Brown pelicans smothered by BP’s oil spill may be the symbols of sadness for the disaster in the Gulf, but they are, of course, far from the only animals affected. Marine scientists are watching other species for signs of danger.

Whales

Late last week, scientists spotted the first dead whale seen in the Gulf since the leak began gushing oil in April. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found a 25-foot-long sperm whale washed up, and now it is testing the sea creature for cause of death.

“While it is impossible to confirm whether exposure to oil was the cause of death, NOAA is reviewing whether factors such as ship strikes and entanglement can be eliminated,” the agency said. Samples collected from this carcass will be stored until the Pisces returns to port on July 2, or possibly if another boat is sent to meet the Pisces. Full analysis of the samples will take several weeks [New Orleans Times-Picayune].

Manatees

So far, it at least appears that manatees have been spared toxic exposure to the ever-growing oil spill. However, a science team hunkered down at Dauphin Island in Alabama—in the path of the oil—say their luck may not hold.

Until recently, biologists believed that manatees rarely ventured west of peninsular Florida, where, so far, no oil has appeared. But in 2007, Ruth Carmichael, who leads the Dauphin Island team, began documenting a relatively large summer migration of manatees to Mobile Bay, Ala. — leading them directly into and through the path of the oil from the Deepwater Horizon leak. From a couple of dozen to as many as 100 come to Mobile Bay for the summer, out of a total North American population of 5,000, she said [The New York Times].

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Last night, President Obama made his first Oval Office speech. In it, he described the BP oil spill as an assault on “our shores and our citizens” and outlined his “battle plan.” He discussed the immediate cleanup of the spill, the repayment he’ll insist on from BP for harm done, and the future of U.S. energy.

Katie Couric compared Obama’s speech to others issued from the Oval Office.

“The disaster in the Gulf may or may not be President Obama’s Katrina, but, tonight, it will be his Challenger explosion, his Cuban missile crisis, his Sept. 11. Unlike those events, this is a long simmering disaster, getting darker by the day.” [CBS]

Here are some of the major points covered in the speech:

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Can Kevin Costner’s centrifuge–a device to separate oil from water at up to 200 gallons per minute–clean up the Deep Horizon spill? We reported on Costner’s clean-up gadget back in May when he convinced the Coast Guard and BP to test his technology, and now comes news that BP has ordered 32 of Costner’s devices to try out in the Gulf.

It sure makes for easy reporting; Costner’s handsome mug is certainly more appealing than oil-soaked sea life. But what are the actual chances that the actor’s device will work? Costner seems to recognize how implausible it all sounds:

“It may seem an unlikely scenario that I am the one delivering this technology in this moment in time,” Kevin Costner said (see ABC video below) in a congressional committee meeting.  “But from where I’m sitting, it’s equally inconceivable that these machines are not already in place.” [CNN]

As described in last week’s testimony before the House Committee on Science and Technology, Costner bought the patent for the basic technology behind his centrifuge 15 years ago and has since spent $20 million to develop it with the company he founded, Ocean Therapy Solutions. BP will test the V20 model, a version that has about a five square foot base, weighs around 4,500 lbs, and costs (according to The Los Angeles Times) $500,000.

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People have now recovered nearly 500 oiled-but-alive birds from the Gulf region. Many of these are the brown pelicans, which—adding insult to tragedy—is Louisiana’s state bird. They have become grimy symbols of BP’s catastrophe, and responders are racing to save the birds and clean them.

But increasingly, the disheartening but necessary question has arisen: Should we euthanize them instead of trying to save them?

YES

Ron Kendall, director of the Institute of Environmental and Human Health at Texas Tech University, told the AP that it might be hard to stomach the thought, but trying to save the brown pelicans and other oily birds could be futile. To help the birds, responders must capture them, hold them in captivity, go through the exhaustive process of cleaning them, and set them free somewhere where they won’t fly back to the oil. In the case of BP’s leak, oil has spread so far that rescuers are currently taking Louisiana birds all the way to Tampa Bay, Florida.

Kendall, for one, is skeptical that our efforts do much good, and the data aren’t encouraging.

