Tuesday, September 14, 2010
More oil out there
Oh, dear. There's even more oil out there than Drew expected! http://birding.typepad.com/gulf/2010/09/dispersed-oil-found-in-the-gulf-in-navarre-florida-how-predictable.html
Saturday, September 4, 2010
Bird rescue experts kept on sideline after gulf oil spill - St. Petersburg Times
This article--which is absolutely true--is what really happened with the rehab situation in the Gulf.
Bird rescue experts kept on sideline after gulf oil spill - St. Petersburg Times
Bird rescue experts kept on sideline after gulf oil spill - St. Petersburg Times
Friday, September 3, 2010
Audubon's special report takes aim at the wrong target
Ted Williams, who writes the “Incite” column in Audubon, has finally managed to incite me, this time not in his column but in the September–October issue's “Special Report: The BP Oil Disaster.”
Mr. Williams has had a long and respected career as a conservationist, and also a long history as a curmudgeon, his columns often written in an angry Lewis Black style. Just recently he wrote one of the best pieces ever put together about “trap, neuter, release” feral cat colonies. And he usually sees the big picture in an insightful as well as “inciteful” way. He wrote in his December, 2004, column (quoted here):
He also says, “Finally, much has been learned about boom laying and skimming, and operations are massive and intense.”
Massive and intense they may be, but neither massive nor intense enough—I personally saw many islands, several with important nesting colonies, onto which heavily oiled boom had washed ashore weeks before, yet nothing had or was being done. I was there the last week of July and first week of August, weeks after the first tropical storms washed them there. Mr. Williams doesn’t say how long he was in the Gulf, nor whether he visited any places except with spokespeople for major players in the cleanup, so it’s hard to be sure he was even aware of how badly the booms were maintained.
Audubon was contracted by BP to take charge of coordinating volunteers for assisting with wildlife issues [NOTE: I've been asked to clarify that Audubon was not contracted by BP. But BP and US F&W were using Audubon to coordinate volunteers, as Williams noted:
Immediately after the spill, thousands of people volunteered, calling by phone or filling out their information on various websites, and thousands of people got back form responses telling them to wait. Even one of my friends, an authority on bird rehabilitation who has been part of many oil spill responses in the past, a woman who led the Bald Eagle recovery program after the Exxon Valdez, was turned away. Audubon was criticized widely for not galvanizing these volunteers. Mr. Williams defends this:
There were many different ways that volunteers could have been used without compromising cleanup or responsible, legal wildlife rehab protocols. For example, teams could have been sent out on prescribed routes to check, at a safe distance, the boom around vulnerable islands to alert cleanup response teams where boom needed to be replaced in a timely manner. When I was in the Gulf at the end of July, over three months after the BP explosion, a large crew was working at one still-unoiled island, putting in vertical structures to better hold the boom in place—the kind of task that requires hard work but would be well within the abilities of volunteers (after all, many of the people that I saw doing this were prisoners on work-release programs). This was, unfortunately, a task that should have been done in the first place, months earlier. Sadly, the boom around virtually every other island had been laid without this low-tech insurance to keep it from washing ashore in storms, which just happened to be when the oil washed up with it.
Mr. Williams minimized the effects of the spill:
Mr. Williams wrote specifically about Drew Wheelan:
Since May, Drew has been working tirelessly in Grand Isle virtually every day except when he developed pneumonia. He’s operating on a shoestring, even mostly sleeping in his truck. This young environmentalist is doing what Ted Williams once did so well—speaking truth to power. Not one word that Drew Wheelan has written or spoken been in service of any agenda except to present the truth about what is happening to birds as a result of the oil spill. He has seen a lot of things that were being done badly, and a lot of things that badly needed being done, and has written about them with charmingly unfiltered forthrightness.
It’s ironic that forty years after his own environmental activism set him on a life course of speaking out, Ted Williams set as his target not the corporation that caused the biggest oil spill in peacetime or maritime history, nor the weak federal agencies that endlessly repeated BP’s lies and exaggerations, from the amount of oil gushing in the first place to the amount of oil that had magically disappeared. No, Mr. Williams set his aim on the one young environmentalist of the 21st century who most exemplifies the standards Mr. Williams usually stands for. I hope that Mr. Williams' injudicious trashing doesn't harm Drew's chances to learn “what it feels like to win big against seemingly impossible odds.”
