Saving Seafood

Florida gets $32M more in oil spill money

November 16, 2016 — PANAMA CITY, Fla. — Florida will receive $32 million for four projects aimed at restoring natural resources damaged by the 2010 oil spill, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF) announced Tuesday.

The money is part of a $370 million announcement to finance 24 grants, the foundation’s fourth and largest round to date. Louisiana will receive $245 million, Alabama $63 million, Mississippi $16 million and Texas nearly $12 million.

NFWF was awarded a total of $2.5 billion over five years in settlements and penalties from BP to repair natural resources damaged during the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, which is considered one of the largest environmental disasters in history. It began April 10, 2010, and lasted 87 days, releasing millions of barrels worth of oil into the Gulf.

In Florida, the latest round of grants will go toward conserving oyster reefs, building a sea turtle necropsy facility, better assessing stocks of Florida’s reef fish, and restoring shorebird and seabird populations.

Read the full story at the Panama City News Herald

BP oil disaster might have hurt Bluefin tuna rebuilding, study says

October 3, 2016 — The release of 4 million barrels of oil in the 87 days following the BP Deepwater Horizon explosion in April 2010 occurred just as Atlantic bluefin tuna had returned to the Gulf of Mexico to spawn, and a small but significant percentage of the adult fish and their eggs and larvae were likely exposed to the toxic oil, according to a new study announced Friday (Sept. 30).

The study led by scientists with NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service and Stanford University concludes that the oil cumulatively covered 3.1 million square miles where fish, eggs and larvae were present in the weeks immediately after the accident.

When combined with other stressors affecting this species of tuna — including overfishing and warming seas caused by climate change — the addition of the oil’s impact “may result in significant effects for a population that shows little evidence of rebuilding,” the study published in Nature: Scientific Reports concluded.

The study, funded by the Natural Resource Damage Assessment for the BP spill required under the federal Oil Pollution Act, made use of computer modeling based on information gathered from 16 years of electronic tagging of 66 tuna that kept track of individual fish locations, temperatures and oscillating diving patterns. The information was compared with satellite observations of the breadth of oil from the spill on the surface of the Gulf to estimate the potential impacts.

Barbara Block, a Stanford professor of marine scientists and expert on Atlantic bluefin tuna, said in a Friday interview that the tagging program took advantage of earlier tagging information that indicated many of the Gulf-spawning tuna migrate back and forth from the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Canada. Researchers captured adult tuna in Canada and installed the tags. When the fish returned to Canada a year later, the tags dropped off and were collected, and their data was added to a long-term database on fish movements.

The information collected from the tags helped the scientists confirm their theories about the spawning habits of the huge fish, which can weigh as much as 1,000 pounds at maturity, and begin reproducing about 10 years after birth.

Read the full story at the New Orleans Times-Picayune

NOAA Announces Proposals to Expand Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary

June 9, 2016 — Building on more than 30 years of scientific studies, including numerous reports released in the last decade and in the aftermath of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster, NOAA today announced a proposal to expand Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary to protect additional critical Gulf of Mexico habitat.

The plan lays out five expansion scenarios, ranging from no expansion of the 56-square-mile sanctuary, to one bringing it to a total of 935 square miles. In NOAA’s preferred scenario, the sanctuary would expand to 383 square miles to include 15 reefs and banks that provide habitat for recreationally and commercially important fish, as well as a home to 15 threatened or endangered species of whales, sea turtles, and corals.

“These habitats are the engines of sustainability for much of the Gulf of Mexico and are critical to fish such as red snapper, mackerel, grouper and wahoo, as well as other protected species,” said John Armor, acting director, NOAA’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries. “The proposed expansion also advances NOAA’s mission to conserve and manage coastal and marine ecosystems and resources that help sustain local communities and America’s economy.”

Read the full story at Ocean News

BP Drops $1 Billion Seafood Industry Spill Payments Fight

May 3, 2016 — After fighting for more than two years to avoid paying almost $1 billion in oil spill damages to Gulf Coast shrimpers, oystermen and seafood processors it claimed didn’t exist, BP Plc has thrown in the towel.

“We have withdrawn our claims seeking an injunction against payments by the Seafood Program so the program can be concluded,” Geoff Morrell, a BP spokesman, said in an e-mail Tuesday. The company will keep pursuing fraud claims against lawyer Mikal Watts and his firm, Morrell said. Watts was indicted for allegedly making false claims in connection with the BP spill.

A federal judge in New Orleans Monday allowed BP to drop its bid to avoid paying the second half of $2.3 billion in compensation promised to seafood interests harmed by the blown-out well. The subsea gusher pumped more than 4 million barrels of crude into the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, closing fisheries and blackening the shores of five states.

Read the full story at Bloomberg

MARK PHILLIPS: Who will pay for electronic monitoring?

April 21, 2016 — The Nature Conservancy a 6.5 BILLION dollar ENGO (2014 IRS 990) has put forward a paper seeking Electronic Monitoring on groundfish boats by May 1, 2017. If people recall The Nature Conservancy said very little about the BP oil spill.

NOAA and it’s environmental partners are bound and determined to force paid monitoring and eventually EMS on the fishermen. The last EMS study was delayed and delayed so that NOAA’s partners could put out misinformation about costs. And when the report did come out it substantially underestimates costs by assuming the average groundfish trip is 1.5 days when in reality my sector’s average trip is 6-10 days which is 4 to 7 times greater in duration.

The report also underestimates the number of hauls, claiming the average trip has five haul backs when in fact we are looking at between 40 to 60 hauls per trip, an underestimation by a factor of 10.

Read the full opinion piece at the Center for Sustainable Fisheries