TagDispersant

My LA Times op-ed: “5 years after BP spill, little has changed to protect Gulf of Mexico”

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Today, on the actual 5th anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon tragedy, I published an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, voicing my dismay not only at the current state of the Gulf of Mexico but over the complete failure to take the necessary steps to make sure this never happens again. Here’s an excerpt: The Obama administration, for its part, has been a lot more aggressive about awarding new...

Book excerpt: “Colluders in Crude: The Oily Politics of How the Obama Administration Sided with BP Over the American People”

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My feelings about BP and the 2010 Deepwater Horizon catastrophe have been consistent from Day One. Working closely with dedicated environmentalists from Louisiana and elsewhere, we have never fully trusted the oil giant’s public version of events. We have fought for safety and protection of workers and wildlife — ever skeptical of early reports that seafood from the Gulf of Mexico was...

No, BP did not make the oil in the Gulf “disappear”

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This week has been something of an upsetting one for the millions of Gulf Coast residents whose lives were turned upside down by the massive BP oil spill in 2010. Inside the federal courthouse in New Orleans, lawyers for the British oil giant have been pushing to reduce the civil penalties it will have to pay for the widespread damage under the Clean Water Act. In doing so, the firm has called a...

The feds act on toxic oil-spill dispersants — too little, too late

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One of the many battles with Big Oil that I chronicle in my new book — Crude Justice: How I Fought Big Oil and Won, and What You Should Know About the New Environmental Attack on America — is the fight over BP’s handling of the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010. The action peaked during the darkest days of the spill that poisoned the Gulf with 5 million barrels of oil. While...

In-depth: The Gulf is still making marine life, and people, sick

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Note: As promised, Part II of my in-depth report on the state of the Gulf. more than four years after the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe: When the full extent of the Deepwater Horizon spill became clear in the spring of 2010, experts predicted the impact on the Gulf’s diverse ecosystem would last at least for a generation, if not longer. Unfortunately, they were working off a known template: The...

More damning evidence that the Gulf is still sick

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Earlier this week, I presented the first part of some research showing that more than four years after the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe — at a moment in which BP is mounting a furious and at times a bit ridiculous PR campaign to show that everything is back to normal — in fact the Gulf of Mexico is still very, very sick. I noted the non-stop assault on our beaches of tar balls and...

In-Depth: The Gulf Is Still Sick

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On April 15, 2014, with the fourth anniversary of the massive Deepwater Horizon rig explosion and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico just days away, British Petroleum – the rig’s operator — issued a press release that caught many people off-guard. BP announced that its “active cleanup” of oil pollution in the Gulf had officially ended. The statement by the British energy giant did not say that...

Government scientists prove BP is killing dolphins

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It’s no secret here on the Gulf Coast that ever since BP’s reckless Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in 2010, dolphins have been getting sick and dying at an alarming rate. I’ve been reporting on this phenomenon since the early months after the spill, and this has been an ongoing, sickening event in the nearly four years that have followed. For example, I noted earlier this year...

The dispersant is more deadly than the oil

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It was no secret that spraying nearly 2 million gallons of a toxic chemical — the oil dispersant marketed under the brand name Corexit — into the Gulf of Mexico was a really, really bad idea. Indeed. back on May 11, 2010, or less than a month after the Deepwater Horizon disaster began, I issued a statement warning that BP’s willy-nilly spraying of the dispersant, which was...

Stuart H. Smith is an attorney based in New Orleans fighting major oil companies and other polluters.
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