[MARINE_BIOLOGY_INTERNATIONAL] THE DEEPWATER HORIZON OIL SPILL: A YEAR LATER

THE DEEPWATER HORIZON OIL SPILL: A YEAR LATER

Race to assess costs of restoring the Gulf

The oil-damaged shoreline in the Northern reaches of Barataria Bay in Louisiana is seen weeks after the April spill. ASSOCIATED PRESS.

By Kate Spinner

Saturday, April 16, 2011 at 7:36 p.m.

GRAND ISLE, La. - In the year since BP's Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded and sank in the northern Gulf of Mexico, thousands of birds and hundreds of sea turtles and dolphins have washed ashore dead as waves of crude lapped a thousand miles of shoreline.

WHAT IS A NATURAL RESOURCE DAMAGE ASSESSMENT?
It is a legal process set by the 1990 Oil Pollution Act, following the Exxon-Valdez spill. It instructs states and federal agencies to identify damage caused by hazardous spills and figure out how to repair the damage.

Those responsible for the spill must pay for assessing the damage, restoring the environment and compensating the public for the loss of natural resources.

The assessment involves several steps:

Pre-Assessment: Answers whether damage occurred. In October the federal government declared that the BP spill violated laws and harmed natural resources, including 950 miles of shoreline, marine mammals, birds, fish, bottom-dwelling ocean wildlife, deep-ocean and coastal water quality and habitat in the water and along the coast.

Injury Assessment: Details the damage that occurred. This step began right away, but will take years. It includes figuring out what damage was inflicted by the spill and what damage would have occurred without the spill.

Restoration Planning: This coincides with injury assessments and involves figuring out how to restore damage or offset damages that cannot be restored. The restoration should return the environment to conditions present before the spill.

Restoration Implementation: Putting the restoration plan into action, using money provided by those responsible for the spill.

Resources to be assessed include:

Fish: Swordfish, white marlin, blue marlin, yellowfin tuna, bluefin tuna, longbill spearfish, sailfish, red snapper, grouper, gray triggerfish, red drum, vermilion snapper, greater amberjack, black drum, cobia, mahi-mahi, king and Spanish mackerel and sharks, including scalloped hammerhead, shortfin mako, silky, whale, bigeye, thresher, longfin mako, oceanic white tip.

Shellfish: oysters, shrimp and crabs.

Marine mammals: 28 species of whales, dolphins and manatees, some of which are at risk for extinction.

Turtles: Four species of threatened or endangered sea turtles.

Birds: royal terns, gulls, brown pelican, diving ducks, wading birds, piping plover, shearwaters, northern gannets and frigate birds.

Habitats: salt and freshwater marshes, mangroves, mudflats, beaches, coral and shellfish reefs, water column and bottom sediments.

But for all the damage visible from land here, far more occurred offshore, from the cobalt surface where small fish float on rafts of seaweed to dark canyons where corals grow at crushing depths.

Like insurance adjusters after a hurricane, government scientists are racing to inventory the damage to charge BP with the cost of environmental restoration. Unlike rebuilding homes, however, restoring this Gulf ecosystem is complex, and unprecedented in the deep sea. For rare resources that may be impossible to bring back — 1,000-year-old corals for instance — scientists will have to assess a dollar value for something many consider priceless.

The environmental evaluation — it is separate from the many claims for lost business and income — is required under federal laws passed after the Exxon Valdez collision in Alaska. While the process has worked for dozens of smaller oil spills, including one in Tampa Bay in 1993, the BP disaster will test the law as never before.

In the three months that followed the explosion last April 20 that killed 11 people, an estimated 186 million to 227 million gallons of crude blasted into the Gulf of Mexico from the sea floor a mile below, making this one of the largest spills in history. BP doused the slick with nearly 2 million gallons of toxic dispersants to break up the oil before it reached land.