Gulf Oil Spill

The Senate approved a highway bill Wednesday that includes a long-sought provision for the Gulf Coast: A guarantee that 80 percent of the fines collected from the April 2010 BP oil spill — an amount that could reach $20 billion — would be distributed for coastal restoration to the five states along the Gulf of Mexico: Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, Texas and Alabama.

The House is expected to vote later today on an amendment pushed by Gulf State lawmakers to dedicate 80 percent of the fines collected from the BP oil spill to a trust fund for coastal restoration of Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana and Texas.

NOAA officials called a national media briefing Thursday and said that the BP oil spill could have played a role in the high number of dolphin deaths in the northern Gulf since 2010.

Republican Sens. Roger Wicker of Mississippi and Marco Rubio of Florida, unhappy with the handling of the $20 billion fund set up by BP to compensate victims of the 2010 Gulf oil spill, won Senate approval Friday for an independent audit of the organization.

Members of the House of Representatives from the five Gulf Coast states — Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Florida and Texas — announced Wednesday that they had agreed on a bill to direct at least 80 percent of the fines that BP is expected to pay for last year's oil spill to their states for economic and environmental restoration — a payday that may reach $20 million.

A bipartisan effort to secure at least 80 percent of fines from the BP Gulf oil spill for the five Gulf Coast states — Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida and Texas — advanced Wednesday as the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee approved the bill by voice vote.

Tony Hayward, the oil executive Americans learned to hate during last year's oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, is back in business, this time in the rich oil fields of northern Iraq.

Eliu Gonzalez, a South Florida fisherman who worked the waters off Miami-Dade and Monroe counties for more than a decade, lived hundreds of miles from the Deepwater Horizon rig when it exploded in April 2010. But that didn’t stop Gonzalez from logging onto the British Petroleum’s Gulf Coast claim center website five months later, stating that that the massive oil spill cost him more than $110,000 in lost income.

Dark-amber mats of oil as big as a large man’s foot sit on the sand 10 feet from the water, and farther inland along the beaches of Horn Island’s west end. Recreational boater Nick Mason pointed out a swarm of quarter-sized tar globs floating around his boat anchored on the north side of the island Tuesday. BP knows.

NOAA’s theory that shrimpers are to blame for almost 1,000 sea-turtle deaths since the BP oil spill unleashed a fury of comments in two languages Wednesday.

The Senate Commerce Committee on Wednesday approved a bill to help the families of the 11 victims of last year's Deepwater Horizon blowout by changing outdated federal maritime laws, one going back to the 1850s, to make it possible to recover damages from BP, rig operator Transocean and rig subcontractors.

All-terrain vehicles still rumble across the eight-mile stretch of Pensacola Beach each morning, driven by workers looking for tar balls. One year after crude from the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion reached Florida’s shores, cleanup crews are still unearthing the sticky hardened bits of oil.

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour came to the U.S. Capitol on Thursday with a message: last summer's Gulf of Mexico oil spill was an economic — not an environmental - disaster, and he wants lawmakers to help shore up the region's hard-hit fishing, tourism and energy sectors.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on Tuesday defended his agency's changes in the year after the Deepwater Horizon explosion, dismissing criticism of a lengthier and more extensive permitting process as mere "Washington noise."

Negotiations between the Natural Resource Trustees and BP has resulted in a $1 billion down payment toward early restoration projects in the Gulf of Mexico for damage to natural resources resulting from the BP oil disaster.

A team that's spent two decades studying psychological distress among residents who lived near the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska has found striking similarities among those affected by the Deepwater Horizon spill.

Local government leaders in Biloxi are defending what has been called a shopping spree with millions of dollars of emergency grants from BP, saying they were uncertain what they needed for the unprecedented disaster and didn’t want to be caught ill-equipped.

Florida will not join Alabama, Louisiana and more than 800 other plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit against Transocean, the operator of the Deepwater Horizon rig that exploded in the Gulf of Mexico a year ago, causing a massive oil spill, Gov. Rick Scott announced. Instead, the state will file a claim against BP directly.

A year after the BP oil spill put the brakes on full-bore domestic production, it's back to "drill, baby, drill" as federal lawmakers, anxious about rising gasoline prices, push legislation to open offshore leases and make it easier to drill domestically.

The rebuilding process one year after the BP oil spill is leaving those who live along the northern Gulf distrusting of government, optimistic about the beaches and this year’s crop of seafood, but leery that what lies below the surface of the Gulf in the water and on the sea floor will haunt them for decades and generations.

One year later, the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history looks more and more like just a big bump in the road in the drive to drill deeper in the Gulf of Mexico and potentially closer to Florida’s coastline. In the months since the anxious, ugly summer of the monster slick, political tide and public opinion seem to have shifted.

BP’s chief of operations for the Gulf cleanup, Mike Utsler, has been on the job since the first days of the spill. He’s shifted it from a major effort in the summer and fall to pulling back as oil residue washing ashore has diminished each month since the winter.

BP's chief of operations for the Gulf cleanup, Mike Utsler, has been on the job since the first days of the spill. He's shifted it from a major effort in the summer and fall to pulling back as oil residue washing ashore has diminished each month since the winter.