Mr. Williams has had a long and respected career as a conservationist, and also a long history as a curmudgeon, his columns often written in an angry Lewis Black style. Just recently he wrote one of the best pieces ever put together about “trap, neuter, release” feral cat colonies. And he usually sees the big picture in an insightful as well as “inciteful” way. He wrote in his December, 2004, column (quoted here):
I envy young environmentalists of the 21st century, but I feel bad for them, too. They don’t know what it feels like to win big against seemingly impossible odds. When I started out, America and the world were environmentally lawless. There was no Endangered Species Act, no Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, no Clean Water Act, no Clean Air Act, no National Environmental Policy Act, no National Forest Management Act. In 1970 I remember standing on the steps of the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife field headquarters and arguing with a colleague, Joe, about the banning of DDT. “It will never happen,” he told me. When DDT was banned two years later, he said, “It won’t make any difference.”Ted Williams may both envy and feel bad for young environmentalists, but he’s not above attacking one for looking critically at Audubon’s response to the BP oil spill. Mr. Williams writes, “Until I got to coastal Louisiana in mid-June, covering BP’s oil gusher was an assignment I’d have loved to pass up.” Two months after the Deepwater Horizon explosion, like most of the American public, he still wasn’t galvanized to get personally involved, not until his job required him to do so. And when he did get there, he took BP and the government’s word about a great deal, focusing his ire on this:
What I found is another toxic gusher, one of misinformation spewing from politicians puffing and preening for voters, alleged experts with questionable credentials vying for the limelight, and talking heads reporting or concocting news depending on availability.Certainly there was a lot of misinformation floating about for Mr. Williams to focus on, but rather than clearing it up, his article actually repeats scientifically discredited information as fact. He writes, comparing this to the Exxon Valdez spill:
Deepwater Horizon oil is different. It is highly volatile, and nearly half evaporates immediately. In the intense heat, bacteria consume other fractions. Also, the leak is almost 50 miles at sea, giving dispersion and natural breakdown processes more time to kick in.His deadline was apparently before a great many studies confirmed that most of the oil still remains in the water, and he apparently never considered that water temperatures at the depth of the blown-out oil well are quite cold.
He also says, “Finally, much has been learned about boom laying and skimming, and operations are massive and intense.”
Massive and intense they may be, but neither massive nor intense enough—I personally saw many islands, several with important nesting colonies, onto which heavily oiled boom had washed ashore weeks before, yet nothing had or was being done. I was there the last week of July and first week of August, weeks after the first tropical storms washed them there. Mr. Williams doesn’t say how long he was in the Gulf, nor whether he visited any places except with spokespeople for major players in the cleanup, so it’s hard to be sure he was even aware of how badly the booms were maintained.
Audubon was contracted by BP to take charge of coordinating volunteers for assisting with wildlife issues [NOTE: I've been asked to clarify that Audubon was not contracted by BP. But BP and US F&W were using Audubon to coordinate volunteers, as Williams noted:
Audubon is seeking volunteers experienced in handling seabirds and asking them to sign up with response leaders. But at this writing there aren’t so many oiled birds that state and federal recovery personnel can’t handle the job. Therefore, qualified volunteers are being told to stand by in case they’re needed. The very last thing Gulf Coast birds need are well-meaning amateurs crashing through nesting habitat.]
Immediately after the spill, thousands of people volunteered, calling by phone or filling out their information on various websites, and thousands of people got back form responses telling them to wait. Even one of my friends, an authority on bird rehabilitation who has been part of many oil spill responses in the past, a woman who led the Bald Eagle recovery program after the Exxon Valdez, was turned away. Audubon was criticized widely for not galvanizing these volunteers. Mr. Williams defends this:
It’s hard to do nothing when the world is yammering at you to do something—anything, even the wrong thing. This was a lesson I relearned on the humid, 100-degree morning of June 15 when I visited bay islands with Reid and his Audubon colleagues Melanie Driscoll, director of bird conservation for Audubon’s Louisiana Coastal Initiative, and Karen Westphal, Atchafalaya River Basin program manager.There were MANY islands with the same problems Mr. Williams saw here. Putting aside issues of compassion for suffering birds, and simply considering how many unknowns are indeed involved in these situations, why wasn’t there intervention on at least one or two of these islands to learn, based on actual data, which approach is wiser? That is what science is about.
