Drill Baby Drill!

[give her dixie]

Dont worry folks about seeing any pictures of oil covered birds, as a new law has been implemented to make sure we dont get to see what is taking place. Now, wouldn't it be so very upsetting to see a dolphin covered in oil as we enjoy the World Cup or watch Big Brother?

Move along folks, nothing to see here................


Coast Guard bans reporters from oil cleanup sites

By Daniel Tencer
Sunday, July 4th, 2010 -- 1:31 pm

Anderson Cooper: 'We are not the enemy here'

Journalists who come too close to oil spill clean-up efforts without permission could find themselves facing a $40,000 fine and even one to five years in prison under a new rule instituted by the Coast Guard late last week.

It's a move that outraged observers have decried as an attack on First Amendment rights. And CNN's Anderson Cooper describes the new rules as making it "very easy to hide incompetence or failure."

The Coast Guard order states that "vessels must not come within 20 meters [65 feet] of booming operations, boom, or oil spill response operations under penalty of law."

But since "oil spill response operations" apparently covers much of the clean-up effort on the beaches, CNN's Anderson Cooper describes the rule as banning reporters from "anywhere we need to be."

A "willful" violation of the new rule could result in Class D felony charges, which carry a penalty of one to five years in prison under federal law.

The new rule appears to contradict the promises made by Adm. Thad Allen, the official leading the Coast Guard's response to the oil spill.

"Media will have uninhibited access anywhere we're doing operations, except for two things, if it's a security or safety problem," Allen told ABC News in June.

In defending the new rule, Allen told reporters that he got "complaints from local officials" about the safety of people near cleanup efforts.

"We're not the enemy here," Cooper responded in a report broadcast Thursday night. "Those of us down here trying to accurately show what is happening -- we are not the enemy. I've not heard about any journalist who's disrupted relief efforts; no journalist wants to be seen as having slowed down the cleanup or made things worse. If a Coast Guard official asked me to move, I'd move. But to create a blanket rule that everyone has to stay 65 feet away from boom and boats, that doesn't sound like transparency."

The rule has come under severe criticism not only from journalists but from observers and activists involved in the Gulf Coast clean-up.

"With this, the Gulf Coast cleanup operation has now entered a weird Orwellian reality where the news is shaped, censored and controlled by the government in order to prevent the public from learning the truth about what's really happening," writes Mike Adams at NaturalNews.

"We might expect something like this from Chavez, or Castro or even the communist leaders of China, but here in the United States, we've all been promised we lived in 'the land of the free,'" Adams continues. "Obama apparently does not subscribe to that philosophy anymore (if he ever did)."

Under the rule, reporters or anyone else wishing to get within 65 feet of a cleanup operation need to get permission from the Coast Guard Captain of the Port of New Orleans.

"The fact is we're not attempting to keep anyone from seeing anything," Edward Stanton, the current Coast Guard Captain in New Orleans, told WKRG News in Mobile.

"Nine times out of 10, probably 10 times out of 10" access will be granted, Stanton said.

He said the rule was put into place because of complaints about "boaters interfering with the oil spill operations."

Yet the rule seems on its face to be just the latest attempt to reduce media coverage of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which has now attained the status of worst accidental oil spill in history.

Reporters have been complaining for weeks about BP, the Department of Homeland Security and the Coast Guard working to keep reporters away from wrenching images of oil-covered birds and oil-soaked beaches. On Friday, a photographer from ProPublica was detained by police and BP officials after taking photos of a BP refinery in Texas City, Texas.

Cooper compared the latest effort to prevent access to the oil spill to similar efforts during Hurricane Katrina.

"Frankly it's a lot like in Katrina, where they tried to make it impossible to see recovery efforts of people who died in their homes. If we can't show what is happening, warts and all ... that makes it very easy to hide failure, and hide incompetence."

[delboy]

Heres a more reputable article on tackling oil spills (from nature). Apologies about the lenght but i didn't want to cherrypick it.

