BP Gulf Oil-Spill Fishing Waters Opened East of Mississippi River Despite Oil Just a Few Miles Away

  Posted by - July 31, 2010 at 6:42 am - Permalink - Source via Alexander Higgins Blog
Gulf Fishing Waters Opened East Of Mississippi River Despite Oil Just A Few Miles Away
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Al.com is reporting that government agencies have decided to open BP Gulf oil-spill fishing waters east of the Mississippi River.

NEW ORLEANS — Commercial fishermen were allowed back in some Louisiana waters east of the Mississippi River today after federal authorities said samples of finfish and shrimp taken there were safe to eat.

In Mississippi, state waters north of the barrier islands were ordered opened to all commercial and recreational finfish and shrimp fishing activities that were part of the precautionary oil spill closures. The order takes effect at 6:01 p.m. today.

All commercial and recreational crab and oyster fishing will remain closed in the affected area.

The reopening is being implemented after completion of extensive sampling and testing conducted by the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources, the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, in coordination with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The article also points out that local politicians and businessmen were pushing the government agencies to reopen the waters even in areas where there was known to be oil in the water.

The newly opened waters had already been opened by the state to recreational fishing based on extensive testing of the fish, but FDA approval was needed to open commercial fishing. Gov. Bobby Jindal and seafood processors complained about a backlog of samples awaiting FDA testing, and about FDA protocols that complicated the matter.

For instance, the FDA refused samples from waters where oil was spotted. That had Louisiana officials in a lather last week because they said FDA refused samples from areas were small numbers of tar balls — clumps of weathered oil that are less toxic and would not be ingested by the fish — had been spotted.

Harlon Pearce, owner of a suburban New Orleans processing plant and the chairman of the promotion board, had been highly critical of the FDA, but he welcomed the news of the Friday and said the FDA has been working closely with the state to get more tests done.

They also report that oyster and crabbing have not been reopened blaming a longer testing time required for crabs.

The waters remained closed to crabbing because the FDA testing method for crabs takes significantly longer than finfish and shrimp testing, a Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries news release said.

Oysters in some Louisiana waters have been killed not by oil contamination but by fresh water diverted south in hopes of keeping oil from encroaching.

However the real reason that crabbing may not have been reopened, as I pointed out in my last article, may just be because scientists are now reporting they have found crabs from Texas to Florida are contaminated with Corexit and oil and the contamination is visible to the naked eye.

Fox News is now reporting that researchers now believe Corexit and oil have infested crab larvae from Texas to Florida and fear the toxic chemicals from the BP Gulf oil spill may bio-accumulate and contaminate the entire food chain.

A  report today from Fox 8 in New Orleans reveals that the “orange blobs found lodged in the bodies of tiny blue crab larvae collected from marshes that stretch from Texas to Florida” appear to contain Corexit, according to preliminary results from researchers at Tulane University.

The report says BP’s dispersant “may do more harm than the oil itself.”

University of New Orleans’ Martin O’Connell, PhD said, “No one really knows” if Corexit will bio-accumulate. “If you’re a small fish and you eat 1,000 of these small crab larvae and all of them have oil or Corexit droplets in them they could get into the fish — that little fish could be eaten and so on and so on.”

Pondering the future of the Gulf, O’Connell said, “I think they should be more concerned that we might be losing whole cohorts of these animals when they’re very small, and we won’t see the impact in the adults but three or four years from now.”

Florida toxicologist Dr. William Sawyer, who has been hired on behalf of sickened fishermen and cleanup workers, says “some of these chemicals are in great excess — of risk-based lethal levels — that the current hydrocarbon levels are capable of sterilizing our fisheries and estuary production zones.”

The Fox 8 report concludes, “Since so many fish and crabs feed on crab larvae, some scientists fear the oil and dispersant droplets threaten to kill critical areas in the Gulf of Mexico food web.”

 

To make matters worse the Louisiana Emergency Website states that oil was found just yesterday only a few miles from the area of the BP Gulf oil spill fishing waters that are being reopened.

  • …
  • Sighting: Oil located near the N end of the Chandeleur Islands
  • …
  • Sighting: Dime to quarter sized oil patches impacting an unnamed mangrove island .43 miles ENE of Brush Island.
  • …

Just to give you an idea of where those sightings are I put together this KML file of the July 30 fishery reopening and added the two locations of the oil sightings for viewing in Google Earth.

Here is a screen grab of the Google Earth screen showing the two sightings just a few miles outside the area being reopened.

Gulf Fishing Waters Opened East Of Mississippi River Despite Oil Just A Few Miles Away

Gulf Fishing Waters Opened East Of Mississippi River Despite Oil Just A Few Miles Away

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