Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Travel writers visiting beaches on BP dime

Travel writers visiting beaches on BP dime

From: http://www.pnj.com/article/20100926/NEWS01/9260329/1056/NEWS10/Travel-writers-visiting-beaches-on-BP-dime

Louis Cooper • lcooper@pnj.com • September 26, 2010
What does it take to get a half dozen travel writers to Navarre Beach?

This weekend, it took a check from BP and a white stretch limousine.

Six travel writers — chauffeured around in a limo — are on Navarre Beach this weekend to get the word out that this summer's BP oil spill is over, and the beach, along with the rest of Santa Rosa County, is open for tourism.

Using money from BP, the Santa Rosa County Tourist Development Council hosted a familiarization — or "fam" — tour for select out-of-town reporters, showing them the pristine beaches and other assets of the county.

"We've had travel writers come often, but this is an actual 'fam' trip, a planned package of events to show them the whole county," said Kate Wilkes, executive director of the council. "Having the money from BP enabled us to do this."

The tour was covered with part of $551,000 from BP, some of which also funded a voucher program which gave gift cards to tourists who stayed in local accommodations and this weekend's sand sculpture event on Navarre Beach.

The writers — who are staying at the Summerwinds condominium — come from media outlets like Baton Rouge Parents, the Houston Tribune, Southern Hospitality Magazine, www.Planet EyeTraveler.com, www.UPTake.com and www.JustSayGo.com, among others.

Ron Stern, editor of www.JustSayGo.com based in Colorado, said he will tell his readers that the oil hype has been overblown.

"What the national media has been saying is totally untrue, for the most part, and blown totally out of proportion," Stern said. "What they're going to get from me is the truth. You can come down here, and you're not going to get oil on your feet or tar balls on your shoes. ... I haven't seen anything in the sand other than sand, and I've been swimming in the water."

Apryl Thomas, a freelance writer from Athens, Ga., has written about the oil spill on the coast for several websites and publications, including Southern Hospitality.

"I knew the spill was kind of blown up. I had done many articles when this happened. The way it was first covered in the national media, you honestly thought, 'It's gone,' but once I did a little research and calling, I felt like it is important to let people know everything is good to go."

All of the reporters who are visiting have agreed to write something about the area. Although the trip is paid for by BP and is intended to combat the misconceptions created by the spill, Wilkes said she doesn't think oil will be a big part of the tour.

"From now on in, we're not going to mention oil, unless it comes back," Wilkes said. "In our advertisements, the message is that the beaches are beautiful, but, also, it's that there is more to do."

The writers arrived Friday and are scheduled to leave today. They visited the new Navarre Fishing Pier, the Gulf Breeze Zoo, Hidden Creek Golf Club in Navarre, Adventures Unlimited north of Milton and the Rufus Hayes Training Stables ranch in Milton.

Saturday, September 25, 2010

The Answer to Oil Contamination Around the World: Perfect Science

The Day the Water Died: Detoxing after the Gulf Oil Spill -- Signs of the Times News

The Day the Water Died: Detoxing after the Gulf Oil Spill -- Signs of the Times News: "http://www.sott.net/articles/show/215274-The-Day-the-Water-Died-Detoxing-after-the-Gulf-Oil-Spill"

Gabriela Segura, M.D.
Health Matrix
Fri, 17 Sep 2010 06:30 CDT

The excitement of the season had just begun, and then we heard the news: oil in the water, lots of oil killing lots of water. It is too shocking to understand. Never in the millennium of our tradition have we thought it possible for the water to die, but it is true.

Chief Walter Meganack
Traditional Village Chief
Port Graham NativeVillage, Kenai Peninsula, Alaska
(National Wildlife Federation, 1990)

Psychopaths Rule Our World

We are now part of a giant experiment on massive chemical toxicity exposure, where insanity, wishful thinking, denial, and outright lies run the show. Where our leaders are completely out of touch with reality and rather than guidance, protection and healing, they offer us disinformation and manipulation. How on earth did we allow this to happen? Then again, what do we expect in a world where psychopathic corporate interests dominate almost every area of life?

An invasive cancer has spread throughout our global society. Mother nature too has succumbed to the effects of this destructive ideology and now carries the seeds of ecological disaster in her womb. Despite all their machinations and carefully laid plans, the hubris and supreme self-interest of the psychopaths that rule our world have set humanity on a course for extinction. Who benefits when there are no people left to rule and control?

