Saving Seafood

CALIFORNIA: Fishermen and foodways begin to feel the squeeze of Orange County’s oil spill

October 7, 2021 — Over the weekend, spiny lobster fishermen in Southern California began setting traps for the start of their season. On Sunday, they were suddenly prohibited from entering a swath of the Orange County coastline, and on Tuesday, the banned area was extended even farther — without word on how long fishing will remain off-limits.

Their income from an entire season might have been contaminated in one of the largest oil spills in the state’s recent history.

A 17.7-mile oil pipeline off Huntington Beach has hemorrhaged at least 146,000 gallons into the Pacific since the leak began, possibly Friday, immediately threatening wildlife from sea to shore — and potentially contaminating the fishing grounds and aquafarms that feed Californians and keep hundreds of commercial fishermen employed.

The state Department of Fish and Wildlife has placed a temporary ban on commercial and recreational fishing in an area that stretches about 20 miles from Sunset Beach south to San Clemente and extends six miles out to sea. State officials, fishermen and chefs are scrambling to warn consumers of potential dangers and, in some cases, encouraging them to find new sources of seafood.

Read the full story at the Los Angeles Times

 

CALIFORNIA: Orange County oil spill renews calls to ban offshore drilling

October 6, 2021 — A massive oil spill off the Orange County coast that’s fouled beaches and ecologically sensitive wetlands in what officials are calling an environmental catastrophe has renewed calls to ban offshore drilling.

The spill, first reported Saturday morning but perhaps detected the night before, originated from a pipeline running from the Port of Long Beach to an offshore oil platform known as Elly. The failure caused as much as 144,000 gallons of oil to gush into the Catalina Channel.

In the days that followed, the spill has left crude along stretches of sand in Newport Beach, Laguna Beach and Huntington Beach, killing fish and birds and threatening sensitive marine habitats.

“The ecological and economic damage from this oil spill has the potential to reverberate for generations,” state Sen. Dave Min (D-Irvine) said this week. At a news conference Tuesday, Min called the spill “either a case of negligence or inaction.”

Read the full story at the Los Angeles Times

 

CALIFORNIA: More beaches closed amid questions about oil spill response

October 5, 2021 — Officials imposed more restrictions on Southern California beaches Tuesday in response to a large oil spill while more questions emerged about whether the accident was swiftly reported to the Coast Guard and other authorities.

Signs were posted on the famous Huntington Beach declaring that the beach was open but that the ocean and shore were closed. On a typical day, surfers would usually be seen bobbing in the waves, but not now. Huntington State Beach still had an oily smell, although it was less severe than the stench emanating from the water on Sunday.

Elsewhere, Orange County officials closed the Dana Point Harbor and a beach for small children. Those closures are in addition to other Dana Point beaches and all beaches in Laguna Beach.

The restrictions were announced a day after oil spill reports reviewed by The Associated Press raised questions about the Coast Guard’s response to one of the state’s largest recent spills and about how quickly Amplify Energy, the company operating three offshore platforms and the pipeline, recognized it had a problem and notified authorities.

The Coast Guard received the first report of a possible oil spill more than 12 hours before the company reported a major leak in its pipeline and a cleanup effort was launched, records show.

Two early calls about the spill came into the National Response Center, which is staffed by the Coast Guard and notifies other agencies of disasters for quick response. The first was from an anchored ship that noticed a sheen on the water. The second came six hours later from a federal agency that said a possible oil slick was spotted on satellite imagery, according to reports by the California Office of Emergency Services.

Read the full story from the Associated Press

 

‘Catastrophic’ California oil spill kills fish, damages wetlands

October 4, 2021 — A large oil spill off the southern California coast left fish dead, birds mired in petroleum and wetlands contaminated, in what local officials called an environmental catastrophe.

The U.S. Coast Guard, heading a clean-up response involving federal, state and city agencies, on Sunday announced an around-the-clock investigation into how the spill occurred.

An estimated 126,000 gallons, or 3,000 barrels, had spread into an oil slick covering about 13 square miles of the Pacific Ocean since it was first reported on Saturday morning, Kim Carr, the mayor of Huntington Beach, told a news conference.

She called the spill an “environmental catastrophe” and a “potential ecological disaster”. The beachside city, about 40 miles (65 km) south of Los Angeles, was bearing the brunt of the spill.

