Gulf Coast residents brace for slow-motion oil disaster

Washington (News Terupdate) - Nearly two weeks after an explosion aboard an oil rig caused a leak from an undersea oil well off Louisiana, the impact is just beginning to unfold.

Though the widening pool of oil remained offshore Monday, it was already a presence for some coastal areas. John Kelly, administrator of Gulfport, Mississippi, said he had been able to smell it since Friday.

"I got $3 million worth of boats sitting here," said Capt. Louis Skrmetta, who ferries tourists from Gulfport to the state's pristine barrier islands. "What am I going to do with them?"

BP's ruptured undersea well continues to spew about 210,000 gallons -- or 5,000 barrels -- of crude per day into the Gulf of Mexico. Efforts to contain or curtail the spill have been unsuccessful.

The sheen extends up to 60 miles across and threatens the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, as well as the Florida Panhandle, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That's an area nearly as large as the state of Delaware. The slick was nine miles off the Louisiana coast Monday, said Adm. Thad Allen, commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard and incident commander.

BP chief executive Tony Hayward vowed that the oil giant would "absolutely be paying for the cleanup operation" of the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico.

"Where legitimate claims are made, we will be good for them," he told NPR's "Morning Edition."

The U.S. government was leaving little to chance. Attorney General Eric Holder said Monday that Justice Department employees were in the Gulf region "to ensure that BP is held liable."

Allen said BP "is the responsible party" and "will bear all the costs" of the cleanup.

Still, the promises failed to quell the fears. "I hope we can weather the storm," said Keith Delcambre, owner of seafood market Bozo's in Pascagoula, Mississippi.

WLOX: Pass Christian Harbor in Mississippi prepares for oil

He said the nature of the current disaster could exact more of a toll on seafood than Hurricane Katrina, which savaged the Gulf Coast in August 2005. "We weathered Katrina, but shrimp after Katrina was good," he said. "Seafood after Katrina was good. With all the oil out there, I don't know what to expect. This is brand new."

In Gulfport, officials worried that a drop in tourism from the slick would chill the city's post-Katrina rebound, which includes half a billion dollars in new construction, $30 million of which has been spent on the harbor.

"This could not have happened at a worse time in our history," Kelly, the city's administrator, said.

Katrina left equipment operator Daniel Schepens out of work for a month, but the oil slick could prove worse, he said. "The warehouses are empty. No trucks, no imports, no exports."

"If it threatens the commercial sea lanes, that's a concern, because if ships don't come in and ships aren't able to go out, that stops commerce," said Donald Allee, CEO of the Mississippi State Port Authority.

WWL: Fishermen try to help contain oil slick

For now, the harbor is being used as a loading point for hundreds of miles of booms that are intended to defend against the slick's arrival.

But the booms may not protect the coast any more than the levees protected New Orleans during Katrina: Rough seas have already broken apart some of the booms.

WDSU: Rush to save Lake Pontchartrain

Meanwhile, Florida Gov. Charlie Crist on Monday extended a state of emergency to 13 coastal counties in his state and said he might extend it to two more on Tuesday.

He had issued an emergency declaration last week for six counties on the western end of the Florida Panhandle; Monday's declaration added the rest of the Panhandle, and counties on the Gulf Coast of the main Florida peninsula as far south as Sarasota.

"In the event that the oil does come to our shores, I want us to be ahead of it as much as humanly possible," he told reporters.

Preparations continue on strategies to stop the leak, though each plan has drawbacks. One plan is to lower a dome over the wellhead next week to capture the spewing oil, said Florida Secretary of Environmental Protection Michael Sole. "That would stop the flow -- if successful," he said. "Unfortunately, it's never been tried at 5,000 feet below the surface of the water."

Officials warn of possible catastrophe

BP also is having a contractor drill a relief well that would allow workers to plug the first well.

"Unfortunately, that's a two- to three-month operation," Sole said.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and other Obama White House officials met Monday afternoon with Hayward and BP America President Lamar McKay to discuss the response efforts.