Continue to article: The Day the Water Died: Detoxing after the Gulf Oil Spill -- Signs of the Times News: "http://www.sott.net/articles/show/215274-The-Day-the-Water-Died-Detoxing-after-the-Gulf-Oil-Spill"

Dahr Jamail on The Intel Hub, "Covert Spraying and Internal Bleeding" 1/3

Illegal to build sandcastle on Florida & Mississippi public beach! BP gu...

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

The GULF BLUE PLAGUE is Evolving

Postby Gnosty » 10 Aug 2010, 15:58
http://worldvisionportal.org/wvpforum/viewtopic.php?f=52&t=940

by Michael Edward

I have been interviewing family and friends who live along the Gulf of Mexico coast in Louisiana and Mississippi. Many of them had been working on shrimp boats before May 1, 2010 and a cousin is a shrimp boat owner. I have also spoken at length with two RN's working at a Gulf coast Emergency Room and an Emergency Clinic who are close family friends. I am basing what follows on their observations and knowledge along with my own personal research. Full article

Friday, August 27, 2010

Portions of the Gulf are So Toxic that Dolphins, Fish, Crabs, Stingrays and Other Animals are “Trying to Crawl Out of the Water”

Portions of the Gulf are So Toxic that Dolphins, Fish, Crabs, Stingrays and Other Animals are “Trying to Crawl Out of the Water”



Washington’s Blog
Aug 23, 2010

On Friday, Inter Press Service reported:

Danny Ross, a commercial fisherman from Biloxi… said he has watched horseshoe crabs trying to crawl out of the water, and other marine life like stingrays and flounder trying to escape the water as well. He believes this is because the water is hypoxic. …

David Wallis, another fisherman from Biloxi… [said] “I’ve seen crabs crawling out of the water in the middle of the day. This is going to be affecting us far into the future.”

This has been a common occurrence since BP started spilling oil into the Gulf.
The Post Chronicle noted on August 12th: read more. . .

Monday, August 23, 2010

Nature Fighting Back Against Gulf Oil Spill

Nature Fighting Back Against Gulf Oil Spill

Christine Dell'Amore in Port Sulphur, Louisiana

National Geographic News

Published May 7, 2010

Part of an ongoing series on the environmental impacts of the Gulf oil spill.

Driving down Highway 23 last week in the southern Louisiana fishing town of Port Sulphur (map), David Ojeda could smell that something wasn't right. Turbulent winds over the approaching Gulf of Mexico oil spill were blowing strong odors inland, the 68-year-old shrimper suspects. Continue reading

Monday, August 16, 2010

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

"Death Gyre" in the Gulf

Karl Burkhart
Aug. 3, 2010
http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research-innovations/blogs/death-gyre-in-the-gulf

Firsthand accounts and leaked photos of a secret BP processing facility -- possibly for dead animals -- point to a massive cover-up in the Gulf. An exclusive report.

June 10th was a strange day. In a surprising move, the Coast Guard instituted a dramatic expansion of the "no-fly" zone over the Gulf, preventing major media outlets like the New York Times and even scientists with top government clearance from accessing the area. This caused a wave of journalistic uproar and bewilderment on the part of researchers like Edward E. Clark of the Wildlife Center (above) who had been invited to study the impacts just prior to the media blackout.

More distressing than the media blackout itself was a lingering question in my mind ... what on earth could be so BAD that the U.S. government would risk losing credibility in the minds of journalists, the scientific community and the general public to ensure concealment? Was the sea floor cracking? Was a giant cloud of benzene going to wipe out the Eastern Seaboard? Had Godzilla emerged from the sea to wreak havoc upon us all? One thing was clear ... we weren't getting the story.

All manner of apocalyptic scenarios were running through my head that morning when by chance I received a very strange message that pointed to a less fantastic but equally horrific explanation. It was a text message that had been sent on a borrowed phone to a man's wife (according to the person who forwarded it to me) a man who had just returned from what many are now calling the "Death Gyre." The message was e-mailed to a family friend who posted it on Facebook and it has since been recirculated. Here's the text (you will notice a few colloquialisms that are specific to Bayou talk) so read through the lines, and forgive the misspellings:

I have to write this mail on a new cellphone because they have taken our phones off us. people dont know how bad this oil is.. im working in the cleanup operation and we've all has to sign a legal paper that stops us from talking to anyone. im onshore now and cant tell you where but ive just finished a very long shift in the gulf and textin this....fast as i can. the military are watching us dolphins whales, seabirds fish are all floating dead on the surface of the water.. see more.. see more…boats helicopters are scooping them away dead and dying... Whales are being exploded by the military cause they cant be carried. dead bodys as far as the eye can see air smeling of benzene ..weve seen birds fall from the sky. workers falling sick we think some workers have died. my friends are hard oilmen it was ok to at the start but now we cry. dead sea life is as big as genocide you wont imagine

Since no one has yet been able to get this individual to go on record (and the Facebook post was eventually taken down) this can't be taken as hard evidence, but it does beg the question ... just how many animals have died because of the worst oil spill in U.S. history?


