by Kiley Kroh and Rebecca Leber

Two years after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, BP is reporting profits of $5.9 billion for the first quarter of 2012.

That’s an 18.5 percent dip compared to the first quarter of last year; however, it’s a major reversal from 2010. After claiming a loss that year, BP quickly rebounded in 2011, recording a profit of $25.7 billion.

Even as the company sells off assets to pay billions in damages for the 2010 disaster, it is already pursuing drilling plans again in the Gulf of Mexico:

Deepwater Horizon disaster ruined Florida's shores.

On the heels of the second anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, federal prosecutors have issued the first arrest related to the worst oil disaster in U.S. history. The Justice Department has charged former BP engineer Kurt Mix with destroying evidence on BP’s internal response to the disaster.

Mix, who worked on estimating the amount of oil spilling into the Gulf, allegedly deleted hundreds of text messages with a BP supervisor. This includes one that read “Too much flowrate —- over 15,000,” barrels of oil per day, which was three-times higher than BP’s public estimate of barrels of oil per day at the time.

Attorney General Eric Holder issued the statement [emphasis added]:

“The department has filed initial charges in its investigation into the Deepwater Horizon disaster against an individual for allegedly deleting records relating to the amount of oil flowing from the Macondo well after the explosion that led to the devastating tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico,” said Attorney General Holder. “The Deepwater Horizon Task Force is continuing its investigation into the explosion and will hold accountable those who violated the law in connection with the largest environmental disaster in U.S. history.”

As the criminal investigations continue, Congress has still not yet passed legislation responding to a disaster that continues to have devastating effects on fish, beaches, and wetlands.

The Lasting Impact Of Deepwater Horizon

by Kiley Kroh and Michael Conathan

Two years ago an explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico took the lives of 11 men and spewed nearly 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf. It took 9,700 vessels, 127 aircraft, 47,829 people, nearly 2 million gallons of toxic dispersants, and 89 days to stop the gush of oil. But the work to restore the ecosystem and Gulf economy has only just begun.

The regional oil and gas industry hasn’t skipped a beat despite claims from Big Oil and drilling advocates in Congress that the moratorium on deepwater drilling imposed in the wake of the spill devastated the Gulf economy. The New Orleans Times-Picayune found that oil-fueled economies in the Houma area are humming along just fine. And according to a recent Reuters analysis, Gulf drillers will be busier this year than at any point since the spill, adding eight new deepwater rigs and bringing the total count to 29, just shy of pre-spill levels.

But even though BP’s slick new ads show sparkling beaches and flourishing marshes, the perception that everything is fine in the Gulf is far from the truth. Last week Garret Graves, top coastal advisor to Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, said the state “still has 200 miles of oiled coast,” including “very clear, retrievable oil in coastal areas,” and called the current conditions “unacceptable.”

While the Obama administration took steps to strengthen offshore drilling safety and oversight, much remains to be done. Tourism in the region has rebounded this year but the Gulf Coast is still struggling with the lingering effects of the spill and will likely continue to do so for decades to come. Here are five reasons the Gulf deserves renewed attention:

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The Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded nearly two years ago to the day, beginning an oil spill that lasted three months and released some two hundred million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. BP may have declared their mission accomplished, but the results of the spill are still trickling out.

The latest? Shrimp with no eyes, fish with lesions, and clawless crabs.

Scientists believe that shrimp, fish, and crabs in the gulf have been deformed by the chemical released to disperse oil during the spill. Fishers in the area say that they’ve been noticing deformities on their catches since. Al Jazeera reports:

“At the height of the last white shrimp season, in September, one of our friends caught 400 pounds of these,” [Louisiana commercial fisher Tracy] Kuhns told Al Jazeera while showing a sample of the eyeless shrimp.

According to Kuhns, at least 50 per cent of the shrimp caught in that period in Barataria Bay, a popular shrimping area that was heavily impacted by BP’s oil and dispersants, were eyeless. Kuhns added: “Disturbingly, not only do the shrimp lack eyes, they even lack eye sockets.”

“Some shrimpers are catching these out in the open Gulf [of Mexico],” she added, “They are also catching them in Alabama and Mississippi. We are also finding eyeless crabs, crabs with their shells soft instead of hard, full grown crabs that are one-fifth their normal size, clawless crabs, and crabs with shells that don’t have their usual spikes … they look like they’ve been burned off by chemicals.” [...]

The dispersants are known to be mutagenic, a disturbing fact that could be evidenced in the seafood deformities. Shrimp, for example, have a life-cycle short enough that two to three generations have existed since BP’s disaster began, giving the chemicals time to enter the genome.

BP claims to be investigating any toxicity and testing fish in the gulf, but they also claimed these marshes were clean. The company is clearly trying to distance itself from the spill, which was a public relations disaster. Indeed, just today, BP came to a settlement agreement with plaintiffs suing over health and economic issues related to the spill.

Tumors on a shrimp found in the gulf

At the same time, deep water drilling has started again. And though details are still only emerging on the full impact of the spill, some want the U.S. to move back into offshore drilling as aggressively as possible. Today, Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) went on the Senate floor to advocate for more drilling permits in the Gulf, arguing that “mother nature has proved amazingly resilient” in the wake of the spill.

Tell that to the fish without livers and the shrimp without eyes.

Bad news for the Gulf of Mexico: a study released this week sheds new light on the toxicity of oil in aquatic environments, and shows that environmental impact studies currently in use may be inadequate….

The key finding involved the embryos of Pacific herring that spawn in the [San Francisco Bay, which was hit by an oil spill in 2007]. The fish embryos absorbed the oil and then, when exposed to UV rays in sunlight, physically disintegrated. This is called phototoxicity, and has not previously been taken into account when talking about oil spills. 

Photos from a UC Davis/NOAA study show the effects of phototoxicity in Pacific herring embryos. Embryos on the left are unexposed to oil; those on the right have been in oil and then exposed to sunlight and show cells destroyed.

After the BP oil disaster, I wrote about the toxicity of oil (see “BP’s dispersants are toxic — but not as toxic as dispersed oil“).  Turns out oil is even more toxic than we thought, as a new study from the UC Davis Bodega Marine Laboratory in collaboration with NOAA finds.

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study is titled, “Unexpectedly high mortality in Pacific herring embryos exposed to the 2007 Cosco Busan oil spill in San Francisco Bay” (subs. req’d).  That spill occurred when a “tanker hit the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and spilled 54,000 gallons of bunker fuel into the bay.”

Here’s more from the L. A. Times on the phototoxicity study:

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Other stories below: Philippine Death Toll Rises in Worst Cyclone in Three Years; India May Jump in Solar Trade War

Shell spills 13,000 gallons while drilling near Deepwater Horizon site

Shell International spilled 13,000 gallons of oil and drilling fluids into the Gulf on Sunday while drilling an exploratory well near the site of last year’s Deepwater Horizon accident, according to a federal report on the spill.

The area where the well was being drilled is about 20 miles from the site of the BP oil spill. Shell is working in water more than 7,000 feet deep. The well was being drilled by the Deepwater Nautilus, according to federal records. That rig is owned and operated by Transocean, the company that owned the Deepwater Horizon rig.

While a report Shell filed Monday morning with the National Response Center states that the company spilled 7,560 gallons of oil and 5,829 gallons of synthetic drilling fluids, company spokesperson Kelly op de Weegh said late Monday afternoon that no oil was spilled.

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