The arm of the federal government that nominally oversees offshore rigs agrees with Kendall, and has for some time. “Studies are indicating that rescue and cleaning of oiled birds makes no effective contribution to conservation, except conceivably for species with a small world population,” the U.S. Minerals Management Service said in a 2002 environmental analysis of proposed Gulf oil drilling projects. “A growing number of studies indicate that current rehabilitation techniques are not effective in returning healthy birds to the wild” [AP].

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If we’re lucky, BP’s relief wells will be done in August and the company’s all-time blunder will stop leaking. But even it that happens, the Coast Guard now concedes, it will take years to clean up this disaster.

“It’s the breadth and complexity of the disaggregation of the oil” that is now posing the greatest clean-up challenge, the commander, Adm. Thad W. Allen, said at a news conference at the White House [The New York Times].

The oil has now spread 46 miles from the original site of the Deepwater Horizon explosion, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration now says, and has been found at a depth of more than 3,000 feet. That confirms the wide undersea plumes of oil; BP initially denied those existed. Admiral Allen said it’s time to think of this not as one spill, but rather as hundreds of thousands of little ones.

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We have learned of top caps, top kills, junk shots, and dome plans. We have seen President Obama “furious,” standing on the Louisiana shore. Last week, we saw pictures of the immediate victims of the BP oil spill, the Gulf marine life. Pictures that many believe will endure as symbols of the entire spill.

Adding to the impact, the brown pelican is Louisiana’s state bird, and was only recently removed from the endangered species list.

As a senior official of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, James Harris was too diplomatic to say if he thought the anger was justified, but, as a Louisiana native–from Pearl River, north of New Orleans, he pointed out forcefully why it was there, and how the first images of the oiled pelicans had intensified it. “I think it’s possible that they might come to symbolise the whole disaster,” he said. “For the people of Louisiana, the brown pelican is just as much a symbol of the state as the American eagle is for the nation as a whole, and to see the state emblem being threatened again and despoiled–people are very upset and angry about that.” [The Independent]

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The top cap is in place. How much oil is it actually capturing, though? The Coast Guard says we won’t know until later in the day, but plenty is still leaking into the Gulf of Mexico.

After failing to cut through the riser with its fancy-sounding diamond-tipped saw, BP yesterday had to settle for cutting the broken riser pipes with what’s been described as a big pair of shears. That method, however, likely produced a rougher cut along the edge, which would hamper the effectiveness of the containment dome BP has now placed on top of its leak.

The government’s point man for the crisis, Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, said the cap’s installation atop a severed pipe late Thursday was a positive development but it was too early to tell if will work. The funnel-like lid is designed to channel oil for pumping to a surface tanker. “Even if successful, this is only a temporary and partial fix and we must continue our aggressive response operations at the source, on the surface and along the Gulf’s precious coastline,” Allen said in a statement [AP].

This morning Allen offered the very rough estimate of the containment dome’s effectiveness, saying it might be capturing 1,000 barrels of oil per day. If that’s the right number, then it’s practically nothing: The government’s own estimate was increased last week to between 12,000 and 19,000 barrels per day, and BP warned that the flow would increase when it sheared off the pipe in preparation for installing the dome. According to the Christian Science Monitor, it does appear that a jagged cut has hurt the ability to capture oil:

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Here’s what’s new in the Gulf of Mexico:

1. Saw stuck.

When we left the BP oil spill yesterday, the “top kill” had failed and the “top cap” plan—cutting the pipe at a strategic location and then placing a containment dome on top—was commencing. But like every other BP attempt to stop the leak, the dome effort hit a snag.

The attempt bogged down overnight as a special diamond-wire saw snagged in the pipe. The work has stalled as BP tries two old logger tricks: changing the angle of the pipe to let the saw get through and, if that doesn’t work, bringing the saw to the surface to replace the blade [Christian Science Monitor].

What’s more, even if the saw gets free and BP successfully cuts the riser, the already-gushing flow of oil will increase by at least 20 percent between the time engineers finish the cut and the time they install the cap. Whether BP can install the cap, or instead a looser-fitting shell that would capture less of the oil, depends on how smoothly the company makes the final cut. Getting the saw stuck isn’t a good sign.

2. Criminal investigation.

The word is official now: Attorney General Eric Holder says the United States government will be opening a criminal investigation into the spill.

