Environmental leaders briefing meeting held August 17
Published on August 17, 2010
This morning local environmental leaders had the opportunity to meet with representatives from BP as well as federal and state response agencies for a question and answer session about the next phase of the Deepwater Horizon Oil response.
The Agency Reps present were:
U.S. Coast Guard- Commander Anthony LaRusso, Liaison Officer
U.S. EPA – Art Smith, Incident Commander for EPA
ADEM – Scott Brown, Mobile Branch Manager
NOAA –Brad Benngio
USFWS – Chris Pease
BP- Gary Willis
Commander LaRusso briefed us on the 4 main priorities of Incident Command in the coming weeks and months:
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Pull remaining boom out- approximately 1.6 million feet of boom were deployed and 1 million of that has been removed as of this morning
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Decontaminate the boom
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Develop and implement a subsurface oil detection and sampling plan
Friends: This will be a critical long term effort as we all know (and many of us have seen!) subsurface oil in the nearshore areas. Storms will continue to wash some of it ashore but we need to be diligent about continuing to monitor for shoreline impacts. We also need to insist that long term sediment and water column monitoring continue to happen all along our coastline.
4. Ongoing beach clean-up activities (using beach machines and hand removal using the contracted Qualified Community Responders)
Art Smith with EPA Region 4 gave a brief overview of monitoring and sampling activities:
In Alabama, EPA has conducted 175 air samples; some of these were from the fixed point monitoring station in Point Clear, AL and the majority were from the mobile air monitoring bus known as TAGA.
EPA has collected 42 water samples in Alabama.
Throughout the Mobile Sectors (MS, AL, FL), EPA has taken 4700 samples across all media (air, water, sediment) and zero of these samples have exceeded acceptable levels of risk for human health.
Here is the link to EPA's monitoring data.
Brad Benngio with NOAA spoke about the scientific assessment and clean-up team protocols:
Well, folks, we could not reach consensus in the office about what Mr. Benngio was actually saying in terms of where the teams had assessed…we are going to clarify where and how much of our shorelines have been assessed and we will provide that information to you as soon as we receive it. Sorry!
Gary Willis from BP:
Mr. Willis indicated that BP is in the process of forming the Gulf Coast Restoration Organization (GCRO) that will be the company in charge of handling the response efforts once Incident Command stands down. They have hired a CEO and a COO so far, but the corporate structure has not been finalized yet.
Friends: Stay attuned to the development of this company- we must insist that there is local stakeholder input for any economic and environmental restoration activities!
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