Cleanup Draws Critics Over Speed and Care

Cleanup Draws Critics Over Speed and Care
By LESLIE KAUFMAN and JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/us/31cleanup.html?hpw


PORT FOURCHON, La. — By dawn, the beach here looks like the staging area for a B-movie invasion.

As semi rigs unload equipment and dozens of all-terrain vehicles buzz up and down the sand, young men in blinding white protective suits listlessly shovel globs of rust-colored oil in the heat.

Operations here are just the forward tip of a growing army of cleanup workers, already thousands strong, that is advancing along hundreds of miles of Louisiana shoreline to combat the oily sludge that began washing up heavily here about two weeks ago.

Yet the cleanup effort is drawing some criticism as it unfolds on the beaches, in the bayous and in the marshes.

Environmentalists accuse workers of running roughshod over wildlife and delicate grasses. Conversely, state and local officials are worried that the crews are not doing enough, fast enough. And most agree that the effort has been wildly uneven.

Here in Port Fourchon, vehicles have not only flattened sand dunes, one of the few lines of defense against erosion by the gulf waves, but have also plowed through nesting sites of the least tern.

“There is a lot of collateral damage out there,” said C. Cathy Norman, who manages the nine-mile beachfront here and 35,000 acres of marshland behind it for a local trust.

At other points along the Louisiana coast, some officials complained that the companies hired by BP, which bears heavy responsibility for the cleanup, were not adequately supervising their workers.

On the western end of Grand Isle, where crews filled thousands of bags with oily debris before President Obama’s visit on Friday, local residents cited a dead dolphin that had been buried rather than removed and about a dozen large redfish, dead and still covered with oil, that had been thrown into the grasslands.

All dead wildlife are supposed to be bagged and counted. But local officials said incidents like the tossed redfish are perhaps unavoidable in such a large undertaking done mostly by a newly hired and quickly trained labor force.

Cleanup workers on the beach the day the president arrived declined requests for interviews, saying they had been instructed not to speak to reporters. “I need this job,” explained one man who asked not to be named.

Some local officials complained about delays in the crews’ arrival. In Plaquemines Parish, home to the Mississippi River Delta, the companies hired by BP to clean up the marshes have been slow to respond, sometimes waiting a week to 10 days after oil has been spotted in the marshes to attack the problem, officials there said.

And where they have acted, the workers have at times trampled on flora and fauna as they deployed large absorbent pads to sop up the oil, the parish president, Billy Nungesser, said in an interview.

“I classify it as a sloppy cleanup,” he said.

Some other parish leaders echoed his criticisms. In Terrebonne Parish, oil has fouled the delicate marshes on Timbalier Bay, Lake Felicity and Lake Barre, which are important spawning grounds for brown shrimp.

“Not only was the response not adequate, but the cleanup wasn’t adequate,” the parish president, Michel Claudet, said. “The oil goes into the marsh, and they would send 15 guys in who would trample on the marsh to get it out.”

But Mr. Claudet said contractors working for BP stepped up the number of cleanup crews working in his region late last week, recruiting unemployed people in Houma and New Orleans for $12 an hour. The response time is improving, he said.

He also welcomed the assignment of a Coast Guard officer to each parish last week to be a go-between with BP, saying it had helped improve coordination.

BP and the Coast Guard say that their biggest challenge is explaining to eager and desperate residents why some oil is being left instead of being mopped up.

“We are walking a real fine line between getting the oil removed and irreversibly harming the environment,” said Rear Adm. James Watson, a deputy federal on-scene commander.

The National Audubon Society, which owns beachfront property west of Port Fourchon, recently posted signs warning contractors not to act without its approval, said Paul Kemp, a vice president of the group. “We hope that will forestall the zealous cleanup folks from working without supervision.”

Dr. Kemp said he hoped the size and inaccessibility of many of the marshes would protect them. “The only saving grace is that they can’t get to most of the beaches,” he said of the workers.

But that is changing swiftly, too. On Saturday, in response to criticisms from eager parishes, Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer for exploration and production, announced that they hoped to move 2,200 workers into the more inaccessible areas of the marsh using tent camp bases and floating hotels.

“It’s scary,” said Angelina Freeman, a coastal scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund who has been making boat inspections off the marsh area off Pass a Loutre. “You are seeing lots of wildlife disturbance.”

Some environmentalists assert that BP’s contractors seem more worried about giving the appearance of cleaning up than about cataloging the damage and taking care not to disturb the ecosystem more than necessary.

“The larger reason for these efforts seems to be to make it seem that they are doing everything they can,” said Joseph Smyth, a spokesman for Greenpeace, “when, tragically, there isn’t much that can be done to clean up a spill of this size and nature.”

The avoidable damage is what bothers Ms. Norman, the beachfront manager.

She has brought in her brother, Don Norman, a wildlife toxicologist, to evaluate the harm that the oil and the cleanup are doing to birds here.

He said he had seen the all-terrain vehicles that roam up and down the beach spin through nesting colonies and had even witnessed the occupants honking at baby Wilson’s plovers for fun.

“Nesting season will be over soon,” he said, sighing. “And that is a good thing.”