Read the full story at Reuters

Risk of oil spills may rise as climate change creates more monster storms

September 30, 2021 — Hurricane Ida left a trail of destruction after slamming into the Gulf Coast, but offshore the Category 4 storm left something else in its wake: oil spills.

Oil spills aren’t uncommon with strong storms, but as climate change pushes up sea levels and creates stronger storms with more moisture, offshore refineries are going to need greater and greater protections.

The Gulf of Mexico is “particularly vulnerable” because of the prevalence of storms, the low-lying geography, sea-level rise, receding shorelines and the presence of oil facilities, Christopher Vaccaro, a spokesman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told ABC News. Since offshore drilling began in the region in 1942, about 6,000 oil and gas structures have been installed in the Gulf of Mexico.

On Sept. 4, the day before Ida made landfall in Louisiana, the Coast Guard announced that cleanup crews already were responding to a large oil spill at an offshore drilling about 2 miles south of Port Fourchon, Louisiana.

Read the full story at ABC News

 

 

A 14-year-long oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico verges on becoming one of the worst in U.S. history

October 23, 2018 — An oil spill that has been quietly leaking millions of barrels into the Gulf of Mexico has gone unplugged for so long that it now verges on becoming one of the worst offshore disasters in U.S. history.

Between 300 and 700 barrels of oil per day have been spewing from a site 12 miles off the Louisiana coast since 2004, when an oil-production platform owned by Taylor Energy sank in a mudslide triggered by Hurricane Ivan. Many of the wells have not been capped, and federal officials estimate that the spill could continue through this century. With no fix in sight, the Taylor offshore spill is threatening to overtake BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster as the largest ever.

As oil continues to spoil the Gulf, the Trump administration is proposing the largest expansion of leases for the oil and gas industry, with the potential to open nearly the entire outer continental shelf to offshore drilling. That includes the Atlantic coast, where drilling hasn’t happened in more than a half century and where hurricanes hit with double the regularity of the Gulf.

Expansion plans come despite fears that the offshore oil industry is poorly regulated and that the planet needs to decrease fossil fuels to combat climate change, as well as the knowledge that 14 years after Ivan took down Taylor’s platform, the broken wells are releasing so much oil that researchers needed respirators to study the damage.

“I don’t think people know that we have this ocean in the United States that’s filled with industry,” said Scott Eustis, an ecologist for the Gulf Restoration Network, as a six-seat plane circled the spill site on a flyover last summer. On the horizon, a forest of oil platforms rose up from the Gulf’s waters, and all that is left of the doomed Taylor platform are rainbow-colored oil slicks that are often visible for miles. He cannot imagine similar development in the Atlantic, where the majority of coastal state governors, lawmakers, attorneys general and residents have aligned against the administration’s proposal.

Read the full story at The Washington Post

Report suggests offshore drilling is a ‘bad deal’ for Florida

March 9, 2018 — Oil drilling along Florida’s coast could put at risk almost 610,000 jobs and $37.4 billion in economic activity, according to a new report by an ocean advocacy group.

Nationally, the nonprofit Oceana’s new economic analysis found that the Trump administration’s offshore drilling plan would threaten more than 2.6 million jobs and almost $180 billion in Gross Domestic Product for only two years’-worth of oil and just over one year’s-worth of gas at current consumption rates.

“From ocean views scattered with drilling platforms, to the industrialization of our coastal communities, to the unacceptable risk of more BP Deepwater Horizon-like disasters — expanding offshore drilling to new areas threatens thriving coastal economies and booming industries like tourism, recreation and fishing that rely on oil-free beaches and healthy oceans,” Diane Hoskins, campaign director at Oceana, said in a statement. “Coastal communities and states are outraged by this radical plan that threatens to destroy our clean coast economies.”

Oil industry officials disputed the findings, saying their industry has operated safely alongside commercial fishing, tourism and other industries for decades.

Oceana’s report was based on the most recent available data for ocean-dependent jobs and revenue from tourism, fishing and recreation in Atlantic and Pacific coastal states, as well as Florida’s Gulf coast, and compares them to the “undiscovered economically recoverable oil and gas reserves in those states.”