On Sunday, federal officials banned fishing for at least 10 days in the northern Gulf of Mexico from the mouth of the Mississippi River in Louisiana to waters off Florida's Pensacola Bay. The Gulf Coast's commercial fishing industry brings in about $2.4 billion to the region.

WDSU: Oil spill closes fishing waters

The spill cast a pall over the annual boat blessing ceremony in St. Bernard, Louisiana, where fishermen have observed the tradition for decades to usher in the shrimp season.

On Monday, Sen. David Vitter, R-Louisiana, joined Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser on a conference call with President Obama and Coast Guard officials.

Officials are fighting the spill on three fronts, Napolitano said Monday.

"One is to cap the well" that is leaking the oil, she said. Authorities are also fighting the slick at sea before it reaches land, and preparing to clean it up immediately if it does make landfall, she said.

In Venice, Louisiana, Obama told reporters Sunday that his administration has launched a "relentless response" to the spill, but the problem might not be solved for many days.

WDSU: Fishermen to help oil cleanup

The oil spill started April 20, after an explosion on BP contractor Transocean Ltd.'s Deepwater Horizon drilling platform left 11 men presumed dead.

The spill will have "a multidecade impact," a "long-term poisoning" of the area, said Richard Charter of the environmental group Defenders of Wildlife.

Booms were strung across the mouths of delta estuaries in Louisiana and inlets along the Mississippi coast.

In Alabama, National Guard troops helped lay them out off Dauphin Island, at the southern end of Mobile Bay.

The cause of the blast remains unknown.

BP says a device known as a "blowout preventer" failed and has not responded to repeated attempts to activate it using remotely operated submarines.

How the oil spill crisis could affect BP

Frustration with BP has been growing across the Gulf states, and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal has said the company's response has been inadequate.

Some 200 vessels, including skimmers, tugboats and nine remotely operated underwater vehicles are on or near the site, BP's Chief Operating Officer Douglas Suttles told reporters.

BP spokeswoman Marti Powers said the company was trying to use the submarines to activate the blowout preventer at the ocean floor and spreading dispersants on and under the water to break up the slick.

The company has put out about 300,000 feet -- roughly 60 miles -- of floating booms to keep the oil away from ecologically sensitive shorelines, she said. But she said efforts to skim oil off the surface were put off because of bad weather.

"Some of the vessels can't get out," she said. "But they are still making the effort."

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Oil wreaks havoc on Gulf Coast livelihoods before it arrives

(News Terupdate) - As Gulf Coast residents wait for a huge oil slick to reach their shores, the spill and the massive response already have begun wreaking havoc on livelihoods in a region where jobs are largely dependent on two ocean intensive industries: seafood and tourism.

Stephen Denmark, a city council member in Dauphin Island, Alabama, said Saturday that local scientists are predicting that the seafood crop could take a decade to recover from the oil slick.

"The last two years have been tough already," Denmark said, referring to the recession. "This will be catastrophic to the mom-and-pop businesses, which is 90 percent of the business down here on the island."

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said Saturday that heavy oil is likely to begin hitting the state's coast by Sunday or Monday.

U.S. Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Thad Allen -- the Obama administration's national incident commander for the slick -- said Saturday that oil also is likely to reach shorelines in Mississippi and Alabama in coming days.

But some Gulf Coast oyster beds and other seafood harvesting grounds are already awash in oil, according to Casi Callaway, executive director of the Alabama-based environmental group Mobile Baykeeper.

"It's already covering shrimp beds and shrimp grounds in the Gulf," she said. "So it's here and it's now and it's happening."

Callaway said that the oil could ruin oyster beds for up to two decades.

Forty percent of the fish harvested in the lower 48 states comes from the Gulf of Mexico.

Vacationers, meanwhile, spend billions of dollars every year in the region. But this week, many Americans canceled plans to travel to the Gulf Coast over the summer.

