Death Gyre’ in the Gulf…The Corps Saga Continues…

It’s funny when one thinks about public perception, journalism, and pictures of disasters over the history of time. LIFE magazine and National Geographic used to do gruesome pictorials of dead bodies in whatever was the tragedy of the moment…I guess we got used to seeing dead bodies over the years; but I’m also guessing that masses of dead WHALES… well …that would be a whole different matter altogether…

Were we too focused on the amount of oil being leaked? I think that was the whole idea…

~jude

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.

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 1snake 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.

… 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.

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

ALSO:

The Crime of the Century: What BP and the US Government Don’t Want You to Know, Part I

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