receiving a $48 million grant from the federal government to be used for relocation. The island, which is populated mostly by members of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribe, is steadily sinking.
The new study suggests that disasters like oil spills may only weaken coastal communities’ resilience to the encroaching sea by wearing away their already vulnerable shorelines. But the findings may also help inform policymakers about what to expect if another spill occurs, suggesting that the effects of oil spills are both long-lasting and potentially even more extensive than those of other disasters common on the coast.
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Wisner Trust to receive $30 million over 21 years from BP.
The Edward Wisner Donation Trust, which owns thousands of acres of land along the Louisiana coastline, agreed to accept a 21-year, $30 million settlement from BP in June for damages resulting from the Deepwater Horizon accident and oil spill.
The Edward Wisner Donation Trust, which owns thousands of acres of land along the Louisiana coastline, agreed to accept a 21-year, $30 million settlement from BP in June for damages resulting from the Deepwater Horizon accident and oil spill, according to documents obtained by NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune on Friday (Oct. 28).
The Wisner Donation is a trust controlled by the city of New Orleans that owns 35,000 acres in southern Lafourche Parish along the Gulf, including much of the Cheniere Caminada shoreline and the property on which Port Fourchon is built. Wisner's property also contains a variety of oil well leases and other oil production facilities.
The trust was at odds with BP officials over their cleanup methods during much of their attempts to remove oil from Fourchon Beach, contending the company's contractors caused significant erosion with its selection of heavy equipment.
The trust eventually filed a separate suit against BP over violations of the company's agreement over access to the land for the cleanup, with the trust insisting that BP was supposed to clean the land to trust standards, rather than to standards said by BP or the U.S. Coast Guard.
According to the settlement, BP is to pay the trust $5 million on Oct. 1, $5 million on Oct. 1 of 2017, and then smaller payments ranging from $1.5 million to $500,000 each year through 2037.
The settlement requires the trust to pay the attorneys that represented it in the lawsuits out of the settlement proceeds. A group of attorneys who represented the trust before it was taken over by Mayor Mitch Landrieu at the end of the trust's 100-year legal mandate and a group of attorneys that replaced them are now battling in federal court over their respective shares of the settlement. But agreements both had with the trust will likely result in them receiving as much as 18 percent of the settlement's first $10 million, and 12 percent of the settlement's remaining money.
The settlement payment is in addition to several million dollars BP had already paid the trust to monitor the company's contractors as they repaired some damage to property in the first years following the 2010 disaster.
The settlement also prohibits the trust from going to court in the future to recover damages if additional oil from the spill is recovered on the property, or if any other damages resulting from the spill are discovered. In the years following the initial spill, weathered oil would either be uncovered on the property's beaches or be washed ashore during hurricanes and other storms.
City of New Orleans officials did not respond to requests for information on whether the settlement money will be used to restore damage caused by the spill or other restoration projects on Wisner land, or for other uses.
However, Amanda Phillips, secretary treasurer and land manager for the Donation, said late Friday that there has been on decision on what to do with the money.
"At this time, the (Wisner Donation Advisory) Committee hasn't voted on anything," she said. "They haven't formalized anything. And we don't have any informal plans at this point."
The trust has historically split its revenue with the city and Tulane University, Charity Hospital, the Salvation Army and Wisner descendants. The city has used its share to provide grants for non-profit organizations and to underwrite the city's NOLA for Life crime fighting program.
In 2015, the city of New Orleans entered into its own settlement with BP for $45 million for environmental and economic damages the city experienced during and after the disaster. That settlement was part of an $18.7 billion comprehensive settlement with the federal government, five states and a variety of local governments and governmental agencies.
At that time, now-retired Magistrate Judge Sally Shushan amended a confidentiality order that allowed the unsealing of records of the individual government settlements with BP, while keeping under seal documents involving the negotiations that led to the settlements.
"Since most of these governmental entities are subject to various open meeting and public record laws, the final resolution of such claims typically required that the settlement agreement be approved in a public hearing," Barbier said in a Thursday ruling unsealing the Wisner settlement papers. "Judge Shushan amended the confidentiality order to accommodate such laws."
In January 2016, Shushan issued a new order sealing settlements entered into since the omnibus government settlement. That ruling covers thousands of settlements being approved as individuals and businesses request that their lawsuits against BP be dismissed.