"I'm pretty much on pause right now ... it's just a big waiting game," said David Boola, a fisherman who leads boat trips out of Venice, Louisiana.

"I'm extremely worried because I have customers that [have] already canceled trips," Boola said Saturday. "I should be out taking people fishing today and I'm not. I'm not making money today. Or tomorrow. I'm worried about the 'now' factor, you know?"

Besides the oil, the deployment of hundreds of thousands of feet of floating booms along the Gulf Coast to protect sensitive land areas has kept many fishing boats tied up at the dock.

In Florida's Panhandle, where Saturday was the deadline for tourists to cancel summer plans at many hotels, phones were ringing off the hook.

"In the hurricane season, you know you can't stop the hurricane, but you can prepare ... and we're great at that," said Jewel Cannada-Wynn, deputy mayor of Pensacola, Florida. "But how do we deal with an oil spill? It's a helpless feeling."

Blows to seafood and tourism are likely to be felt in other industries in the Gulf Coast and beyond.

"It affects the people that truck it, the people that make the ice, the people that [provide] fuel -- the labor just to transport it is just monumental," said Denmark, describing the long chain of workers involved in harvesting and shipping seafood. "It's not just the people that catch it and process it."

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As oil spill nears Gulf Coast, experts issue dire warnings

Venice, Louisiana (News Terupdate) - Gulf coast residents braced Saturday for the arrival of a massive oil slick creeping toward shore as nearly a million feet of boom were deployed in an effort to protect precious estuaries and wildlife -- even as thousands of barrels of crude continued gushing into the water.

Landfall along the Mississippi River Delta and other Gulf areas was expected as early as Saturday.

"I'm pretty much on pause right now ... it's just a big waiting game," said David Boola, a fisherman who leads boat trips for tourists out of Venice, Louisiana.

But even as officials and residents wait for the oil to reach land, the slick has already taken a dramatic toll on life all along the Gulf Coast, bringing fishing and tourism to a halt in many places and threatening to cripple those industries for weeks to come.

"I'm extremely worried because I have customers that [have] already canceled trips," Boola told CNN Saturday. "I should be out taking people fishing today and I'm not. I'm not making money today. Or tomorrow. I'm worried about the now factor, you know?"

Government leaders echoed those fears.

"The oil that is leaking offshore, the oil that is coming onto our coast threatens more than just our wildlife, our fisheries, our coast," Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said at a Saturday press conference. "This oil literally threatens our way of life."

The oil company BP -- which operated the rig whose sinking caused the underwater oil gusher -- partnered with government officials to hold town hall meetings throughout the region Saturday to respond to concern about the spill's consequences.

But frustration was growing Saturday in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. At a town hall meeting in Bayou La Batre, Alabama, Mayor Stan Wright warned fishermen in the audience that outbursts would be met with arrest. The fishermen were told that they were not allowed to ask questions.

Jindal suggested the response to the oil slick has so far been inadequate, saying "we continue to be concerned with BP's ability to respond to this incident."

Jindal said he has been working with local officials to develop cleanup contingency plans, but needs funding approval from BP and authorization from the U.S. Coast Guard's incident commander to move forward.

"We need to empower our locals on the ground," he said.

"Now they're saying we are seeing sheens," hitting the coast, Jindal said Saturday, citing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "But they expect the heavier oil to be coming by tomorrow and Monday."

U.S. Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Thad Allen -- who the Obama administration designated Saturday to lead response to the oil slick -- said that oil is likely to reach shorelines in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.

"The real question is when," he said.

Allen said Saturday that the government and BP's top priority is trying to stop the oil leak, but offered no timetable for when that goal might be achieved.

"We don't know how many days the discharge will continue to occur," he said.

Such reports darkened forecasts about the spill's environmental impact.

"This has the potential of being truly devastating," Tom McKenzie, of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, told CNN.

Environmentalist Richard Charter of the Defenders of Wildlife organization said the magnitude of the oil leak could cause damage that would last decades.