Nature 422, 464-466 (3 April 2003) | doi:10.1038/422464a

How to clean a beach

John Whitfield1
Top of page
Abstract

As oil-spill specialists continue to tackle the Prestige slick, they are drawing on knowledge from decades of clean-up operations. John Whitfield reports from Spain's Galician coast.

From the coast road, the beaches of Lira seem as they should be: yellow sand and blue sea. But walk down to the tide's edge and things change. A whiff of petrol taints the sea spray. Water in rock pools has an oily sheen and boulders that should be wet and slippery have a tacky, tarry coating. After the oil-tanker Prestige spilt her cargo last November, these coves in Galicia, in northwest Spain, were a metre deep in a mixture of oil and sea water known to pollution specialists as 'chocolate mousse'. "There was no ocean, only oil," says Pablo Garcia, manager of the Stolt Sea Farm, an aquaculture company in Lira, the area that became known as Ground Zero of the spill.

The Prestige is the latest exhibit in the tanker hall of infamy. But while each new incident brings environmental destruction and financial loss, it also improves our understanding of how to deal with oil spills. This knowledge is hard-won — aggressive clean-ups have sometimes caused more damage than the oil. Government priorities can also clash with those of scientists. But such difficulties apart, a rough consensus on how to juggle the political, economic and ecological issues involved in clearing up oil spills has begun to emerge.

Oil is much less damaging at sea than on shore, so the best option is to suck and skim a slick off the water using specially equipped ships, or break it up with chemical dispersants. Booms can also be used to protect the coastline. But the sea around the Prestige was too rough and much of the coast too exposed for booms to work, so there was little that could be done except watch the oil wash up.
The human touch
How to clean a beach

ITOPF

Volunteers clean up after the Prestige oil spill (far left). After the Erika spill off Brittany in 1999, rocks were hosed with sea water (left).

When oil arrives onshore, the question becomes how best to save affected plants and animals while minimizing damage to the surrounding ecosystem, and without running up a huge bill. In large spills, leaving nature to do the job is a bad idea. Even the oiliest shore will return to normal, but without human intervention this can take a long time. In 1974, the Metula spilled 50,000 tonnes of oil into the Strait of Magellan at the southern tip of South America. Because of the remoteness of the region and the rough seas, no clean-up was mounted, and patches of asphalt-like residue stain the rocks to this day. "It looks like a cheap driveway," says David Page, a chemist at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine.

In the case of the Prestige, the volume of oil spilt and the wildlife, fishing and tourist value of the Galician coast demanded action. The first priority in a clean-up is clear — remove oil from the beaches as quickly as possible. If washed back out to sea, or buried in the beach, oil can do more damage some other time or place.

Cleaning beaches is ideally done manually. People with shovels are the only tools sensitive enough to remove the oil while protecting the ground beneath. Only the human eye can distinguish patches of oil from the clean areas in between: on some of the Galician beaches, oil-coated rocks and apparently unaffected rocks sit side by side. And people can work on isolated rocky shores where heavy machinery cannot go.

But at Lira in early December, manual labour was having no effect. "We got the full load of a couple of tanks of the Prestige — 15,000 tonnes on two kilometres of coast," says Garcia. "You'd see guys working manually, and at the end of the day, the area occupied by the slick was the same."

To decide what to do next, specialists combined their experience with local knowledge in an assessment process known as net environmental benefit analysis. Factors taken into account include environmental considerations, such as whether an oiled beach is home to a breeding colony of seals or seabirds. Socioeconomic considerations also come into play: local people may rely on nearby shellfish beds, for example, or an affected beach could be a tourist destination. And practical realities, such as how much a particular clean-up option will cost, and how easy it will be to implement, are also assessed.

Every intensive clean-up option has its drawbacks. When high-pressure hot water was used to scrub the Alaskan shoreline oiled by the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989, beaches that got this treatment recovered more slowly than those that did not, although conditions seemed about equal after three years1. This technique is now used less often, says Alan Mearns, a marine ecologist with the Hazardous Materials Response Division of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Seattle, Washington. "We have a go-easy policy on using rigorous methods," he says. "The coastguard understands that you don't have to go in with all guns blazing." In Spain, high-pressure water has so far been used only on man-made structures such as jetties and harbour walls.

