Andrew Maynard: Hi! I am Andrew Maynard. Last week I asked you on AskM about your questions
concerning the Gulf of Mexico oil spill that occurred a little over 12 months ago now.
Thank you for your responses. We have some great questions and a great response to this.
So without further ado, let's have a look at some of them and some of the answers.
So the first question comes from Judy Edwards and Don Linosy (ph) who both asked about the
safety of eating the seafood in Florida and other areas near the Gulf and how often seafood
is inspected.
So this was a major issue as oil began to spew out of the seabed floor in the Gulf of
Mexico. People are very concerned about how this would taint or otherwise contaminated
seafood? As a result, federal and local agencies scrambled to do something about this, and
they did a number of things. First thing they did was shut down a lot of the fisheries in
the area so there was no chance of contaminated seafood coming out and ending up on your plate.
They took a very precautionary approach here and they began an extensive program of testing
seafood to ensure that it wasn't contaminated.
They started with a well-established sniff test which actually got a lot of publicity
at the time where literally you just sniff the seafood and see whether it smells okay
or not. But it rapidly became apparent that this wasn't the only thing that was needed.
So very sophisticated new chemical techniques were developed to detect the minutest amounts
of contamination in the seafood and huge amounts of tests were carried out by federal agencies
here.
It was only when those tests show that the seafood was safe that fisheries were open,
that the seafood was allowed to get on to people's plates. Last October, the Food and
Drug Administration actually published the data that have been collected so far, and
it showed that in virtually all cases, things were well below safety concerns, and in fact,
in most cases, there wasn't any detectable contamination whatsoever. As a result of this,
we had at the end of April the last fisheries that were closed were finally opened again.
Well, on to the second question, the second question is about the environmental concerns
associated with the spill, and this comes from Rosemary Janine Dame (ph) who sent that
now that the spill isn't so newsworthy, who is still working on the scene and what's the
current process or focus of cleanup? And an associated question came from Victoria Xanthe
(ph) who wants to know how she can help with the cleanup and restoration.
So the first thing to say here is that we know from other spills that have happened
over the last several decades that the environmental impact extends decades beyond that immediate
newsworthiness of the event. Now even though this isn't a newsworthy event anymore, there
are considerable efforts still going on to restore the environment and understand what
the full extent of the impact is. Of course, things have moved away from that first hands-on
experience of trying to clean things up, trying to actually disperse the oil, trying to deal
with the oil as it comes ashore and trying to deal with the wildlife that are being contaminated.
But still, we are left with the challenge of understanding what those long-term impacts
are going to be, both to the environment, to local people, to the people who were cleaning
up the spill. It's fairly widely known that BP are investing a lot of money in this area,
$500 million over the next ten years, just to try and better understand the impacts of
this spill, and that's looking at the environmental impacts but also the human health impacts.
So one study in particular which is going to be very important is a study that's being
headed up by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences who are going to be using
$50 million of BP's money to try and understand the impacts to people's health over the next
ten years of that spill so that we can do things better in the future.
Well, moving on to the third question, the third question is from Gale Kung-Lin (ph)
who wants to know what's the latest on how the marine wildlife in the Gulf of Mexico
and the regional ecosystems are recovering?
Well, as we've seen very clearly over the last 12 months, the impacts of the Gulf oil
spill on local wildlife were devastating. You only have to go to other sites such as
the National Wildlife Federation website, www.nwf.org to see some of the statistics.
For instance, we know that over 5500 bird deaths were associated with the spill. Over
90 dolphins have been reported dead, three whales, over 500 sea turtles, and these are
just some of the more obvious impacts, clearly a devastating event.
And even where we are not sure whether these impacts were directly associated with the
oil or not, we know that the ecosystem in the area was severely impacted. It's too early
to tell what the full impacts at this event were and it's going to be several decades
before we have a clear idea of what happened here and how the ecosystem is going to recover.
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The good news is that nature is often more resilient than we give it credit for and there
are already examples of how the local ecosystem is recovering. It probably won't end up exactly
like it was before the spill but things are certainly getting better.
So the last question comes from Alex Andrews, and Alex wants to know when they would use
the oil-consuming bacteria to clean up the spill? This refers to something that came
to light over the last 12 months, there are naturally occurring bacteria that will actually
eat oil and especially oil associated with an oil spill.
This is something that's been known to scientists for many years now, naturally occurring bacteria
that will actually thrive on the chemicals that are associated with oil.
Well, there are some bad news and there are some good news here. The bad news is that
naturally occurring bacteria tend to be relatively inefficient in doing this and take a long
time to do it. The good news is that we actually have some rather neat technologies which in
principle allow us to take these bacteria and modify them and produce something which
is far more efficient and fast at cleaning up oil in this way.
Of course, if we do this and this is a few years away yet but there is no reason why
we can't do this, there are some things we need to look out for, and those include working
out whether releasing these new modified bacteria into the environment is going to cause more
harm than good.
Now that's a question that's undoubtedly we can't deal with but it requires a very smart
science, it's a very smart policy decision-making. But if we can, it gives us another weapon
in the arsenal of dealing with future spills.
Well, that's it in terms of the questions. These were all great questions and a great
response about a very serious situation that affects us all and will continue to affect
us over the next few years.
So thank you very much for participating and check back here later for the next in the
series of AskM questions. Thank you!