"This event is a self-feeding fire," Charter told CNN. "It is so big and expanding so fast that it's pretty much beyond human response that can be effective. ... You're looking at a long-term poisoning of the area. Ultimately, this will have a multi-decade impact."

President Obama announced he will visit the oil spill area Sunday morning.

The oil spill started April 20, after an explosion on the BP-operated Deepwater Horizon drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico. Eleven oil rig workers remain missing and are presumed dead.

The rig sank April 22 about 50 miles (80 km) off the southeast coast of Louisiana, and the untapped wellhead is gushing about 5,000 barrels of oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico, according to BP and government estimates. Some environmentalists say the amount could be much larger.

About 1.6 million gallons of oil have spilled since the explosion, the Coast Guard said.

BP said two Louisiana communities -- Venice and Port Fourchon -- will be the first places likely hit by the oil slick.

Nearly 2,000 personnel have joined the response effort, which includes 68 vessels, among them skimmers, tugs, barges and oil-recovery ships, officials said.

Crews worked through Friday night to dispense 3,000 gallons of sub-surface dispersant, officials said. The Coast Guard's Allen said that an initial test of dispersant released near the wellhead suggested the method could "significantly mitigate the amount [of oil] that makes it to the surface."

Such tests have never been done before, BP spokeswoman Marti Powers said. She said that the dispersants attach themselves to underwater concentrations of oil, causing the oil to sink to the bottom and dissipate.

While the dispersants can help dissipate oil slicks and help birds and other land-based or water-surface wildlife, the chemicals can hurt fish and other underwater species, environmentalist Charter said.

"The scale of the event and the likely duration of the event ... really leaves responders with no good options," Charter said. "While [dispersants] can protect terrestial wildlife ... out in the ocean they make toxic biocomponents available to the marine food chain."

Rapid response teams are staged to deploy to shorelines affected by the oil, federal officials said Saturday. The teams will evaluate and determine an appropriate clean-up effort to minimize impact on the environment.

In addition, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has approved Jindal's request to mobilize 6,000 National Guard troops.

Meanwhile, the Minerals Management Service has been in contact with all oil and gas operators in the oil spill area, officials said. Two platforms have stopped production and one has been evacuated as a safety measure, federal officials said in a release Saturday morning.

Federal officials have urged BP to beef up its response.

"We'll continue to urge BP to leverage additional assets," Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano said Friday as she toured the area. "It is time for BP to supplement their current mobilization as the slick of oil moves toward shore."

Doug Suttles, chief operating officer of BP, said the company has had three priorities: stop the flow of oil, minimize its impact and keep the public informed.

"We've so far mounted the largest response effort ever done in the world," Suttles said. "We've utilized every technology available, we've applied every resource request. ... We welcome every new idea and every offer of support."

BP said it has been trying to stop the flow by using remote-controlled submarines to activate a valve atop the well. But the valve is not working, the energy company said.

As concerns about the spill's toll mount -- particularly in the commercial fishing industry, a critical $2.4 billion economic engine for the region -- Obama promised steps to prevent a similar disaster in the future.

The president asked Interior Secretary Ken Salazar "to conduct a thorough review of this incident and report back to me in 30 days on what, if any, additional precautions and technologies should be required to prevent accidents like this from happening again."

Federal officials, including the president, emphasized that BP is legally responsible for paying the costs of the response to and cleanup of the spill.

The cause of the blast on the Deepwater Horizon remains unknown.

Seventeen of the 126 people on the rig were injured in the blast, three of them critically. One person remained hospitalized Saturday, federal officials said.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee is investigating.

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Gulf Coast braces for an oily mess

(News Terupdate) - The Gulf Coast braced for a greasy and unwelcome tide Thursday as the region's largest oil spill in decades threatened the marshlands and beaches at the mouth of the Mississippi River.

"This Saturday is the first date we can go catch live bait," said Glenn Sanchez, who runs a marina in Hopedale, Louisiana. "If this was to happen, this could just devastate the whole of Louisiana."

