Queen Bess Island

Meet A04! This Brown Pelican is the first confirmed pelican on Queen Bess Island that experienced the DWH oil spill. A04 was captured in Mississippi on August 3rd, 2010 then released 12 days later. This bird & mate are raising young in a nest built with sticks from

@LouisianaGov

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Deepwater Horizon Site 9 Years Later

April 20, 2010

The Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion was the April 20, 2010 explosion and subsequent fire on the Deepwater Horizon semi-submersible Mobile Offshore Drilling Unit (MODU), which was owned and operated by Transocean and drilling for BP in the Macondo Prospect oil field about 40 miles (60 km) southeast of the Louisiana coast. The explosion killed 11 workers and injured 17 others. The explosion caused the Deepwater Horizon to burn and sink. The same blowout that caused the explosion also caused a massive offshore oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, considered the largest accidental marine oil spill in the world, and the largest environmental disaster in U.S. history.

This will have environmental effects for decades to come.

Never Forget

April 20th is a date I cannot forget, for two reasons:

In 1999 , two students murdered 12 people at Columbine High School and injured 21 others

It's one of those incidents where we will always remember where we were when we heard about it. The sadness that it brings to our hearts: all those innocents killed or hurt for no reason. The shootings that followed Columbine .

In 2010 11 humans and countless denizens of the Gulf of Mexico are gone or severely affected.

Five years later, oil is still washing up on shore,, bottlenose dolphins and sea turtles are still being affected,an oil chemical from the spill has been shown to cause irregular heartbeats in the embryos of bluefin and yellowfin tuna and thousands of sea birds have died and those that survived show abnormalities.

The lives of people living on the Gulf Coast are forever changed.

We'll never forget the photos of oiled birds (I cannot bring myself to post pictures, it's just too tragic), the smell of the oil burning in the Gulf (yes, we could smell it when the winds were right), our beaches unaccessible after the spill, finding tar balls on the beaches when they opened again. So many bad memories.

These are two April 20th memories I'll never forget.

Remembering the Deepwater Horizon 11

This breaks my heart.

One year later - BP Oilspill

84 bills were introduced in Congress related to the BP oilspill. Two passed the house. None passed the Senate. None

from PewEnvironment.org/OffshoreEnergyReform

Total barrels of oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico by the Deepwater Horizon blowout: 4,900,000

Equivalent of that in Exxon Valdez oil spills: 19

Barrels of oil per day BP claimed in its 2009 emergency response plan it could
skim and store in response to a spill in the Gulf: 491,721

Average barrels per day BP actually captured, burned and chemically “dispersed”: 19,251

Gallons of chemical dispersant dumped into the Gulf to try to break down the oil: 1,843,786

Projected three-year loss of tourism revenue for Gulf Coast communities as a result of the spill: $22,700,000,000

Number of active offshore oil platforms in the Gulf: 3,395

Number of them in deepwater (more than 1,000 feet): 64

Underwater depth of the Deepwater Horizon well, in feet: 4,994

Number of Gulf oil platforms in water deeper than that: 11


Underwater depth of the deepest of those, in feet: 8,062
Number of U.S. offshore oil well “incidents” (including fatalities, injuries, fires, and spills)

reported by federal regulators from 2006 through 2009: 3,282

Number of those that included “a loss of well control”: 23

Ratio of government inspectors to oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico: 1 to 54

Percentage of those inspectors who believe they did not receive adequate training: 50

Percent of increase in U.S. offshore oil and gas leasing since 1982: 200

Percent of decrease in staffing resources for federal offshore regulation since 1983: 36

Number of bills introduced in Congress since the Deepwater Horizon blowout that
would reform offshore drilling and/or improve spill response: 84

Number of those bills that have passed the House: 2

Number that have passed the Senate: 0

Figures are the most recently available as of October 26, 2010. Sources at this link