The saddest scene we encountered—up close, from Wolkart’s 24-foot Ranger Bay boat—was the royal tern colony on Queen Bess Island. Ringing the oil-stained mangroves was red hard boom and, just inside, white sorbent boom. Such barricades offer partial protection at best. Only about 10 of some 300 adults had been oiled, but virtually all the estimated 150 chicks were covered. “If we do nothing, they could die,” said Driscoll. “They’re at risk of overheating and sunburn, hypothermia if they get wet. But if we evacuate them, they won’t be taught to fend for themselves, and they’ll probably die, too. The thought is that now that they’re close to molting they’ll drop their oiled feathers and a few will make it. I don’t know if that’s a good theory, but we’re in a situation where there’s no good decision. The best decision is not to have an oil spill.”
There were many different ways that volunteers could have been used without compromising cleanup or responsible, legal wildlife rehab protocols. For example, teams could have been sent out on prescribed routes to check, at a safe distance, the boom around vulnerable islands to alert cleanup response teams where boom needed to be replaced in a timely manner. When I was in the Gulf at the end of July, over three months after the BP explosion, a large crew was working at one still-unoiled island, putting in vertical structures to better hold the boom in place—the kind of task that requires hard work but would be well within the abilities of volunteers (after all, many of the people that I saw doing this were prisoners on work-release programs). This was, unfortunately, a task that should have been done in the first place, months earlier. Sadly, the boom around virtually every other island had been laid without this low-tech insurance to keep it from washing ashore in storms, which just happened to be when the oil washed up with it.
Mr. Williams minimized the effects of the spill:
Due to the nature of the oil and the monumental cleanup effort, visible damage was not as bad as the public imagines or the media have depicted. Occasionally we smelled oil, but although goop and tar had washed up elsewhere, we saw only light sheens.He was either there before the tropical storms arrived or he closed his eyes to a lot of visible damage. By late July, I saw personally that there were plenty of oiled islands out there. I agree that at least by then there wasn’t much to smell in most areas, but after standing on one oiled beach for 20 minutes or so, I felt woozy and faint, even without smelling a thing. By his own account, Mr. Williams was not exposed to any oiled beaches.
Mr. Williams wrote specifically about Drew Wheelan:
In an interview with CNN’s Gary Tuchman, the American Birding Association’s Drew Wheelan declared: “I cannot see any reason why they would not want as many people here as possible.” And in a later CNN broadcast he and Anderson Cooper spoke of “experts” who supposedly possess the power to pluck birds from the firmament, a feat impossible for any human save Harry Potter.(I’ll interject here that one of these experts they turned away may not be Harry Potter, but is, as I noted, a licensed and active rehabber with decades of oil spill experience. And I find it hard to believe that Mr. Williams has never in his long career witnessed a bird banding operation--banders as well as some rehabbers do in fact have the skills and equipment to catch flying birds. It wouldn't have taken much investigating for him to learn what the St. Petersburg Times reported just this week: Bird Rescue Experts Kept on Sidelines after Gulf Oil Spill. )
Cooper, goosing Wheelan along: “Right now they don’t have the expertise to go after birds that are in flight, which people can do who are experts. . . . Basically, you’re saying they’re just going after the birds who are completely covered in oil and unable to move, and these are the birds that are likeliest basically to die. . . . So birds that maybe have less oil on them and can fly, they’re not going after those birds because it’s too much effort and too difficult.”Drew Wheelan wrote on Facebook on September 2:
Wheelan: “Yeah, they just don’t have any expertise in that area. . . . There’s no reason why there shouldn’t be 50 people down in Grand Isle . . . going out at dawn, trying to capture these birds.”
Cooper: “It seems there are a lot of volunteers and a lot of bird experts who would love to be down here and love to be helping.”
Wheelan: “Absolutely. . . . I know the Audubon Society has over 17,000 people that have signed up to volunteer on this effort, and so far they’ve not received a single phone call. . . . They just don’t want to allow any help.” (Wheelan issued a retraction on his blog after Audubon explained to him that the best way volunteers can help is to wait patiently until they’re contacted.)
I did not retract anything I wrote about the Audubon Society and their volunteers. They had many opportunities that could have helped down here that they let slip through their fingers. The blame is really on Incident Command for not identifying areas of need and allowing qualified people to help...To research this article, Mr. Williams not only did not visit many oiled places in the Gulf—he didn’t even try to contact Drew, not for information about his experiences and what he witnessed over the long, hot months since the explosion, nor to ask for a response to his charges. Mr. Williams focused on one TV interview and then misrepresented Drew’s blog response after the National Audubon Society took him to task.