According to the latest count of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Daily Collection Report (PDF), only about 4,100 birds, 670 turtles, 70 sea mammals, and 1 snake have died in the Gulf since April 20 (assuming 50 percent mortality of live animals).

It's an astonishingly low number, considering that one of the largest pods of sperm whales in the U.S. resided just miles from the site of the BP Macondo well (aka Deepwater Horizon), a region home to one of the most abundant and biodiverse marine ecosystems in the world.

Compare those small numbers with the Exxon Valdez spill ... Best estimates put the toll of the far smaller oil spill in Alaska at more than 200,000 birds (including hundreds of eagles), more than 3,000 sea mammals, more than 20 whales, and billions of fish eggs. The accident permanently wiped out the herring population of this Alaskan Gulf region. And that was an accident 1/10th the size of the Deepwater Horizon.

The final tally of the BP oil spill is almost 5 million barrels of crude, compared to only about 500,000 barrels for Exxon Valdez — a 1:10 ratio. Yes the Alaska spill happened closer inland, but the oil was not fully integrated with the water column as in the BP gusher (a far more pervasive and deadly scenario) and neither were thousands of tons of highly toxic dispersants like Corexit, a chemical that has, ironically, been banned in Britain because of its impacts on wildlife and human health.

One would be forgiven then for assuming there should be a far greater body count than what is currently being reported by the Fish and Wildlife Service, the same government office that famously blocked Anderson Cooper from peering past the 10' high barricades that had been put up to enclose a "bird receiving" area. According to the math, the count should be in the hundreds of thousands of dead birds, tens of thousands of sea mammals, and millions upon millions of fish and shellfish. So where were all the dead bodies? We should be seeing something like the mass dolphin kill off the coast of Zanzibar (left) that resulted from a much smaller offshore oil leak.

Is it possible that a massive cleanup operation in early June was focused on collecting dead animals out at sea in naturally forming "death gyres?" According to marine toxicologist Riki Ott, such gyres of dead and dying animals were common for weeks after the Exxon Valdez spill. And we know that BP was doing everything in its power to keep dead animal photographs out of the press. Kate Sheppard and Mac Mclelland of Mother Jones documented several instances of BP actually barring photography of dead animals on public beaches.

I received two firsthand accounts indicating that some sort of processing operation was taking place —one from Alabama (a rig operator contracted to work in an abandoned Navy yard) and one on Grand Isle — both reporting the construction of highly secured, nearly militarized ports that had been converted into "waste processing" areas.

EPA head Lisa P. Jackson mentioned on her Twitter feed June 11 feed that she was visiting a shipyard "...where the waste is managed." What exactly was the waste being processed? If it was just oil-soaked boom and contaminated sand bags, where were all the photo opps demonstrating BP's awesome progress in cleaning up the oil? It wasn't adding up. Then I got an e-mail with some interesting photos that were uploaded to Citizen Global, a crowdsourcing news platform, on their Gulf News Desk.

It was a firsthand account by an individual working in the Gulf, who reported...

... receiving unconfirmed confidential reports that BP is withholding information about fish kills including that of sperm whales, whale sharks, Blue-fin Tuna and other marine mammals. (…) Following up on these leads, recently I flew over the staging areas where the reports allege that BP has been engaged in these secretive operations. What I saw from the air over Shell Beach and Hopedale, Louisiana was what seemed to be military protected staging areas where whales could potentially be brought in from offshore, processed under huge white tents, then carted off in trash trucks owned by a collaborative of oil companies, including BP. I'm deeply concerned that BP has the power to put in place restrictions on... access to certain areas of the ever-growing BP drilling disaster location and will continue advocating for a change in this policy.

