I first spoke to Rick Steiner more than three months ago — about two weeks into the Deepwater Horizon disaster — after a source recommended I talk to him for a story I was writing about the spill as a teachable moment. Steiner is a marine conservationist and activist in Alaska who started studying oil spills when the Exxon Valdez ran aground in 1989, and never stopped. What Steiner said to me during that first interview was blunt, depressing — and struck me as having the ring of truth. Little did I know how true. “Government and industry will habitually understate the volume of the spill and the impact, and they will overstate the effectiveness of the cleanup and their response,” he told me at the time. “There's no such thing as an effective response. There's never been an effective response — ever — where more than 10 or 20 percent of the oil is ever recovered from the water. “Most of the oil that goes into the water in a major spill stays there,” he said. “And once the oil is in the water, the damage is done.” Steiner was also one of the first scientists to warn that much if not most of BP's oil was remaining underwater, forming giant and potentially deadly toxic plumes. I thought of Steiner last week, as I sat in a congressional hearing room listening to Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Ed Markey question Bill Lehr, a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Lehr was one of the authors of an increasingly controversial federal report about the fate of BP's spilled oil that Obama administration officials misleadingly cited as evidence that the “vast majority” of the oil was essentially gone. Markey's persistent questioning eventually got Lehr to acknowledge that, contrary to the administration spin, most of the spill — including the oil that has been dispersed or dissolved into the water, or evaporated into the atmosphere — is still in the Gulf ecosystem. Then Markey got Lehr to recalculate what percentage of the spill BP had actually recovered, through skimming and burning. That amount: About 10 percent. In other words, Steiner was right. The other part of Steiner's prediction — that the government and BP would low-ball the volume of the spill — had already played out very publicly. BP and NOAA both opened with a 5,000 barrel a day estimate. NOAA officials stuck to that estimate for weeks, despite the fact that they had access to video feeds from the wellhead clearly showing how far off they were. More than two weeks after some of that video was made public, the government finally, grudgingly, upped its estimates to 12,000 to 19,000 barrels daily; then 20,000 to 40,000 barrels, then 35,000 to 60,000 barrels, before finalizing its estimate in early August at 62,000 barrels a day at the beginning of the spill, declining to 53,000 barrels a day toward the end. So it wasn't until early August, two weeks after the well was capped, that the public was officially clued in that BP's blowout had — by the end of June — become the largest accidental offshore oil spill in history; totaling almost 16 times the Exxon Valdez. I talked to Steiner again this week about where things stand now, what he expects will happen next, and what he hopes will come of it all. The first thing we talked about was that NOAA report. Steiner said it was obviously full of guesswork — and bad guesswork at that. “They shouldn't have even tried to issue these numbers right now,” he said. “I smell politics all over it. The only plausible explanation is they were in a rush to hang the 'Mission Accomplished' banner.” And Steiner suspects the 10 percent recovery rate for BP is actually overstated. The report based its conclusions on operational reports showing that 11.1 million gallons of oil were burned and 34.7 million gallons of oily water were recovered through skimming. But Steiner said the actual amount of oil recovered could be about half what the report claims. The oil-water mix, which officials evidently assumed was 20 percent oil, could well have been closer to 10 percent, he said. As for the burned oil figures, “they are simply coming from the BP contractors out there and then put into the Incident Command reports as gospel. As far as I know, there was no independent observation or estimation of those numbers.” And there's something else the government seems to have forgotten about when it comes to burning crude oil: “That's not technically removing it from the environment.” Steiner said. “It either went into the air as atmospheric emissions, and some of that is pretty toxic stuff, or there's a residue from burning crude that sinks to the ocean floor, sometimes in big thick mats.” Steiner had even more critiques of the report — and the response — but his central point was one of the same he made when I first spoke with him, back in May: Once the oil is in the water, the damage is done. “You just can't fix most of the damage caused in marine oil spills. You just can't do it.” (con't in comments) added by: samantha420