Chemical cleaners also do damage. When the Torrey Canyon ran aground off the south coast of Cornwall, UK, in March 1967, oiled beaches were sprayed with 10,000 tonnes of powerful solvents and detergents, including industrial degreasers. The chemicals were more toxic than the oil: many seashore invertebrates died, and the nutrients in the dispersants caused an explosion of seaweed growth2.

Dispersants are much milder now, but they can still be used inappropriately. Peter Dyrynda, a marine biologist at the University of Wales Swansea, UK, says that after the Sea Empress ran aground off the southwest coast of Wales in 1996, dispersants were used on some patches of oil but not washed off. The resulting mix was more toxic than either oil or dispersant alone and killed animals that had survived until then. Such problems, as well as the fact that dispersants are ineffective against thick oil, have prevented their use in Galicia.
Softly softly
How to clean a beach

P. DYRYNDA/UNIV. WALES SWANSEA

Common scoters heavily oiled in the Sea Empress disaster had a poor chance of surviving.

A gentler option is bioremediation, which involves using fertilizer to speed the growth of naturally occurring oil-digesting bacteria. But this won't work on every spill, says Richard Swannell, a bioremediation specialist with Momenta, a consultancy company near Oxford, UK, that works with the British government. The oily shore must be sheltered, otherwise the sea will wash the oil and bacteria away. Oil buried in sediments can't be digested. And if the natural bacterial growth is limited by temperature rather than by nutrients, the treatment will have no effect.

The oil must also be biodegradable: light crude oils of the type spilt by the Exxon Valdez are broken down easily, but heavier types contain compounds that microbes find indigestible. Finally, sites must be secluded, so that they do not offend the senses of local people and tourists during the several months the bacteria need to work. The remote Alaskan shores polluted by the Exxon Valdez fitted the bill3, but many others do not. "For marine spills, bioremediation is a niche market," Swannell concludes. Spanish researchers began bioremediation experiments on oiled beaches late last month, although the Prestige's thick, poorly biodegradable oil might not respond well to the treatment.

In Galicia, local people wanted heavy machinery to come in and remove large quantities of oil quickly. But this has its own environmental costs. There were no tracks to the worst-affected beaches and building them would have harmed the surrounding landscape. "If you've got a site that no one visits, then it's ideal to leave for natural clean-up. If it's an area that people go to all the time you can't do that, because people will be getting oil on them," says Rob Self of Oil Spill Response, a company in Southampton that worked out of the command centre in La Coruña to advise the Spanish authorities on the clean-up operation. But at Lira, oil on the surface of the beaches was likely to be washed into the pipe that supplied water to Garcia's fish farm. In the end, the desire to protect the farm tipped the balance in favour of building tracks for bulldozers and earthmovers, which scooped up the chocolate mousse from the beach.

Heavy machinery has not been used in all areas affected by the Prestige spill. Salt-marshes and estuaries are such delicate terrain that almost any activity does more damage than the oil. After the Amoco Cadiz disaster in 1978, when nearly a quarter of a million tonnes of oil were spilt off the coast of Brittany, in northwest France, heavy equipment was sent into some polluted salt-marshes, where it scraped up the top half-metre of sediment. Twelve years later, these areas had still not recovered, whereas the oiled marshes that went uncleaned seemed in good shape4.

In Galicia, some marshy areas were placed completely off-limits, even to people, when it became clear that volunteers were cleaning with excessive gusto. "People were pushing the oil into the substrate, and that has more of an effect than if you just left it," says Self. "In the end we had to close the site."