Hopedale is in what Sanchez calls the "big toe" of Louisiana, about 35 miles southeast of New Orleans.

It's where dry land gives way to a patchwork of marshes, lagoons and canals that drain into Chandeleur Sound and the Gulf of Mexico. The estuaries are rich in crab, oysters and shrimp, and Breton Sound Marina is home to a variety of commercial and sport-fishing vessels that buy bait from Sanchez.

But the spill that began last week when the Deepwater Horizon drill rig blew up and sank has cast a new shadow on a region already under heavy environmental pressure.

Share your stories of how the oil spill is affecting you

The rig sat atop an oil well that is now spewing up to 210,000 gallons of light sweet crude a day into the Gulf of Mexico. BP, the well's owner, has been trying to shut off the flow using eight remote-controlled submarines. It's had no success up to this point.

iReport: BP stages Alabama coast

George Crozier, administrator of Alabama's Dauphin Island Sea Lab, said the worst of the spill appeared most likely to hit Chandeleur Sound and western Mississippi Sound, to the north. The barrier islands that shielded those waters were devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and have yet to bounce back, he said.

But weather patterns and the amount of oil released make it difficult to predict where the slick will wash ashore.

"It's just too early to have much sense of what's going to happen," Crozier said.

The Coast Guard has begun attempting to burn the oil off in sections, but the rainbow sheen on the surface now stretches for about 100 miles and was less than 20 miles off the mouth of the Mississippi River late Wednesday.

"This is very frightening to us, because we don't know what the impact is," said Frankie Duggan, port director for Biloxi, Mississippi.

Read the latest news on the oil spill

Louisiana is the No. 1 producer of shrimp and oysters in the United States, while fishing remains a major industry on the Mississippi coast even after casino gambling has come to dominate the local economy. The smell of heavy oil already was wafting ashore Tuesday, said Barry Deshamp, a charter boat skipper in Long Beach, Mississippi.

Deshamp's business is ramping up ahead of the summer, and while no one has canceled trips yet, "Nobody wants to fish in an oil slick," he said.

The 120-mile oil slick advanced to within a few miles of the mouth of the Mississippi River on Thursday -- well within the 10- to 20-mile range Deshamp usually fishes. The bigger commercial boats "can pretty much go around it," but the slick is drifting over prime fishing grounds for popular catches, such as red snapper.

"It's unreal they haven't even stopped it yet," Deshamp said. "At first they were telling us it's not even leaking."

Worse yet, the spill is happening at a time when Gulf shrimp are in their spawning season. That puts more pressure on fishermen already feeling the pinch from high fuel prices, increased imports and a late spring, said Scott St. Pierre, captain of the shrimp boat "Mom and Dad" out of Port Fourchon, Louisiana.

"This is our critical time. We want our babies to grow. We need south wind and warm weather," St. Pierre said. "If the south wind brings them oil, we thought we had problems before? This has the potential to be a disaster."

The first of the oil slick could hit southeastern Louisiana's shores late Friday, Gov. Bobby Jindal said. The area is home to several wildlife reserves, and the state might even put prison inmates into the effort by using them to clean oil from birds, Jindal said.

The Gulf Coast hasn't seen a major oil spill in about 40 years, Crozier said. Most of the toxic components in the crude spill are likely to evaporate in the sun, but a "physical mess" is likely to remain in the marshes.

"The occasional drum has fallen overboard, but we've never had anything of this magnitude," he said.

Wilma Subra, a chemist who advises the Louisiana Environmental Action Network, said hundreds of spotters are watching for signs of the slick along the shoreline. But until the damaged well is capped, the coast could be hit over and over again when weather patterns shift.

Subra expressed hope the planned burning would limit the slick's advance, "but it all depends on how the weather moves."

"This is just going to be unbelievable," Subra said. "It's not going to be just a one-time event."