In June, the city and Mayor Mitch Landrieu joined with the donation trust and its beneficiaries, including members of the Wisner family, in requesting Barbier to dismiss its suits, citing the settlement.
But attorneys representing the Wisner trust and the New Orleans City Attorney's Office concluded that Shushan's new sealing order -- itself sealed -- covered the Wisner settlement and refused to turn it over to NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune. The newspaper pointed out the issue to Barbier, who issued his ruling Thursday lifting the seal on the settlement papers themselves, though keeping it in place for any settlement negotiaton documents.
"The Wisner Donation appears to be a public or quasi-public entity," Barbier wrote in his order. "The City's website lists the Edward Wisner Donation Advisory Committee under 'Boards and Commissions.' The Mayor of New Orleans serves as its trustee, and the Advisory Committee was created and is subject to oversight by the New Orleans City Council. The City itself is one of the primary beneficiaries of the trust. For these reasons, the Court finds that the confidentiality order issued by Judge Shushan should be amended."
U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier's order unsealing the Wisner-BP settlement agreement:
The Wisner Donation Trust-BP settlement agreement:
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Oil & Water: video catches supervisors dumping oil in Gulf.
Evan Howington's supervisors, including the highest-ranking official on the rig, were knowingly opening a valve on an oil pipeline 1,500 feet below, releasing hydrocarbons and chemicals directly into the Gulf of Mexico, 60 miles off the southeast Louisiana coast.
Oil & Water: Video catches supervisors dumping oil in Gulf
“AT ONE POINT I WAS THINKING IN MY HEAD, ‘WHAT AM I DOING? THIS IS CRAZY. BUT I HAVE TO DO IT. IF I DON’T RECORD THIS, NO ONE WILL EVER KNOW,’” HOWINGTON RECALLED.
David Hammer
David Hammer talks about video that shows intentional oil dumping in the Gulf.
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HOUSTON — Evan Howington held his cellphone furtively in his lap and hit "record" on the video camera. He couldn’t believe what he was witnessing, but he also couldn’t let his supervisors on the Uncle John oil rig see the shock on his face or the camera app activated on his phone.
That’s because his supervisors, including the highest-ranking official on the rig, were knowingly opening a valve on an oil pipeline 1,500 feet below, releasing hydrocarbons and chemicals directly into the Gulf of Mexico, 60 miles off the southeast Louisiana coast.
“At one point I was thinking in my head, ‘What am I doing? This is crazy. But I have to do it. If I don’t record this, no one will ever know,’” Howington recalled.
“What Evan did was incredibly brave,” said Raleigh Hoke of the Gulf Restoration Network, a leading watchdog of offshore oil and gas operations. “I mean, he put his livelihood and his future on the line to hold this company accountable.”
Howington’s video was used by federal prosecutors to convict Houston-based Walter Oil & Gas Corp. earlier this year of a felony for failing to report an illegal discharge.
But the evidence, which Hoke and other environmentalists call some of the most damning and detailed they’ve ever seen, appears to show this was more than the typical failure to report pollution. The video shows representatives from Walter and its contractors, Helix Canyon Offshore and Cal Dive International, joking about breaking the law and discussing how to cover it up in their official activity reports.
The video also shines a bright light on an ongoing cavalier attitude toward the environment. The dumping took
Evan Howington: “I remember his response very clearly. It was, ‘Oh, it's just Tellus 32 (hydraulic oil). Don't worry about it.’ So I was kind of shocked. I was like, ‘What?’ ” (Photo: WWL)
place April 1, 2014, four years after a massive BP oil spill was supposed to have served as a wake-up call and changed the culture in the industry.
A single felony charge against Walter Oil & Gas and a $400,000 fine served as punishment for what Howington said were repeated violations during his entire 24-day hitch on board the Uncle John.
Serving his first stint as an operator of Remotely Operated Vehicles, or ROVs, unmanned robot submarines used for maintenance on deepwater wells and pipelines, Howington got nowhere reporting leaking hydraulic oil to his supervisor.
“I remember his response very clearly,” Howington said. “It was, ‘Oh, it's just Tellus 32 (hydraulic oil). Don't worry about it.’ So I was kind of shocked. I was like, ‘What?’ ”
Four days later, on March 31, 2014, the crew and supervisors on the Uncle John rig had an accident as they tried to clean out a connecting pipe so they could remove it and fix a plug that had built up and impeded oil flow in the main pipeline. About 64 gallons of chemical leaked from a bladder they were using to empty the connecting pipe, called a jumper.