The rosy scene bothered Tampa attorney Steve Yerrid. There was Gov. Rick Scott on Monday, happily announcing a $30 million marketing and tourism grant from BP for seven Panhandle counties, thanking a BP senior executive at his side for "stepping up."

A NOAA Fisheries chief told reporters today that “not one piece of tainted seafood has entered the market” related to the BP oil spill, starting within days of the well blow out.

More than 140 women who'd championed Gulf Coast recovery after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita were at it again Tuesday, convening on Capitol Hill to announce that they were supporting legislation that would guarantee the five Gulf Coast states at least 80 percent of BP's fines from last spring's oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, an amount that could top $21 billion.

When BP announces it has processed a certain number of individual and business claims, that doesn’t mean the claims have been paid.

Federal officials involved in the investigation of the deaths of dozens of baby dolphins along the northern Gulf said Wednesday that they are certain now that a portion of the infants were stillborn -- that their mothers did not carry them to full term.

The phenomenon of new born or stillborn baby dolphins washing ashore from the Gulf or the Mississippi Sound continued through the weekend and Monday.

The bodies of five more dolphins have been reported since late last night along the Mississippi and Alabama coasts, some of them infants.

NOAA will give high priority to an investigation into the large numbers of baby dolphin deaths along the Mississippi and Alabama coasts, an official told the Sun Herald on Wednesday.

Baby dolphins, some barely three feet in length, are washing up along the Mississippi and Alabama coastlines at 10 times the normal rate of stillborn and infant deaths, researchers say. This is the first birthing season for dolphins since last year's oil spill.

The Interior Department has approved 10 oil and gas exploration projects in the Gulf of Mexico since October in violation of two laws that protect whales and other marine mammals, environmental groups said Thursday.

Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood wants to hear from whistle-blowers with inside information about how the Gulf Coast Claims Facility is operating. Hood believes administrator Ken Feinberg "stiff-armed" claimants affected by last year's BP oil spill, but Feinberg says 90,000 people have been adequately compensated for their damages.

Michael Bromwich, the official put in charge of oil and gas regulation after the BP blowout last spring, gave a detailed public update Thursday about changes now under way, including new inspections, environmental reviews and ethical standards.

Lulled by success, the U.S. wasn't prepared for a catastrophe the size of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and it needs additional government regulation and tougher industry self-policing to improve the safety of deepwater drilling, the presidential commission investigating the Gulf of Mexico disaster found.

In fact, it is likely more oil tar has been cleaned from the islands in the fall and winter than at the height of the spill last summer, because larger crews of BP workers can now get to the beaches and inlets. They had been restricted to foot traffic while birds and turtles were nesting.

Ever since the April 20 Gulf of Mexico Macondo oil well blowout and Deepwater Horizon rig explosion, which killed 11 men, the three mega corporations involved have stood in a triangle pointing fingers at each other.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced the lawsuit in a televised news conference. The defendants in the case either owned portions of the lease for the Macondo well or were responsible for drilling the well. Not named: Halliburton, whose cement work played a key role in the well's failure.

Kenneth Feinberg, the head of the Gulf oil spill fund, said Monday that victims of the BP oil spill will have three options for final compensation from the Deepwater Horizon blowout, and all but one of them requires claimants to give up their right to sue.

Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, who apologized to BP last summer during the Gulf oil spill and then backtracked under pressure from GOP leaders, has failed in his effort to be named the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee in the 112th Congress.

While oil did not reach South Florida shores, individuals and businesses impacted by the disastrous spill in the Gulf of Mexico have filed claims. The claims have come from all types of South Florida businesses and residents 7mdash; including commercial fishermen, marinas, restaurants, hotels, dive watering holes, real estate agents, waterfront property owners, lobster trap makers, municipalities and even Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum in Key West.

A peer review of a controversial August federal report on the whereabouts of oil from BP's Deepwater Horizon well upholds its conclusion that three-quarters of the oil had been burned, skimmed or was in the process of degrading, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Tuesday.

Houston-based Halliburton knew that the cement it was using to seal BP's Deepwater Horizon oil well was unstable, but did not tell BP or act on the information internally before the well blew up April 20, the staff of the presidential commission investigating the disaster reported Thursday. The findings add to the growing body of evidence that safety procedures intended to head off such accidents were ignored or overlooked.

BP is considering dismantling the ombudsman's office it created to handle whistle-blower complaints after the company's major oil spills at Prudhoe Bay four years ago. BP created the office to give its U.S. employees and contractors around-the-clock, confidential access to a person outside BP who can launch third-party investigations.

A second oil spill report released Wednesday, entitled "Decision-Making in the Unified Command," portrays the cleanup effort as confused, wasteful and often ineffective, and offers thinly veiled criticism of some of the key figures in the effort, including Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal.

Government scientists wanted to tell Americans early on how bad the BP oil spill could be, but the White House denied their request to make the worst-case scenarios public, a report by staff for the national panel investigating the spill said Wednesday. The staff paper does not assign any motive to the administration's moves but says underestimating the flow "undermined public confidence in the federal government's response."

Ray Mabus chose the Ken Combs Pier to announce to Mississippi the plan for restoring the Gulf he presented to President Obama today asks Congress to send some of the BP penalty money here.

Under grilling by a presidential commission on the oil spill, BP's top official for oil production said he couldn't explain why the oil industry didn't develop technologies to shut down a deepwater oil spill.