Using a combination of manual labour and heavy machinery, the Prestige spill has now moved from what Self calls the emergency phase — high profile, high pressure — to a long-term painstaking project. Cleaning beaches, for example, is a sisyphean task. At Carnota, one of the most heavily affected areas of Galicia, the high-water mark on the beach in February continues to be marked by a chain of thumbnail-sized oily gobbets. Dozens of volunteers and soldiers work their way along six kilometres of sand on hands and knees, picking up the small lumps with what look like wallpaper scrapers. At other beaches nearby, people sift the sand and comb seaside plants by hand to remove the oil and stop it becoming buried.

Perhaps the most difficult decision, and one usually taken by local politicians, is when to stop. As the coastline becomes cleaner, the clean-up starts to cost more for progressively less reward and more environmental damage. On rocky shores, once the bulk of the oil is recovered, the decision often comes down to whether the beach is an eyesore. Once workers have done all they can with shovels and pompoms — balls of plastic strips that soak up oil — stubborn patches still remain under rocks and in crevices. Moving oily boulders down the beach into the surf can accelerate the natural cleaning process, as can flushing — pumping sea water over the shore and sifting the oil out of the run-off.

As the Prestige clean-up continues into spring and summer, researchers are starting to try to assess the spill's effects. Marine toxicologist Ricardo Beiras of the University of Vigo in Galicia hopes to produce data on damage to local fisheries on which compensation claims can be based. Researchers will also be called on to pronounce when the coast has recovered. This doesn't necessarily mean that no trace of oil remains — old, weathered oil is not very toxic, and oil locked in sediments may not harm organisms.

But the definition of recovery is disputed. The owners of the Exxon Valdez are still fighting with Alaskans over whether the area hit by the spill is still suffering. Page, whose funding comes partly from Exxon, thinks it isn't. "With all spills there are places you can go back to and dig and find a deposit," he says. "The question is whether those isolated remnants are biologically relevant. And the answer is no, they're not."

Others disagree. Stanley Rice of NOAA's Alaska Fisheries Science Center in Auke Bay says the oil is still damaging animals that live and feed on the seashore, such as otters and salmon. "These damages are new and continuing from the remaining oil, and not just a slow recovery from the original hit," says Rice. To try to minimize such chronic effects, he advocates a swing towards more intensive cleaning. "I would push for a more aggressive clean-up, realizing that for the short term you are going to suffer more damage."
Political science

Resolving issues such as these will require more research, but studies of spills are often only carried out in the fraught atmosphere after a disaster. As a result, clean-up efforts are not as well informed or coordinated as they could be. "We don't clean up spills as well as we should be able to," says Ian White, managing director of the London-based International Tanker Owners Pollution Federation, which responds to spills around the world. "Spills take on a political significance that's hard to control."

Research tends to be improvised and opportunist, as local scientists drop what they were doing and start studying the pollution. "In the early days of a major spill things are terribly chaotic," says Dyrynda. "Scientific study is not a top priority." Like many others, Dyrynda had oil-pollution research thrust upon him when the Sea Empress ran aground close to where he works. Scientists in northwest Spain are having the same experience, and once again the research is not running smoothly. "There are different individual studies, but they're not coordinated. People are diverting resources from other projects," says Beiras.

But despite the gaps in our knowledge, scientists say that the major threat to the coast, should another spill occur, is not lack of research but of government preparedness. There have been six major oil spills in Galicia. The region is also a hotbed of marine science, with four institutes in Vigo alone. But such experience doesn't guarantee that government officials will talk to local experts. "There's not a lack of knowledge, there's a lack of communication," says plankton ecologist Pablo Serret, of the University of Vigo.

Many Spanish researchers accuse their government of ignoring scientific advice in their handling of the spill — particularly in its decision to tow the Prestige out to sea rather than into port — and of seeking to play down the incident's severity. At the end of January, the scientific community rejected the original plan for studying the clean-up and recovery, put together behind closed doors by the government's National Research Council; the replacement was published only last week, four months after the spill. Just before Christmas, Galician researchers, worried that the government was giving Spanish researchers a bad name, put together a letter of protest5. They circulated it around the research community, and got 385 signatures in 24 hours.