USFWS and LDWF have stated time and again that they will not disturb the colony to rescue a few birds as a reason for not saving any of those Royal Terns, hundreds of which died, BTW, And in the next sentence [Ted Williams] commends Mike Carloss for doing exactly that, rescuing a Gull on Queen Bess on the very same day. That bird was filmed by CNN as it was captured and was horribly mis-treated by Carloss and eventually died. Audubon has had every opportunity to work as stewards to protect beach nesting colonies in Louisiana, and I was specifically told by Melanie Driscoll to lay off the issue, as she had it covered. They did nothing, Colonies from the Chandeleur Islands to the Timbaliers have all been impacted negatively by clean up response, and LDWF and Audubon never did a thing to help. In fact in their most recent Gulf Spill news letter they praised their own efforts to work as stewards to protect a Least tern Colony that I found and brought to the attention of the world, and they did NOTHING to help protect, except for about 8 hours during the Leanne Rimes concert, and when they praised themselves for that herculean effort they never mentioned the thousands of dollars spent by BTNEP to protect the colony, nor the man hours put in, nor the logistical support given to them, housing and transportation all by BTNEP. Not one word. Clean up effort: I am working on my calculations, but I can account for hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil left on Louisiana's shores never once attempted to be cleaned by BP and still remains there, even here on Grand Isle.
Since May, Drew has been working tirelessly in Grand Isle virtually every day except when he developed pneumonia. He’s operating on a shoestring, even mostly sleeping in his truck. This young environmentalist is doing what Ted Williams once did so well—speaking truth to power. Not one word that Drew Wheelan has written or spoken been in service of any agenda except to present the truth about what is happening to birds as a result of the oil spill. He has seen a lot of things that were being done badly, and a lot of things that badly needed being done, and has written about them with charmingly unfiltered forthrightness.
It’s ironic that forty years after his own environmental activism set him on a life course of speaking out, Ted Williams set as his target not the corporation that caused the biggest oil spill in peacetime or maritime history, nor the weak federal agencies that endlessly repeated BP’s lies and exaggerations, from the amount of oil gushing in the first place to the amount of oil that had magically disappeared. No, Mr. Williams set his aim on the one young environmentalist of the 21st century who most exemplifies the standards Mr. Williams usually stands for. I hope that Mr. Williams' injudicious trashing doesn't harm Drew's chances to learn “what it feels like to win big against seemingly impossible odds.”
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Gulf Coast Oil Spill
Make sure you're keeping up with Drew Wheelan's blog. He's finding a lot of shorebirds right now. Gulf Coast Oil Spill
Friday, August 20, 2010
When numbers get serious
This was my For the Birds script for the program that aired August 4, 2010:
As of August 3, 2010, a total of 5154 oiled birds have been collected and reported on the official Deepwater Horizon Response Consolidated Fish and Wildlife Collection Report. Of these, 1699 were collected alive and 3455 were collected dead. So far, 594 of the treated birds have been released back into the wild, far away from the oiled areas where the birds were retrieved.
The data released each day in the Consolidated Report is accurate and extremely valuable. But it is not in any way a complete accounting of the numbers of birds affected by the spill. I find it troubling that because this is the only official number out there, the media and many organizations are using it as the definitive number of birds oiled. Defenders of Wildlife even cites the figure on their website as the “Total Impacted.” But this figure leaves out all the birds people are reporting to BP or the Fish and Wildlife Service that have not actually been collected. Many birds are seen and reported while still capable of flying away and so no attempt is made by officials to collect them—this includes the badly oiled night-heron and Great Egret that I saw on Cat Island in Barataria Bay, and the lightly oiled Great Egret I saw at Grand Isle State Park, all in Louisiana. Because of rules regarding disturbing nesting colonies, hundreds of badly oiled birds that were carefully documented and reported have not been collected.
It makes sense that BP and Fish and Wildlife are maintaining official, verifiable numbers of the birds collected in the spill. And keeping track of oiled birds that haven’t been collected would be a difficult task: someone might count and even photograph a large number of oiled birds on one island, and then on another island, with no way of knowing whether a few or a great many had island hopped and were counted twice. So it’s understandable that such an amorphous number isn’t part of the consolidated report. But it’s troubling that on BP’s website with the consolidated number, the text makes it sound like the total number of birds collected is greater than rather than less than the total number of birds oiled. The report emphasizes, “Some fish and wildlife reported here have likely died or been injured by natural causes, not due to the oil spill. Due to the increased number of trained people evaluating the spill impacted areas, it is also likely that we will recover more naturally injured or dead fish and wildlife than normal.”