They failed to report that to federal authorities, as required by law, according to federal court documents.
But the next morning, the crew went a step further. The bladder they were using to remove the oil and chemicals inside the jumper wasn’t working. The jumper was shut off at both ends, but every time they thought they had emptied it, the pressure readings built right back up to show it was full again.
Early on April 1, supervisors ordered one of Howington’s colleagues to simply open the valve and let the material in the jumper flow into the open sea. The robot arm on the ROV slowly turned a lever clockwise and a black cloud billowed out.
The discharge quickly obscured the lens of the camera on the ROV and oily brown residue dripped on the color monitor in the Uncle John’s control room, but black-and-white cameras mounted on the side of the ROV continued to capture the gusher for nearly 90 minutes.
A few times during the first 20 minutes, Howington had to hide his camera phone in the pouch of his hooded sweatshirt, but he kept it recording.
“In my eyes, if you don’t stand up to the criminals when you know they’re doing something wrong, you might as well be a criminal yourself because you’re letting them do it,” he said.
The audio is at least as shocking as the video.
A screenshot from Howington's video showing the release. (Photo: WWL-TV)
“Lights out!” says David Thibodaux, an independent contractor who served as Walter’s rig boss — a position known as the “company man.”
“Yeah, that’s nothing harmful there,” says a Cal Dive employee Howington knows simply as “Mongo.”
“No, that's inhibitor,” Thibodaux says as the crew laughs.
Court documents state the discharge was hydrate inhibitor, a toxic mix of chemicals used to prevent hydrate crystals from forming and blocking the oil flow. It’s illegal to release that substance into the Gulf, but the video captures the crew commenting on how dark the discharge is and that probably it’s actually oil.
At one point, Thibodaux tells the crew, “As far as everybody is concerned, that is chemical on there; there is no oil,” as he makes slashing motions with his hands.
Shortly after that, Rod Heckle, the superintendent for Canyon Offshore, is heard saying, “No, we didn't see anything.”
“As a matter of fact, all I did was put ‘relieve pressure.’ I didn't put nothing about …,” Thibodaux says. “On my report, that's exactly what I put. Yeah, I know how to word that (expletive).”
At another point in Howington’s video, Thibodaux suggests it would have been better to have done the operation under the cover of darkness.
“Like y'all, that (expletive) makes me nervous,” Thibodaux says. “You know what I'm saying. (Expletive). I'd much rather do this like about 3 o'clock last night.”
WWL-TV attempted to reach Thibodaux through social media and messages left with his current employer but did not receive a response.
Helix Energy Services Group, the parent company of Canyon Offshore, did not respond to requests for comment about its employees’ involvement.
Cal Dive International is in bankruptcy, and messages left with its attorney in New York were not returned.
Walter Oil and Gas, the only entity charged with a crime in the incident, said in a written statement to WWL-TV that it didn’t learn about what happened on March 31 and April 1, 2014, until the Justice Department notified it in August of that year. From that point on, the statement said, Walter cooperated with authorities.
“While no Walter employees were directly involved in this incident, Walter has taken responsibility for it and implemented corrective actions to prevent similar incidents in the future," the company said.
The statement said Walter has a good environmental record over 35 years operating in the Gulf and has invested in safety and environmental compliance training for employees and contractors.
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Why is it so hard to get answers about Deepwater Horizon?
A new book and movie explore the causes, legacy, and drama of the oil spill. But neither probe deeply enough.
It seemed inevitable that the deadly 2010 explosion of the BP-operated Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling platform, which caused millions of gallons of oil to gush into the Gulf of Mexico, would eventually get the Hollywood treatment. It’s also unsurprising that a former Department of Justice lawyer would pen an account of the spill that is cast in nearly as dramatic fashion—“the story that neither BP nor the federal government wants heard,” according to its publisher, the Brookings Institute Press. Both were released this fall, within weeks of each other.
Unfortunately, neither the movie, Peter Berg’s Deepwater Horizon, nor the book, Daniel Jacobs’ BP Blowout: Inside the Gulf Oil Disaster, do justice to one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history. Where a dramatized account could at least convey the human side of the disaster to a wider audience, Deepwater Horizon feels more like an action movie with a side helping of workplace and familial drama. And where a nonfiction account could bring fresh facts and clarity, BP Blowout fails to deliver many new insights. That well from hell, as those who labored on the rig called it, still elicits more questions than answers.