Research into clean-up methods may be coming together. But as the strength of feeling among Spanish researchers attests, good science is of limited use unless scientists have the backing of politicians. Without that, the damage from oil spills risks going unchecked. "We haven't learnt from the past," says Beiras.

[give her dixie]

Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post

Some are attuned to the possibility of looming catastrophe and know how to head it off. Others are unprepared for risk and even unable to get their priorities straight when risk turns to reality.

The Dutch fall into the first group. Three days after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico began on April 20, the Netherlands offered the U.S. government ships equipped to handle a major spill, one much larger than the BP spill that then appeared to be underway. "Our system can handle 400 cubic metres per hour," Weird Koops, the chairman of Spill Response Group Holland, told Radio Netherlands Worldwide, giving each Dutch ship more cleanup capacity than all the ships that the U.S. was then employing in the Gulf to combat the spill.

To protect against the possibility that its equipment wouldn't capture all the oil gushing from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, the Dutch also offered to prepare for the U.S. a contingency plan to protect Louisiana's marshlands with sand barriers. One Dutch research institute specializing in deltas, coastal areas and rivers, in fact, developed a strategy to begin building 60-mile-long sand dikes within three weeks.

The Dutch know how to handle maritime emergencies. In the event of an oil spill, The Netherlands government, which owns its own ships and high-tech skimmers, gives an oil company 12 hours to demonstrate it has the spill in hand. If the company shows signs of unpreparedness, the government dispatches its own ships at the oil company's expense. "If there's a country that's experienced with building dikes and managing water, it's the Netherlands," says Geert Visser, the Dutch consul general in Houston.

In sharp contrast to Dutch preparedness before the fact and the Dutch instinct to dive into action once an emergency becomes apparent, witness the American reaction to the Dutch offer of help. The U.S. government responded with "Thanks but no thanks," remarked Visser, despite BP's desire to bring in the Dutch equipment and despite the no-lose nature of the Dutch offer --the Dutch government offered the use of its equipment at no charge. Even after the U.S. refused, the Dutch kept their vessels on standby, hoping the Americans would come round. By May 5, the U.S. had not come round. To the contrary, the U.S. had also turned down offers of help from 12 other governments, most of them with superior expertise and equipment --unlike the U.S., Europe has robust fleets of Oil Spill Response Vessels that sail circles around their make-shift U.S. counterparts.

Why does neither the U.S. government nor U.S. energy companies have on hand the cleanup technology available in Europe? Ironically, the superior European technology runs afoul of U.S. environmental rules. The voracious Dutch vessels, for example, continuously suck up vast quantities of oily water, extract most of the oil and then spit overboard vast quantities of nearly oil-free water. Nearly oil-free isn't good enough for the U.S. regulators, who have a standard of 15 parts per million -- if water isn't at least 99.9985% pure, it may not be returned to the Gulf of Mexico.

When ships in U.S. waters take in oil-contaminated water, they are forced to store it. As U.S. Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, the official in charge of the clean-up operation, explained in a press briefing on June 11, "We have skimmed, to date, about 18 million gallons of oily water--the oil has to be decanted from that [and] our yield is usually somewhere around 10% or 15% on that." In other words, U.S. ships have mostly been removing water from the Gulf, requiring them to make up to 10 times as many trips to storage facilities where they off-load their oil-water mixture, an approach Koops calls "crazy."

The Americans, overwhelmed by the catastrophic consequences of the BP spill, finally relented and took the Dutch up on their offer -- but only partly. Because the U.S. didn't want Dutch ships working the Gulf, the U.S. airlifted the Dutch equipment to the Gulf and then retrofitted it to U.S. vessels. And rather than have experienced Dutch crews immediately operate the oil-skimming equipment, to appease labour unions the U.S. postponed the clean-up operation to allow U.S. crews to be trained.