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Coast Guard considers burning Gulf oil slick to save coastline

(News Terupdate) - The U.S. Coast Guard could begin burning off portions of a Gulf of Mexico oil slick as early as Wednesday, as the pool of crude began to encroach on sensitive ecological areas in the Mississippi River Delta.

The option is one of several that Coast Guard officials were considering as the oil slick moved to within 20 miles of the Louisiana coastline.

Officials say the oil spill has the potential to become one of the worst in U.S. history.

Oil is still leaking at a rate of about 42,000 gallons a day from the well, located some 50 miles off the coast of Louisiana. A drilling rig, the Deepwater Horizon, exploded and sank at the site last week.

BP, the well's owner, has been trying to shut off the well using eight remote-controlled submarines, but has had no luck up to this point.

"If we don't secure the well, this could be one of the most serious oil spills in U.S. history," Coast Guard Rear Admiral Mary Landry, head of a joint response task force, said at a press conference Tuesday afternoon.

The Coast Guard stressed it would never set the entire spill on fire at once. It would instead use a 500-foot-long, flame-retardant boom to gather some of the oil and then burn only the crude inside its perimeter, according to spokeswoman Lt. Sue Kerver.

Twenty miles is the closest the slick has come to land so far.

Officials said oil slicks are sometimes set on fire, especially when they are near sensitive marsh areas where heavy equipment used to clean the spill may cause more harm than good.

The spill, measured from end to end, stretched as wide as 42 miles by 80 miles, although oil isn't necessarily covering that entire area.

Most of the slick is a thin sheen on the water's surface, ranging in thickness from a couple of molecules to the equivalent of a layer of paint. About 3 percent of it is a heavy, pudding-like crude oil.

At its current flow rate, it would take over 260 days to rival the Exxon Valdez disaster, which discharged some 11 million gallons into Alaska's Price William Sound. Still, even if it never compares in size to the Exxon Valdez spill, if it makes landfall it could have serious ecological repercussions.

The Coast Guard, BP and the rig's owner Transocean have deployed nearly 50 vessels to help contain and clean the slick.

Marine life has been spotted in the area. Over the weekend, a plane from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service sighted five small whales nearby.

Efforts are also underway near the shoreline to deal with the spill should it reach land, including positioning boom material around sensitive ecological areas.

Five staging areas have been set up on land, stretching from Venice, Louisiana, to Pensacola, Florida.

Landry said it appears the slick should remain at sea for at least the next three days, although weather reports for the latter part of that period suggest the wind could shift and blow the slick toward land.

The oil, if it stays at sea, will eventually evaporate, break down and sink, or get cleaned up, but analysts have said the spill could have political fallout, especially if it reaches shore.

Several lawmakers and interest groups have led a charge over the last several years to open up more parts of the U.S. coast for oil drilling, efforts that are generally supported by the public.

That support could erode if crude oil starts washing up on the Louisiana or Mississippi coasts.

The well is expected to continue leaking until it is sealed. The leak appears to be coming from a pipe that ran from the well head to the drilling rig, which is now laying upside down in 5,000 feet of water.

It has not been decided if the rig will be salvaged or remain where it is, a Transocean official said Monday.

To seal the leak, three approaches are being tried.

BP is now using a set of remote controlled submarines in an attempt to activate the well's "blow out preventer" -- a steel device the size of a small house that sits atop the well and is intended to choke off the flow of oil in the event of a disaster. It's not clear why that device didn't not originally act to cap the well, or if it will be of any use in the future.

BP is also bringing in another drilling rig which could seal the well, but that effort would take months, according to a BP spokesman.

In the meantime, the company is also trying a novel approach to capture the oil -- using a dome right above the well head. The dome resembles an inverted funnel, with a pipe leading up to ships waiting at the surface to capture the oil. That tactic has never been tried in deep water before.

A BP spokesman said the dome should be ready in two to four weeks.

Eleven workers are still missing after last week's explosion. The search for them was suspended last Friday.

Another 115 other people were rescued from the rig after it exploded. One person injured in the blast remains hospitalized. The cause of the blast remains under investigation.

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