Four years after Deepwater Horizon exploded, long-term environmental impacts from BP oil spill remain mostly unknown

The Gulf of Mexico today looks very much like it did in the moment before Transocean’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded the morning of April 20, 2010, and sank amid a towering inferno 40 miles south of the Louisiana boot.

Eleven rig workers died, marking the accident’s greatest tragedy.

Over the next three months, the damaged BP Macondo 252 wellhead spewed an estimated 200 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf from 5,000 feet below the surface.

Despite more than 1 million gallons of dispersant used to send it to the bottom, large quantities of weathered oil floated across the water’s surface until reaching estuaries and washing ashore in various degrees in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and along Florida’s panhandle.

To this day, scientific debate continues on its impacts with no clear conclusions.

"We don't have a clue"

With the Natural Resource Damage Assessment process still being conducted, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has not released findings of any direct damage caused by the oil.

Mainly that’s because any such evidence could have a direct impact on the federal court case that will determine what BP may be required to pay to compensate the nation for such damage.**

Outside of that NRDA process, there is very little independent research being done on determining potential long-term impacts of the oil spill.

John Valentine, executive director of the Dauphin Island Sea Lab and a professor of marine sciences at the University of South Alabama, said BP funding for such comprehensive, Gulfwide research dried up not long after the well was officially declared dead on Sept. 19, 2010.

“The funding is non-existent now,” Valentine said. “We really finished up our early studies in 2011 and we have not been involved in any oil-spill specific monitoring since then. I hope things are OK in the Gulf. I mean I hear stories about issues with blue crabs and oysters and even that we had reduced classes of juvenile red snapper. Now, are those things causal or cyclical? We just don’t know.

“We know about the immediate acute affects that happened during the spill, but we don’t have a clue what the long-term impacts are. That’s just the way it is.”

For much more on the BP oil spill, click here.

Valentine even said at the time that the closure of federal and state waters further complicated long-term monitoring since it prevented fishermen from catching them and potentially skewing historical catch data series.

Without long-term monitoring, he said, it will be hard to ever determine fact from fiction when – not if – future spills occur.

He pointed to the recent 170,000-gallon fuel oil spilled into the Galveston Ship Channel after a barge and ship collided in late March as an example of why the need for baseline scientific data is so important to ever being able to accurately and fairly determine environmental damages

“Unfortunately, I think the message has been muted again that this stuff matters,” Valentine said. “Look what happened when the public perceived that the Gulf was sick. The tourist industry had a very hard time.”

The good times have returned

Until “the next time,” tourists have returned to Gulf Coast beaches in record numbers and most commercial and recreational fisheries appear to be thriving.

Alabama’s Marine Resources Director Chris Blankenship credits a focused, vigorous marketing campaign and ongoing testing program for overcoming a national perception formed in the spill’s wake that the Gulf’s seafood was contaminated and unsafe to eat.

“I credit a lot of the recovery to the work of the Alabama Seafood and Marketing Commission that has helped to drive the demand for local products back to what it was before the spill,” Blankenship said.

He said those continuing efforts to ensure the public that Gulf seafood is safe are backed up now by nearly four years of Alabama Department of Public Health tests on oysters, shrimp, crabs and fish to determine if they were contaminated by the oil.

Blankenship said Alabama seafood has never had a sample tested that came back even close to containing USDA levels of concern for oil-spill related toxicity.

BP funding for the testing program runs out this year. While not ruling out the possibility, Blankenship said, considering the state’s seafood has had such a clean record, he has no plans to actively seek alternative funding.

Blankenship said Alabama continues to monitor fish species through commercial and recreational catch data collection.

Since the spill, he noted declines in commercial catches of blue crabs, inshore shrimp species such as brown and white shrimp and commercial and recreational catches of flounder are being closely monitored.

As an example, information Blankenship provided shows that commercial gill-net catches of flounder in 2013 were 84 percent behind average catch rates between 2001 and 2008. Catches declined exponentially in 2011 and 2012 before plummeting last year.

It should be noted that many gill-net fishermen left the fishery with a state-sponsored buyout in 2009 and that record flooding through the Mobile-Tensaw Delta impacted flounder migration up Mobile Bay through most of the first half of 2013.

Blankenship said it was too early to say if the declines could be considered trends or simply cyclical variations with potential causes ranging from freshwater flushing to simply a naturally occurring below-average annual survival rate.

“We got lucky in that the spill’s impacts weren’t as bad as we thought they were going to be,” Blankenship said. “On the tourism and seafood sides, I think our promotion efforts and ability to really rally people together has helped those segments of our economy recover very well.

“We’re still dealing with fisheries issues, which is our responsibility to monitor. With the (conservation) commissioner (N. Gunter Guy Jr.) working as our NRDA trustee, it will be our job to ensure that if damages to our fisheries occurred that we’ll be compensated for those losses.”

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