A catastrophe that could have been averted is now playing out. With oil increasingly reaching the Gulf coast, the emergency construction of sand berns to minimize the damage is imperative. Again, the U.S. government priority is on U.S. jobs, with the Dutch asked to train American workers rather than to build the berns. According to Floris Van Hovell, a spokesman for the Dutch embassy in Washington, Dutch dredging ships could complete the berms in Louisiana twice as fast as the U.S. companies awarded the work. "Given the fact that there is so much oil on a daily basis coming in, you do not have that much time to protect the marshlands," he says, perplexed that the U.S. government could be so focussed on side issues with the entire Gulf Coast hanging in the balance.

Then again, perhaps he should not be all that perplexed at the American tolerance for turning an accident into a catastrophe. When the Exxon Valdez oil tanker accident occurred off the coast of Alaska in 1989, a Dutch team with clean-up equipment flew in to Anchorage airport to offer their help. To their amazement, they were rebuffed and told to go home with their equipment. The Exxon Valdez became the biggest oil spill disaster in U.S. history--until the BP Gulf spill.

- Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and author of The Deniers.
.

[Tony Baloney]

Michael what are you doing?

[Mike Sheehy]

yerra, I was just checking if anyone was actually reading

[give her dixie]

Now why did the well cemented by Haliburton blow up after 20 hours?

Halliburton profit soars 83% in Q2Mon, 19 Jul 2010 16:50:40 GMT

US oil giant Halliburton says its second-quarter profit has jumped 83 percent, despite the company's involvement in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

The news caused Halliburton shares to soar 5 percent to $28.89 in Wall Street pre-opening trade on Monday, the Associated Press reported.

Halliburton announced that the boom is the result of a hike in natural gas drilling activities in the United States.

The oil giant's net income for the April-June period was $480 million up from $262 million one year ago.

This is while the oil leak disaster in the Gulf of Mexico still hangs over the company. Before the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig on April 20, Halliburton was hired by BP to seal the Macondo well before it blew up.

Halliburton shares dipped 17 percent after the incident.

The US has banned deepwater explorations after the spill, forcing energy companies to turn to land-based operations.

Halliburton has predicted that the ban will cause a 5 to 8 cent drop in its share value during each quarter in the second half of the year.

[Tyrones own]

Shockingly this particular oil spill doesn't seem to be on your radar John
but then the US, Cheney and or Haliburton don't as yet seem to have had anything to do with it
I suppose credit where credit's due though as you don't even try to hide your blinkered and jaundiced
vitriol for the West anymore!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38337393/ns/world_news-world_environment

[give her dixie]

BP Hires Prison Labor to Clean Up Spill While Coastal Residents Struggle


In the first few days after BP's Deepwater Horizon wellhead exploded, spewing crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico, cleanup workers could be seen on Louisiana beaches wearing scarlet pants and white t-shirts with the words "Inmate Labor" printed in large red block letters. Coastal residents, many of whom had just seen their livelihoods disappear, expressed outrage at community meetings; why should BP be using cheap or free prison labor when so many people were desperate for work? The outfits disappeared overnight.

Work crews in Grand Isle, La, still stand out. In a region where nine out of ten residents are white, the cleanup workers are almost exclusively African American men. The racialized nature of the cleanup is so conspicuous that Ben Jealous, the president of the NAACP, sent a public letter to BP CEO Tony Hayward on July 9, demanding to know why black people were over-represented in "the most physically difficult, lowest paying jobs, with the most significant exposure to toxins."

Hiring prison labor is more than a way for BP to save money while cleaning up the biggest oil spill in history. By tapping into the inmate workforce, the company and its subcontractors get workers who are not only cheap but easily silenced—and it gets lucrative tax write-offs in the process.