Although this is true, the large numbers of badly oiled dead and dying birds seen and photographed on breeding colonies that were never officially collected may very well outnumber the entire total number of birds collected. Raccoon Island alone, which was very heavily oiled, is known to harbor 10,000 nesting birds—and eyewitnesses estimated the number showing signs of oil at 50 to 80 percent. Fish and Wildlife disputes this figure, but if they’ve sent any of their own biologists to do an accurate and verifiable count, that information has not been released. Meanwhile, a couple of members of Massachusetts Audubon and I did a flyover of Raccoon Island two full weeks after oil reached its shores. We were very high up, but some of the photos Shawn Carey took show pelicans lying flat on the ground with their wings spread—something they just don’t do when healthy. From so far above, we saw plenty of oil along the shore and washed into parts of the island interior, and could see that the badly oiled booms that had washed ashore had still not been removed and replaced with boom that could protect the island from additional oiling.
All this is to say that although the official number of oiled birds is a useful index, it’s far from the total number of birds oiled in this disaster.
A more accurate figure would be difficult or even impossible for the US Fish and Wildlife Service, or anyone else, to produce. But it’s still important to recognize that the official figures being given out for oiled birds are far smaller than the actual numbers of birds that have so far been harmed by this disaster.
As of August 3, 2010, a total of 5154 oiled birds have been collected and reported on the official Deepwater Horizon Response Consolidated Fish and Wildlife Collection Report. Of these, 1699 were collected alive and 3455 were collected dead. So far, 594 of the treated birds have been released back into the wild, far away from the oiled areas where the birds were retrieved.
The data released each day in the Consolidated Report is accurate and extremely valuable. But it is not in any way a complete accounting of the numbers of birds affected by the spill. I find it troubling that because this is the only official number out there, the media and many organizations are using it as the definitive number of birds oiled. Defenders of Wildlife even cites the figure on their website as the “Total Impacted.” But this figure leaves out all the birds people are reporting to BP or the Fish and Wildlife Service that have not actually been collected. Many birds are seen and reported while still capable of flying away and so no attempt is made by officials to collect them—this includes the badly oiled night-heron and Great Egret that I saw on Cat Island in Barataria Bay, and the lightly oiled Great Egret I saw at Grand Isle State Park, all in Louisiana. Because of rules regarding disturbing nesting colonies, hundreds of badly oiled birds that were carefully documented and reported have not been collected.
It makes sense that BP and Fish and Wildlife are maintaining official, verifiable numbers of the birds collected in the spill. And keeping track of oiled birds that haven’t been collected would be a difficult task: someone might count and even photograph a large number of oiled birds on one island, and then on another island, with no way of knowing whether a few or a great many had island hopped and were counted twice. So it’s understandable that such an amorphous number isn’t part of the consolidated report. But it’s troubling that on BP’s website with the consolidated number, the text makes it sound like the total number of birds collected is greater than rather than less than the total number of birds oiled. The report emphasizes, “Some fish and wildlife reported here have likely died or been injured by natural causes, not due to the oil spill. Due to the increased number of trained people evaluating the spill impacted areas, it is also likely that we will recover more naturally injured or dead fish and wildlife than normal.”
Although this is true, the large numbers of badly oiled dead and dying birds seen and photographed on breeding colonies that were never officially collected may very well outnumber the entire total number of birds collected. Raccoon Island alone, which was very heavily oiled, is known to harbor 10,000 nesting birds—and eyewitnesses estimated the number showing signs of oil at 50 to 80 percent. Fish and Wildlife disputes this figure, but if they’ve sent any of their own biologists to do an accurate and verifiable count, that information has not been released. Meanwhile, a couple of members of Massachusetts Audubon and I did a flyover of Raccoon Island two full weeks after oil reached its shores. We were very high up, but some of the photos Shawn Carey took show pelicans lying flat on the ground with their wings spread—something they just don’t do when healthy. From so far above, we saw plenty of oil along the shore and washed into parts of the island interior, and could see that the badly oiled booms that had washed ashore had still not been removed and replaced with boom that could protect the island from additional oiling.
All this is to say that although the official number of oiled birds is a useful index, it’s far from the total number of birds oiled in this disaster.
A more accurate figure would be difficult or even impossible for the US Fish and Wildlife Service, or anyone else, to produce. But it’s still important to recognize that the official figures being given out for oiled birds are far smaller than the actual numbers of birds that have so far been harmed by this disaster.