The following three photographs (taken in the first week of June and published here for the first time) document the processing area just prior to commencing operations. A large-scale construction project, which included creating a visual barricade on a 200' long pier, several large cranes adjacent to lined pools at least 50' in length, and a series of large tents alongside a fleet of trucks, gives further credence to the theory that BP, with the help of the U.S. government, was processing some form of waste that they did not want the public to know about:







A team of journalists, including Jerry Cope of the Huffington Post and Charles Hambleton, co-producer of the Academy award-winning documentary "The Cove", went down to the region to investigate. They had some interesting findings to report and got some great interviews with locals on the mystery of the disappearing dead animals. Most notable was their finding that some municipal dumps had been secured by law enforcement officials in the area, and several individuals reported the dumping of bags full of rotting carcasses.

You might be wondering about motive. Sure BP probably wanted to keep the full, gruesome reality of their toxic nightmare out of the press as much as possible. But was that enough of a motive to warrant such a massive and expensive operation? Probably not. A greater incentive may have been the fines the company would have incurred if the correct number of dead carcasses had been verifiable. At $50,000 a pop, hundreds of thousands of dead animals could spell B-A-N-K-R-U-P-T-C-Y for BP, and that's something that no one, including the U.S. government, would have wanted to happen.

August 3, 2010

VIEW VIDEO

www.mnn.com/green-tech/research-innovations/blogs/death-gyre-in-the-gulf

Sunday, August 1, 2010

Thousands in Gulf Suffer from Misdiagnosed Skin Lesions

Symptoms experienced by Gulf residents may be the result of exposure to chemical dispersants

July 30, 2010

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:

Christina Gagnier

T: 909.576.1411

Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana—Area residents have begun to show up at clinics and hospitals with mysterious scabs and pustules covering their extremities, as reported from residents to non-profit relief organizations in the Gulf.

One thirty-three year-old woman, who wished to remain anonymous, has disclosed to Project Gulf Impact that upon seeking medical advice at a clinic, she was told she had scabies. Hours later, she was told by an area hospital that she had a staph infection. The woman was treated with a shot of penicillin and Elimite cream, a topical agent for the treatment of scabies mite infestations, and an oral antibiotic. In addition to the lesions, the woman reported aching bones, weight loss, stomach pains, inflammation in her leg and sties developing in her eyes.

Full report: http://www.projectgulfimpact.org/?post_type=pressReleases&p=132#

Coast Guard Let BP Use Too Much Toxic Chemical in Oil Spill, Congressman Says

Published August 01, 2010 | Associated Press

NEW ORLEANS

As BP inched closer to permanently sealing the blown-out oil well in the Gulf of Mexico, congressional investigators railed against the company and Coast Guard for part of the cleanup effort, saying too much toxic chemical dispersant was used.

Full article at: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/08/01/congressman-coast-guard-let-bp-use-toxic-chemical-dispersant-gulf-oil-spill/

Saturday, July 31, 2010

Scientists Find Evidence That Oil And Dispersant Mix Is Making Its Way Into The Foodchain

Dan Froomkin
First Posted: 07-29-10 06:27 PM | Updated: 07-29-10 06:43 PM

Scientists have found signs of an oil-and-dispersant mix under the shells of tiny blue crab larvae in the Gulf of Mexico, the first clear indication that the unprecedented use of dispersants in the BP oil spill has broken up the oil into toxic droplets so tiny that they can easily enter the foodchain.

Marine biologists started finding orange blobs under the translucent shells of crab larvae in May, and have continued to find them "in almost all" of the larvae they collect, all the way from Grand Isle, Louisiana, to Pensacola, Fla. -- more than 300 miles of coastline -- said Harriet Perry, a biologist with the University of Southern Mississippi's Gulf Coast Research Laboratory.

And now, a team of researchers from Tulane University using infrared spectrometry to determine the chemical makeup of the blobs has detected the signature for Corexit, the dispersant BP used so widely in the Deepwater Horizon

"It does appear that there is a Corexit sort of fingerprint in the blob samples that we ran," Erin Gray, a Tulane biologist, told the Huffington Post Thursday. Two independent tests are being run to confirm those findings, "so don't say that we're 100 percent sure yet," Gray said.

"The chemistry test is still not completely conclusive," said Tulane biology professor Caz Taylor, the team's leader. "But that seems the most likely thing."

With BP's well possibly capped for good, and the surface slick shrinking, some observers of the Gulf disaster are starting to let down their guard, with some journalists even asking: Where is the oil?

But the answer is clear: In part due to the1.8 million gallons of dispersant that BP used, a lot of the estimated 200 million or more gallons of oil that spewed out of the blown well remains under the surface of the Gulf in plumes of tiny toxic droplets. And it's short- and long-term effects could be profound.

Continued at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/29/scientists-find-evidence_n_664298.html