BP Blowout, released October 18, is far from the first nonfiction account of the disaster. At least nine titles emerged within the year following the accident. But even with six years of distance, Jacobs hasn’t managed to find much unexplored terrain in terms of what Deepwater Horizon can teach us as energy consumers. Readers get a close look at everything from the causes of the accident to the missteps that both BP and the government made in their responses. It’s informative for those who haven’t read much about the trials, settlements, public-relations campaigns, and attempts by individuals to defraud BP through false claims tied to the accident. But despite Jacobs’ insider status, the book doesn’t bring much to the table that hasn’t been reported before. It misses an opportunity to advance the conversation around the legacy of the spill or provide lessons on how we might be better prepared for the next major catastrophe involving an extractive industry.
In one section, Jacobs details the ways in which John Browne, the BP CEO who resigned three years before the spill, painted BP as a concerned corporate citizen that was investing heavily in renewable energy yet in reality was a masterful greenwasher. The company’s focus on growth and promoting a green image obscured unsafe working conditions, which remained a problem under Browne’s successor, Tony Hayward. “We were all hoodwinked by John Browne,” Frances Beinecke, former president of the Natural Resources Defense Council and a member of the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, tells Jacobs. And that’s the last Jacobs says about it, when he could have explored how Browne ingratiated himself with big environmental NGOs—and, more important, with regulators.
Jacobs also discusses BP’s poor safety record prior to 2010, including a 2005 explosion at a BP refinery in Texas that killed 15 people. But he doesn’t explore how BP’s environmental record compares to that of Exxon, or Chevron, or any other large oil producer.
Still, Jacobs does bring to light the abuse of the system set up to reimburse those whose livelihoods were affected by the spill. Through Freedom of Information Act requests, he determined that the Department of Justice brought criminal cases against more than 300 individuals who filed false claims seeking monetary rewards from BP, and that the DOJ won 236 of those cases and gave 75 individuals federal prison sentences, with one as high as 15 years. Yet, Jacobs points out, only five individuals were convicted of crimes related to the blowout, and none of them will serve time in prison.
While BP Blowout explores the disaster as a series of court battles and corporate and political spin campaigns, Deepwater Horizon, which premiered September 30, focuses on the human toll. The movie, which is the first feature film about the disaster, follows chief electronics technician Mike Williams (played by Mark Wahlberg) and the ten other workers aboard the rig during the explosion and subsequent fire, as well as their co-workers and families. John Malkovich portrays a truly devilish Donald Vidrine, one of BP’s managers on the rig who faced manslaughter charges that were later dropped.
Unsurprisingly, the movie oversimplifies at times, especially when it comes to laying blame for the blowout. Berg makes no effort to explore the degree to which Transocean, the company that owned and operated the Deepwater Horizon rig, was culpable for the accident. That’s despite the fact that, as noted in Jacobs’ book, Transocean was apportioned 30 percent of the blame in private-party lawsuits. (The Department of Justice said that BP bore 67 percent, and Halliburton, tasked with placing the cement cap on the well that later failed, bore just 3 percent.) Instead, the movie holds tight to the image of Transocean as victim, pressured by BP to speed the well’s closing because the project was weeks behind schedule. Because key survivors declined to consult on the movie—Berg contends they signed gag orders with BP to receive settlements—it’s hard to know how authentically the events are portrayed, though the sequence of decisions and major events that resulted hew closely to what’s available in court records.
Ultimately, the movie fails to deliver on its potential by never developing characters deeply enough for the viewer to make real connections. Those looking for a more profound treatment of the disaster’s human toll would be better off watching Margaret Brown’s 2014 documentary, The Great Invisible, and hearing from the real people who were most affected by the spill.
The best writing and filmmaking have the potential to connect an audience to tectonic shifts in the timeline of a place or a culture in a deep, visceral manner. But neither Berg’s film nor Jacobs’ book achieve that admittedly ambitious goal. Six years after the fact, we still need coverage of the spill that tries harder—digs deeper or at least outrages us—because we don’t want it to happen again. And we still can’t be sure that it won’t. In his book, Jacobs details how neither the federal government nor the energy extraction industry have taken any meaningful steps to improve safety regulations for offshore drilling. With the backdrop of a significant recent uptick in deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, he succinctly concludes: “There is little cause for optimism.”
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