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At this point the question “now what?” has reached a sort of repetitive absurdity in the Gulf of Mexico. With BP having failed to stop its oil leak with robots and failed with containment domes and failed with the “top kill” maneuver, the company has decided it’s going to try the dome approach again.

On Monday, engineers positioned submarine robots that will try to shear off a collapsed 21-inch riser pipe with a razorlike wire studded with bits of industrial diamonds. If that is achieved, officials will need at least a couple of days to position a domelike cap over the blowout preventer [The New  York Times].

The cap is called the lower marine riser package (LMRP), and—stop me if you’ve heard this one—it’s never been tested at the depth of 5,000 feet, so BP has no idea whether it will work. The previous version of the containment dome had the same goal: establishing a seal on the seal and piping the oil up to a tanker on the surface. But because of buildup on the dome, that first attempt in early May was unsuccessful.

Meanwhile, the disastrous numbers just get worse. The oil spill is now worse than the Exxon Valdez and increasing in size by the day. Yesterday wind patterns from the south threatened to carry more oil toward Mississippi and Alabama. The fishing ban has been extended to nearly 62,000 square miles, or about a quarter of the Gulf.

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After nearly forty days of wandering in the wilderness of failure and frustration, is this the time that BP finally closes off its oil leak?

There’s a glimmer of optimism in the Gulf of Mexico right now, as the “top kill” appears to have stopped the flow of oil. But with everything that’s happened so far, people are watching nervously and holding off on any celebration until we know the leak is sealed at last.

“They’ve been able to stabilize the wellhead, they’re pumping mud down it. They’ve stopped the hydrocarbons from coming up,” said Coast Guard chief Thad Allen, who is coordinating the US government’s battle against the oil spill. He told local radio WWL First News that BP “had some success overnight” but cautioned the British energy giant was “in a period of kind of wait and see right now where they see how the well stabilizes” [Discovery News].

The likelihood of long-term success grows with the passing hours, though, for the sake of caution, it may be tomorrow before BP declares victory on this. It took a lot of pumping heavy mud just to get to this point:

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The U.S. Coast Guard is saying today that the “top kill” procedure looks like it’s having success at stemming BP’s oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. We hope they’re right.

In the meantime, you can now say that the BP oil spill is the worst in our nation’s history, eclipsing the 11 million gallons spill by the Exxon Valdez.

In a teleconference this morning, U.S. Geological Survey head Marcia McNutt released the new estimates by her scientists trying to gauge the flow rate of the oil leak. There were two teams working—one watching the surface and the other monitoring the video feed from the leak site. The low estimate is now 12,000 barrels per day, but it may be more like 19,000 to 25,000, the teams found. (The previous estimate, repeated throughout the first month of the spill, was just 5,000 barrels per day).

McNutt wouldn’t say explicitly if the BP spill is now the worst the United States has ever seen, but the numbers speak for themselves. If we do a very conservative calculation and say that 12,000 barrels leaked every day between April 22, when the Deepwater Horizon rig sank, and May 17, when BP installed the siphon to catch some of the oil, you get approximately 13.1 million gallons of oil released into the Gulf’s waters (there are 42 gallons in a barrel of oil).

And keep in mind that’s just the conservative estimate; it’s probably a lot worse than that. The AP did a similar calculation, assuming that either 12,000 or 25,000 barrels leaked every day from the rig’s explosion on April 20 to the present moment, and came up with even more dire figures.

The new government estimate means at least 19 million gallons and maybe as much as 39 million gallons have leaked in the five weeks since an oil rig exploded and sank [AP].

Recent posts on the BP oil spill:

80beats: “Top Kill” Operation Is Under Way in Attempt to Stop Gulf Oil Leak
80beats: BP To Switch Dispersants; Will Kevin Costner Save Us All?
80beats: Scientists Say Gulf Spill Is Way Worse Than Estimated. How’d We Get It So Wrong?
80beats: Testimony Highlights 3 Major Failures That Caused Gulf Spill
80beats: 5 Offshore Oil Hotspots Beyond the Gulf That Could Boom—Or Go Boom

Image: NOAA (the Exxon Valdez)

It’s on.

Today the U.S. Coast Guard gave its approval to BP’s “top kill” plan to finally cap the oil spill, and at 2 p.m. Eastern time, the company got started. BP leaders warned that it may take a couple of days before they know for sure if it worked, but now say they will maintain the live video feed during the top kill attempt.

