One Year Later, Gulf Oil Spill Continues to Impede Gulf Progress

(Images: BP America;Eric Vance; File; Pete Souza; ThinkStock)

• Claims
  BP has received 505,161 claims, but they’ve only paid out $3.9 billion to 177,937 to claimants and to a separate fund for real estate brokers and agents. For more than two-thirds of the people who have filed claims, the Gulf Coast Claims Facility has failed to process their claims according to the timeline that was set forth at public forums and on web sites, says John Jopling, a managing attorney, at the Mississippi Center for Justice.
• There have also been complaints about a lack of specificity about why claims are being denied. “When a client is told that their documentation is insufficient, they are not told why it is insufficient,” says Jopling. “If they don’t think that what you sent is sufficient, they need to identify why it is deficient and tell you what else you can send so that you and your lawyer can try to meet whatever standard they are applying. But they don’t even say what that standard is.”
• It also appears that the Gulf Coast Claims Facility isn’t paying many of the service industry claims, says Jopling, referring to cocktail waitresses, casino table dealers, people who provide spa services, and other hourly wage earners. These are individuals who weren’t directly employed in the seafood industry, but who suffered from a reduction of income when tourism decreased after the oil spill.

• Regional Economy
  According to different resources, tourism has rebounded in some of the cities along the Gulf of Mexico. That is in part due to more than $117 million that BP set aside for Gulf Coast tourism in 2010. New Orleans, for example experienced a small economic boom the summer after the spill. Hotel occupancy in New Orleans was at 100% occupancy, according to Nola.com.
• Yet, that boom wasn’t widespread or lasting and it didn’t change the circumstances of individuals who earned a living in the seafood industry. Approximately 71% of consumers are still concerned about the safety of consuming Gulf seafood, and 23% reported having reduced their seafood consumption as a result of the oil spill, according to the NAACP report.
• Also, BP’s own figures on diversity suppliers reflect a disparity in opportunities afforded to minority contractors seeking to recover from the disaster, explained Ernest Johnson, NAACP’s St
  ate Conference President for Louisiana. Compared to $181 million in small business enterprise contracts awarded overall to address this disaster, reportedly only$7.6m was spent through minority contractors.

• Loss of employment
• Shrimpers, bait and tackle shops, food processors and others experienced extreme loss of jobs in Alabama, according to Alabama senator Richard Shelby. Similar losses were reported by fisherman in Louisiana, Mississippi and Florida. Even those who were able to receive a claim are concerned about how they will continue now that the demand for work in the seafood industry has decreased. “Unemployment rates in some of these fishing communities are at 80%,” said Rocky Kistner of the Natural Resources Defense Council, according to the NAACP report.
• “These fishermen are fed up,” says Byron Encalade, Louisiana Oystermen’s Association, who also appeared in the September 2010 issue of BLACK ENTERPRISE magazine . “They’re not going to see their families starve to death. And we are up to the point where you have nowhere else to go now. Your back is up against the wall here.”

• Waste Management
• Previously, the Environmental Protection Agency has approved nine landfills in the Gulf Coast to receive the waste products from the BP Gulf Oil Spill. Five of those nine landfills were located in communities where a majority of residents are people of color, according to data compiled by Robert Bullard, director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center (EJRC) at Clark Atlanta University, and long time EJ advocate.
• He found that a significantly large share of the oil-spill waste–24,071 tons out of 39,448 tons (61%)–was dumped communities where people of color live, Bullard wrote on DissidentVoice.org, a social justice blog. Many of those communities were located along “Cancer Alley”, a 85-mile stretch along the Mississippi from Baton Rough to New Orleans predominantly inhabited by African Americans and Latinos, and which has an increased incidence of cancer risk, allegedly due to landfills and petrochemical plants. As of this month, there are now 19 landfills designated to accept oil spill waste. The EPA says those landfills, which are not designed for hazardous wastes were used because waste from petroleum operations is exempt from hazardous-waste rules. Much of the waste included oil-stained gloves, boots, and boom used to clean up decontamination areas.
• BP is required to sample and test collected waste weekly and the EPA is doing its own sampling to confirm, said EPA spokeswoman Betsaida Alcantara in a Miami Herald article. Residents near the landfills are concerned that oil spill waste will leak into groundwater or volatilize into the air.

• Health Problems
• NOAA contends that Gulf beaches and surrounding areas can be safely occupied for recreation and work. To anesthetize any concern about safety on the Gulf Coast, President Barack Obama and his family swam in the water and ate the seafood sourced from the Gulf while vacationing in Panama City, Florida, last fall.
• While the Gulf water may be safe now, some people believe that they are suffering from medical problems associated with the oil spill.
• “People along the coast are still having health problems due to the oil spill, including respiratory, dermatological, and digestive health problems,”
  said Stephen Bradberry, Executive Director of the Alliance Institute’s Gulf Coast Fund Adviser in the NAACP report. “The Gulf Coast Claims Facility is not accepting health claims, so people who have gotten sick and are now unable to work don’t have the money to pay their medical bills.”

• Seafood Safety
• Starting today, all of the commercial and recreational fisheries in federal waters that had been closed due to the oil spill have been reopened. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration ruled that all seafood samples from reopened waters have passed sensory testing for contamination with oil and dispersant, according to the FDA , and are safe for consumption.
• Yet, independent toxicologists and scientists mentioned in the NAACP report do not believe that the sensory tests used by the FDA and the NOAA were thorough enough to detect oil compounds that can build up in the flesh of marine animals and seafood. Consumption of large fin fish like tuna and mackerel from the Gulf could be a health hazard in the future as toxins and metals accumulate in fish tissues, reports a study done by public health experts in an August 2010 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. In addition, the NAACP reported that subsistence farmers and their families are more vulnerable to Gulf oil toxins because they consume fish more frequently than what was accounted for by the FDA when determining the risk assessment of the seafood.