Known to some as "the inmate state," Louisiana has the highest rate of incarceration of any other state in the country. Seventy percent of its thirty-nine thousand inmates are African-American men. The Louisiana Department of Corrections (DOC) only has beds for half that many prisoners, so twenty thousand inmates live in parish jails, privately-run contract facilities and for-profit work release centers. Prisons and parish jails provide free daily labor to the state and private companies like BP, while also operating their own factories and farms, where inmates earn between zero and forty cents an hour. Obedient inmates, or "trustees," become eligible for work release in the last three years of their sentences. This means they can be a part of a market-rate, daily labor force that works for private companies outside the prison gates. The advantage for trustees is that they get to keep a portion of their earnings, redeemable upon release. The advantage for private companies is that trustees are covered under Work Opportunity Tax Credit, a holdover from Bush's Welfare to Work legislation that rewards private-sector employers for hiring risky "target groups." Businesses earn a tax credit of $2,400 for every work release inmate they hire. On top of that, they can earn back up to 40 percent of the wages they pay annually to "target group workers."

If BP's use of prison labor remains an open secret on the Gulf Coast, no one in an official capacity is saying so. At the Grand Isle base camp in early June, I called BP's Public Information line, and visited representatives for the Coast Guard Public Relations team, the Department of Homeland Security, and the La. Fisheries and Wildlife Department. They were all stumped. Were inmates doing shore protection or oil cleanup work? They had no idea. In fact, they said, they'd like to know—would I call them if I found out?

I got an answer one evening earlier this month, when I drove up the gravel driveway of the Lafourche Parish Work Release Center jail, just off Highway 90, halfway between New Orleans and Houma. Men were returning from a long day of shoveling oil-soaked sand into black trash bags in the sweltering heat. Wearing BP shirts, jeans and rubber boots (nothing identifying them as inmates), they arrived back at the jail in unmarked white vans, looking dog tired.

Beach cleanup is a Sisyphean task. Shorelines cleaned during the day become newly soaked with oil and dispersant overnight, so crews shovel up the same beaches again and again. Workers wear protective chin-to-boot coveralls (made out of high-density polyethylene and manufactured by Dupont), taped to steel-toed boots covered in yellow plastic. They work twenty minutes on, forty minutes off, as per Occupational Safety and Health Administration safety rules. The limited physical schedule allows workers to recover from the blazing sun and the oppressive heat that builds up inside their impermeable suits.

During their breaks, workers unzip the coveralls for ventilation, drink ice water from gallon thermoses and sit under white fabric tents. They start at 6am, take a half hour lunch and end the day at 6pm, adding up three to four hours of hard physical labor in twenty-minute increments. They are forbidden to speak to the public or the media by BP's now-notorious gag rule. At the end of the day, coveralls are stripped off and thrown in dumpsters, alongside oil-soaked booms and trash bags full of contaminated sand. The dumpsters are emptied into local HazMat landfills, free employees go home and the inmates are returned to work release centers.

Work release inmates are required to work for up to 12 hours a day, six days a week, sometimes averaging 72 hours per week. These are long hours for performing what may arguably be the most toxic job in America. Although the dangers of mixed oil and dispersant exposure are largely unknown, the chemicals in crude oil can damage every system in the body, as well as cell structures and DNA.

Inmates can't pick and choose their work assignments and they face considerable repercussions for rejecting any job, including loss of earned "good time." The warden of the Terrebonne Parish Work Release Center in Houma explains: "If they say no to a job, they get that time that was taken off their sentence put right back on, and get sent right back to the lockup they came out of." This means that work release inmates who would rather protect their health than participate in the non-stop toxic cleanup run the risk of staying in prison longer.

Prisoners are already subject to well-documented health care deprivations while incarcerated, and are unlikely to have health insurance after release. Work release positions are covered by Worker's Compensation insurance, but pursuing claims long after exposure could be a Kafkaesque task. Besides, there is currently no system for tracking the medical impact of oil and dispersant exposure in cleanup workers or affected communities.

"They're not getting paid, it's part of their sentence"

To learn how many of the 20,000 prisoners housed outside of state prisons are involved in spill-related labor, I called the DOC Public Relations officer, Pam LaBorde, who ultimately discouraged me from seeking such information. ("Frankly, I do not know where your story is going, but it does not sound positive," she said on our third phone call.)