Read the full story at Florida Today

 

Trump’s offshore drilling proposal has a cost besides potential oil spills

February 23, 2018 — The Trump administration’s effort to open almost all of the U.S. outer continental shelf to drilling has rattled coastal communities fearful of oil-drenched beaches like those they saw after the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

There’s another cost, though, of high-volume offshore oil and natural gas leasing borne by the public, even if nothing is spilled. A new analysis Thursday says that the federal government — and therefore U.S. taxpayers —  isn’t getting its money’s worth from oil and gas companies pumping publicly owned fossil fuels from the seabed in the Gulf of Mexico.

By law, the government is supposed to get “fair market value” for leasing offshore tracts of oil and gas. But the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), a government watchdog group, found that companies rarely compete for leases.

As a result, the federal government got less than 3 percent per acre in its most recent lease sales, in August of last year, than it did before 1983, a new POGO analysis found. The findings suggest that for years the government has gotten short-changed when it comes to oil and gas lease sales. As the Trump administration tries to expand offshore drilling, the problem may only get worse.

Here’s the rub: That marked decline isn’t really the result because of President Trump’s policies. It stems all the way back to the Reagan administration.

Read the full analysis at the Washington Post

 

 

Coastal leaders speak out against offshore oil drilling plans

Many states want to be left out of new oil leases entirely

February 23, 2018 — Politicians and fishing industry representatives from across the country have been speaking out against a proposal from the Department of Interior that would end an Obama-era ban and open up coastal states for offshore drilling operations.

“I find the whole thing to be really quite alarming,” said Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo, who requested an interview with the Providence Journal to speak out on the proposal. “This might happen if we don’t oppose it loudly enough.”

The New England Fishery Management Council voted to urge federal regulators to take the whole Atlantic coast out of consideration during its first meeting of 2018.

“Spills don’t happen all that often, but there clearly have been a number of cases that we all know about… where those activities have resulted in some significant impacts to our marine resources,” said Doug Grout, chief of New Hampshire’s Marine Division.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

 

A Nearly Invisible Oil Spill Threatens Some of Asia’s Richest Fisheries

February 13, 2018 — ZHOUSHAN, China — A fiery collision that sank an Iranian tanker in the East China Sea a month ago has resulted in an environmental threat that experts say is unlike any before: An almost invisible type of petroleum has begun to contaminate some of the most important fishing grounds in Asia, from China to Japan and beyond.

It is the largest oil spill in decades, but the disaster has unfolded outside the glare of international attention that big spills have previously attracted. That is because of its remote location on the high seas and also the type of petroleum involved: condensate, a toxic, liquid byproduct of natural gas production.

Unlike the crude oil in better-known disasters like the Exxon Valdez and the Deepwater Horizon, condensate does not clump into black globules that can be easily spotted or produce heart-wrenching images of animals mired in muck. There’s no visible slick that can be pumped out. Experts said the only real solution is to let it evaporate or dissolve. Absorbed into the water, it will remain toxic for a time, though it will also disperse more quickly into the ocean than crude oil.

Experts say there has never been so large a spill of condensate; up to 111,000 metric tons has poured into the ocean. It has almost certainly already invaded an ecosystem that includes some of the world’s most bountiful fisheries off Zhoushan, the archipelago that rises where the Yangtze River flows into the East China Sea.

The area produced five million tons of seafood of up to four dozen species for China alone last year, according to Greenpeace, including crab, squid, yellow croaker, mackerel and a local favorite, hairtail. If projections are correct, the toxins could soon make their way into equally abundant Japanese fisheries.

Exposure to condensate is extremely unhealthy to humans and potentially fatal. The effects of eating fish contaminated with it remain essentially untested, but experts strongly advise against doing so.

“This is an oil spill of a type we haven’t seen before,” said Paul Johnston, a scientist at Greenpeace Research Laboratories at the University of Exeter in England. “Working out the impact is actually a huge task — probably next to impossible.”

For China, the disaster has become a test of its ambitions as a global and regional steward of the seas, especially at a time when it is reinforcing its territorial claims, including disputed territories with Japan in these waters. Given its proximity, China has taken the lead in investigating the disaster and monitoring the spill, but it has faced some criticism for what some see as a slow and inadequate response thus far.

Officials in Beijing announced on Feb. 1 that samples of fish taken within four to five nautical miles of the sunken ship contained traces of petroleum hydrocarbons, suggesting possible condensate contamination; they pledged to expand the range of testing to 90 miles, and closely monitor fish coming into markets.

Read the full story at the New York Times