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Covering up the damage
Rick Outzen documents in his blog how fishermen were instructed to ignore large tar balls and the Coast Guard's use of dispersants. It's valuable information, and I know it's true because I talked at length with a boat captain in the Vessels of Opportunity program who was sent out with a BP team to collect water samples. They collected some where he could clearly see a lot of oil--and then BP threw out those samples because they had been "collected improperly." But he observed the whole process, and knew they were collected in exactly the right way.
Read Rick Outzen's blog post here.
Read Rick Outzen's blog post here.
Thursday, August 5, 2010
Huge fish die-off in Louisiana
The American Birding Association's Drew Wheelan reports a huge die-off of fish in Port Fourchon, Louisiana, yesterday.
When I get home, I'm calculating how much I spent on gas on this trip and donating it to a few worthy causes--the American Birding Association being Number One. Drew's reports have been consistently accurate, and he's doing a far, far better job of reporting the news than any news professionals. To stretch his finances farther so he can continue to report as long as possible, he's even been sleeping in his truck. I'm proud to know someone with his commitment, integrity, and courage.
Monday, August 2, 2010
To disperse or not to disperse. That was the question.
Oil from the natural beach at Grand Isle State Park, July 29, 2010
Originally uploaded by Laura Erickson
EPA research indicates that oil is far more toxic than dispersants, including COREXIT, and that for the most part, dispersants plus oil are no more toxic than oil alone. But in my mind, the debate is only tangentially about the toxicity of the dispersant, and more fundamentally about what the dispersant does to the oil and where dispersed oil goes. My focus of course is on birds, and it's virtually certain that many more birds would have been conspicuously oiled at this point in time if no dispersants had been used. But because the level of use of dispersants in this spill is unprecedented, we have no idea what the long term effects will be, on either the Gulf ecosystem or on the birds that depend on it.
Had the oil all surfaced at the point of the blowout, booms would have been more effective at containing it and skimmers more effective at pulling a lot of it out. But without dispersants, more thick crude oil would have contaminated beaches. With dispersants, the oil is breaking up into tinier droplets which can stay within the water column much longer before floating to the top in slicks or sinking into the bottom muck. We don't know how masses of oil are acting beneath the surface, nor whether the bulk of it will slowly float to the top to evaporate, will sink to the bottom to contaminate bottom feeding animals, or will float within the water column indefinitely. We don't know how tiny dispersed droplets in the water column might affect a loon or pelican diving through a plume. We don't know how long dispersed oil will be washing onto beaches, nor at what concentrations this dispersed oil will be, nor whether it's likely to reduce numbers of the tiny creatures that sandpipers and other birds eat. There is far more that we don't know than what we do know. The Gulf of Mexico promises to be a rich source of research projects for decades to come.
Meanwhile, it's too late to retract the decision to use dispersants to deal with this crisis. If substantial evidence proves that it was a big mistake, there will be no magic wand to get the dispersants out of the water. But now that it's happened, it's essential that we carefully and objectively evaluate all the evidence we can gather to figure out whether using dispersants really was the lesser of two evils or not. Bird deaths from starvation may not be as conspicuous and gruesome as bird deaths from heavy oiling, but the birds' suffering may well be as great. And depending on how plumes of dispersed oil act, we may be seeing oiled diving birds for weeks, months, years, or even decades to come.
The final decision on whether dispersants are an appropriate way to respond to an oil spill in the future should be made based on doing the greatest good for the entire ecosystem, from plankton and shrimp to birds and dolphins. The Coast Guard, the EPA, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Centers for Disease Control should be making these decisions together, uninfluenced by the desires of the corporation that caused the disaster in the first place, especially when that company has a vested interest in minimizing the appearance of the disaster.
Exxon and a team of other companies are right now working together to develop a sounder response for dealing with future oil spills in the Gulf. Experimenting with dispersants in such a precious body of water when the stakes are so very high may or may not prove to have been justifiable. Either way, a sound, long-term investigation of the results will help us make future decisions based on knowledge rather than guesses.
Some reassuring news
Today I talked to someone who works on vessels on cleanup here in Alabama. He told me that when they find any wildlife in distress or any dead wildlife, they call a number--he thinks for US Fish and Wildlife--and are required to stay nearby until the response arrives. He said the response is always pretty quick, and added that he and his co-workers would be scared to try and rescue the birds themselves for fear of either getting hurt (and as a former rehabber, I can attest that it would be very dangerous for someone without training to grab a Great Blue Heron!) or causing the bird more distress by chasing it when they don't have proper equipment or knowledge of how to handle them or house them. So it sounds like what is happening in the waters off Alabama, and the protocol when cleanup workers find oiled wildlife, are genuinely about as good as we could hope for.
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