BP Blocks Attempt to Save Endangered Sea Turtles from Oil Spill
http://www.seaturtles.org/article.php?id=1660
From Seaturtles site
June 16th, 2010
A shrimp boat captain in Louisiana hired by BP was blocked from rescuing juvenile Kemp's ridleys that were covered in oil in the Gulf waters. He was captured on video saying that the turtles are being collected in the clean-up efforts and burned up like so much ocean debris with other marine life gathering along tide lines where oil also congregates.
He witnessed BP workers burning turtles caught in the oil booms. Rescue efforts are being ended tomorrow.
STRP's Gulf Director Carole Allen responded to the news by saying "The burning of boom and oil when even one sea turtle was seen in the water is a despicable crime."
STRP's Chris Pincetich has been in communication with both the reporter who shot the interview and the Captain who witnessed the illegal killing of sea turtles, and is making arrangements to ensure that sea turtle rescue efforts are not stopped, and can be performed in areas with boomed oil.
The Los Angeles Times reported on the "Death by Fire" June 17
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kjw3_bMk8o&feature=player_embedded
Excerpt from the LA times regarding the sea turtles.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-oil-spill-burnbox-20100617,0,4814068.story
The turtle rescue team sets out at 6 a.m. in the muggy warm stillness of the harbor at Venice, La. The researchers move into the open gulf about an hour later, past a line of shrimp boats deputized to lay boom along the coastal marshes.
Closer to the Deepwater Horizon site, the water takes on a foreboding gray pallor tinged with a rainbow-like sheen. Soon, the oil begins swirling around the boat and the seascape smells like an auto mechanic's garage.
Strewn among the oil and seaweed are human flotsam: an orange hardhat, a pie pan, a wire coat hanger, yellow margarine-tub lids, a black-and-green ashtray. The crew has found papers — long at sea on global currents — bearing inscriptions in Spanish, Arabic, Greek and Chinese.
The only sound that breaks the stillness is the deep thrum of the motors of the large charter boat and a small skiff carrying the turtle researchers. From dawn until nearly dusk, across sargassum islands that normally are alive with birds looking for crabs and snails — bridal terns, shearwaters, storm-petrels — only one bird is seen.
"What's amazing is there's so little bird life out here right now. Either they've moved on, or the oiling has had a tremendous impact," said Kate Sampson, a researcher with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who is part of the turtle rescue team.
"We saw a few yesterday. We saw a few laughing gulls fly by. They were oiled, but they could still fly. And we saw a northern gannet, a diving bird. It was oiled too," she said. "I can only imagine that the birds left because the dining hall is closed."
Soon, the rising towers of the Discoverer Enterprise drill ship, which is collecting oil and gas from the damaged well, and the tall rigs boring two relief wells miles into the seabed appear through the haze. A flare of burning natural gas is silhouetted against the gray hull of the ship.
The Premier Explorer, which is helping coordinate cleanup operations at the broken well, announces the day's burn box: A 500-square-mile field within which 16 controlled burns will be conducted.
In the days since the April 20 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon, more than 5 million gallons of oil have been consumed in more than 165 burns.
"The real issue is to stop this thing at the source, do maximum skimming, in-situ burning — deal with it as far off shore as possible, and do everything you can to keep it from getting to shore, because once it's into the marshes, quite frankly, I think we would all agree there's no good solution at that point," Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen told reporters last week.
But the burn operations have proved particularly excruciating for the turtle researchers, who have been trolling the same lines of oil and seaweed as the boom boats, hoping to pull turtles out of the sargassum before they are burned alive.
Much of the wildlife here seems doomed in any case. "We've seen the oil covering the turtles so thick they could barely move, could hardly lift their heads," Witherington said. "I won't pretend to know which is the nastiest."
Yet in one case, the crew had to fall back and watch as skimmers gathered up a long line of sargassum that hadn't yet been searched — and which they believe was full of turtles that might have been saved.
"In a perfect world, they'd gather up the material and let us search it before they burned it," Witherington said. "But that connection hasn't been made. The lines of communication aren't there."
The smoke starts rising on the horizon at midday. The two boats carrying the researchers head in different directions, hoping to find and rescue a few more turtles before their mission wraps up. They find 11, all of them heavily speckled with oil.
Each day, the chances of rescues grow smaller. That there are still so many left stranded in the oil without food is a small miracle. Their long-term chances "are zero," Witherington said.
"Turtles just take a long time to die."
kim.murphy@latimes.com
Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times
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