A successful capping of the leaking well could finally begin to mend the company’s brittle image after weeks of failed efforts, and perhaps limit the damage to wildlife and marine life from reaching catastrophic levels. A failure could mean several months more of leaking oil, devastating economic and environmental impacts across the gulf region, and mounting financial liabilities for the company. BP has already spent an estimated $760 million in fighting the spill, and two relief wells it is drilling as a last resort to seal the well may not be completed until August [The New York Times].

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This week BP will try one more time to stop its massive leak in the Gulf of Mexico. The “top kill” plan that was supposed to go into action on Sunday will now commence on Wednesday, the company says.

The process will involve pumping heavy fluids down two three-inch lines placed inside the wellhead. If successful, the fluids will temporarily stop the oil rush, which would then allow operators to seal the opening with cement. The wellhead, officials say, will never be used again for oil drilling [Christian Science Monitor].

Just like the containment dome, though, a top kill has never been attempted on a leak gushing so far below the surface of the water—5,000 feet. But with BP’s other attempts ending in failure, this looks like the best shot the company has to stop the flow in a short term.

As BP prepares this operation, the simmering anger at the company has seeped up to the higher levels of the U.S. government. Rear Admiral Mary Landry, who has been coordinating the Coast Guard’s response with BP, finally started to sound annoyed with the company’s actions—or lack thereof—as 65 miles of American shorelines have now been hit by oil, coating pelicans in Louisiana that were just removed from the endangered species list six months ago.

Landry also criticized BP for allowing some equipment that could aid in efforts to block or clean up the spreading oil slick to sit unused, even as oil is washing up onto the Gulf Coast. “There is really no excuse for not having constant activity,” Landry said [New Orleans Times-Picayune].

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By now, more than 650,000 gallons of chemical dispersant have gone into the Gulf of Mexico to try to break up the oil. But after giving BP the go-ahead to use the chemical, and to inject it undersea, the Environmental Protection Agency changed course yesterday and demanded that BP switch to a less toxic dispersant. From the EPA statement:

While the dispersant BP has been using is on the Agency’s approved list, BP is using this dispersant in unprecedented volumes and, last week, began using it underwater at the source of the leak – a procedure that has never been tried before. Because of its use in unprecedented volumes and because much is unknown about the underwater use of dispersants, EPA wants to ensure BP is using the least toxic product authorized for use.

EPA gave BP until today to pick an alternative, and then another 72 hours after that to begin using the alternative in the Gulf. A couple weeks ago we covered the concern that Corexit—the dispersant BP has been using all along—could have toxic side effects, and that a less toxic (and possibly more effective) alternative could be available. With the EPA order, BP is finally moving in that direction.

U.S. Polychemical of Spring Valley, N.Y., which makes a dispersant called Dispersit SPC 1000, said Thursday morning that it had received an order from BP and would increase its production to 20,000 gallons a day in the next few days, and eventually to as much as 60,000 gallons a day [The New York Times].

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Will the Florida Keys catch a break with the loop current? Most observers are now in agreement that one of the biggest ecological worries about the BP oil spill—that it could reach the Gulf of Mexico’s loop current that flows to the Keys—has begun to occur. However, The New York Times reports today via Greenwire that eddies around the edge of the current are keeping much of the oil out of it.

Clear predictions are hard to come by because the oil continues to defy expectations about which direction it will go, and so does the loop current.

The loop moves based on shifting winds and other environmental factors, so even though oil is leaking continuously it may be in the current one day, and out the next. The slick itself has defied scientists’ efforts to track it and predict its path. Instead, it has repeatedly advanced and retreated, an ominous, shape-shifting mass in the Gulf, with vast underwater lobes extending outward [AP].

And, oceanographers like Mitch Roffer say, eddies forming near the current could disrupt it and change the oil’s course.

Satellite shots this morning showed that an eddy farther south along the Florida coast is expanding in size and strength. That cyclone appears likely to destabilize or even sever the Loop Current, greatly reducing the oil threat to the Florida Keys and beyond, he said. “If it forms, it’s going to pull a lot of the oil away from Florida,” Roffer said. There are no guarantees, he added, “but it looks very likely that this is forming” [The New York Times].

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