Going to prison officials directly didn't help. The warden of a South Louisiana jail refused to discuss the matter, exclaiming, "You want me to lose my job?" A different warden, of a privately-owned center admitted, on condition of anonymity, that inmates from his facility had been employed in oil cleanup, but declined to answer further questions. Jefferson Parish President Steve Theriot and Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser, and Grand Isle Police Chief Euris DuBois declined interview requests.

Transparency problems are longstanding with the La. DOC. There is also scant oversight of private prison facilities. Following Hurricane Katrina, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) issued a 140-page report that documented abuses and botched prison evacuations, as well as the numerous times its requests for official information were rejected. "It appears that you are standing in the shoes of prisoners, and therefore DOC is exempted from providing any information which it might otherwise have to under public records law," DOC lawyers told the ACLU National Prisons Project.

Some officials have been more forthcoming. A lieutenant in the Plaquemines Parish Sheriff's Office told me that three crews of inmates were sandbagging in Buras, La. in case oil hit there. "They're not getting paid, it's part of their sentence," she said. "They'll work as long as they're needed. It's a hard job because of the heat, but they're not refusing to work." In early May, Governor Bobby Jindal's office sent out a press release heralding the training of eighty inmates from Elayn Hunt Correctional Center in "cleaning of oil-impacted wildlife recovered from coastal areas." DOC Spokesperson Pam LaBorde subsequently denied that any inmates participated in wildlife cleaning efforts.

Offering an exception to this policy of secrecy is Lafourche Parish Work Release Center, the only one in the state that is accredited by the American Correctional Association. It is audited regularly and abides by national standards of safety and accountability, which is perhaps why I was able to simply walk in on a Thursday afternoon and chat with the warden.

Captain Milfred Zeringue is a retired La. state police officer with a jaunty smile, powerful torso, and silver hair. His small, gray office is adorned with photos of many generations of his Louisiana family and a Norman Rockwell print picturing a policeman and a small runaway boy sharing a meaningful look at a soda fountain counter. A brass plaque confers the "Blood and Guts Award" upon Zeringue. Of 184 men living under the Captain's charge, 18 are currently assigned to oil spill work. The numbers change daily and are charted on white boards that stretch down the hallway.

Captain Zeringue says that inmates are glad for any opportunity they can get, and see work release jobs as a step up, a headstart on re-entry. "Our work release inmates are shipped to centers around the state according to employer demand," he explains, describing the different types of skilled and unskilled labor. "I have carpenters, guys riding on the back of the trash trucks, guys working offshore on the oil rigs, doing welding, cooking. Employers like them because they are guaranteed a worker who's on time, drug-free, and sober."

"And," he adds, "because they do get a tax break."

[whiskeysteve]

"Hate is never the answer John!"

Like the way TO dedicates his signature to John now, starting to get a bit desperate methinks!

ad hominem attacks are never the answer tyrones own

[Tyrones own]

Like the way TO dedicates his signature to John now, starting to get a bit desperate methinks!

Hate can never be the answer Steve especially when ye have yourselves wrapped in the
Humanitarian  flag!
Kind of reminds me of the type who are eating the rails off the alter on a Sunday morning
but would scam and screw all a sundry during the week.... Despicable Human beings!!

[Tyrones own]

Like the way TO dedicates his signature to John now, starting to get a bit desperate methinks!

Desperate....? Na Desperate is running to the Mods to have it taken down

[Baile an tuaigh]

Keep up the great work John. My brother is currently setting up an "Antrim to Gazza"  inspired by your good self. Also encouraging to see a Tipperary to Gazza started as well. Fair play to you.

[AZOffaly]

Leave poor Gazza out of this. He's beyond help from Antrim, Tipp or anywhere else

[Doogie Browser]

I see Tony Hayward will be stepping down to be replaced by a yank, apparently the Americans did not appreciate being talked to by someone with an English accent!

[whiskeysteve]

Like the way TO dedicates his signature to John now, starting to get a bit desperate methinks!

Desperate....? Na Desperate is running to the Mods to have it taken down

Pity someone complained. Would have preferred it kept up so you continue to look a right fool