FWS Oil Spill Response
The "Spill" on the Spill: As Told by Pete Tuttle
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| The operations room for the Natural Resource Damage Assessment and Restoration program, near Mobile, Ala., coordinates efforts over the entire Gulf region, with the goal of assessing damage from the spill and making sure it is restored at no cost to the American people. Credit: Phil Kloer/USFWS |
Thursday, September 9, 2010
As a contaminants specialist with the Daphne, AL., Ecological Services Field Office since 2001, my job is to assess and address pollution as it affects fish and wildlife and habitat quality. Working oil spills, “Superfund” sites, and water quality issues is what I do for a living. It’s said that each of us will have at least one “crucible” experience in our lives that will alter our trajectory personally and/or professionally. For me, this spill qualifies on both fronts. First, it is happening in a place I call home, so I share in the heartbreak and dismay as a member of the Gulf Coast community. Second, it has elevated a little-known program through which I do my work — the National Resource Damage Assessment and Recovery (NRDAR) — to a place of prominence in redressing the harm that is being done to wildlife and to people as a result of this oil spill.
NRDAR operates under three laws: the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980 (also known as CERCLA or Superfund); the Clean Water Act; and the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 (OPA). When a hazardous substance such as oil enters the environment, fish, wildlife, and other natural resources can be injured. Under OPA, the party responsible must not only remove the oil and clean up the spill site, it must also compensate the public for any natural resource injuries, diminishment, or loss of use or services. Several Department of the Interior bureaus, along with state, tribal and other federal partners, act as trustees for these resources on behalf of the public.
I explain how NRDAR works using the analogy of a house fire. We’re living in our house and life is good (that’s the baseline) until the neighbor’s kid lights our house on fire. The fire department responds, put the fire out and everyone goes home. Now NRDAR begins.
Service Stories: Six Months Pregnant, She Volunteered to Work on Oil Spill Response
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| U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Tera Baird is shown here in early September on the job in Charleston, S.C. Credit: USFWS |
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Charleston, S.C. – A lot of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service personnel who have volunteered to work on the BP oil spill response have left their families behind to do so.
Tera Baird took part of her family along. Specifically the baby boy she was six months pregnant with when she volunteered to work in the Mobile, Ala., Incident Command Center in late June and early July.
Baird is now back in Charleston, S.C., at her regular job, as a biologist in the Charleston Field Office working on the Coastal Program. She’s eight months pregnant, due Oct. 2, and yes, she does have a name picked out for the baby boy and no, she is not sharing it until he is born.
She still serves on the Southeast Region’s Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Steering Committee, which is what got her to Mobile in the first place, a few weeks after the Service began responding to the oil spill.
“Jason Duke, who heads the Southeast Region GIS Committee, asked for volunteers to go down to the Gulf and serve as a GIS liaison,” said Baird, a five-year Service employee. (GIS is a mapping system that can be used in numerous ways.)
“I thought it was a great opportunity to be of service to Fish and Wildlife and the people who needed help there,” she continued. “And it would allow me to learn more about GIS.”
She discussed the deployment with her husband Morgan, who manages a historic site for the state of South Carolina, and he agreed to take care of their daughter Adeline, then 13 months old.
“Just because I’m pregnant and have a young family, that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t serve,” Baird said. “Everybody who has been to the Gulf has family or some kind of commitments outside the Service. I didn’t really think I was doing anything exceptional.”
A Day in the Life of a Bird Rescue Team
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Dauphin Island, Ala. -The call came in to Jeffrey Emerson’s cell phone from a Wildlife Operations dispatcher. A pelican had been spotted, apparently distressed, possibly oiled. Emerson and his crew needed to find the bird, evaluate it, rescue it if needed.
The only location they had for the pelican, however, was a street address. The woman who had called the Oiled Wildlife Hotline owned a house that backed up to a little man-made bay in Little Pelican Bay off the coast of Alabama, and the pelican was perched on a pole she could see from her deck.
Emerson, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employee who usually works as a firefighter at Sherburne National Wildlife Refuge in Minnesota, relayed all this to the boat’s captain, Jerry McCullough, and told him the dispatcher was feeding the street address into Google Earth to get GPS coordinates for the pelican. But McCullough, a veteran of the local waters who had been hired by BP to transport the rescue team, said he could figure out from the street address where to head.
So off they went. McCullough the boat captain, Emerson the rescue team leader, along with Josh Crowley, a ranger with the Mississippi Forestry Commission, and Benji Anderson, a ranger with the Georgia Forestry Commission, on a more-or-less typical day as a Wildlife Operations reconnaissance and rescue team.
“Oh, and they say to be careful with this one,” Emerson told his partners. “She may be hostile.”
The pelican may be hostile? No, the caller.
She had first called the Oiled Wildlife Hotline early in the morning, and it was now early afternoon, and no one had shown up to rescue the bird yet, and she had called back, upset. What she wasn’t factoring in, though, was that the Dauphin Island area had been swept by wave after wave of thunderstorms with jagged bolts of lightning for the past four hours, and McCullough had decided it was too risky to take the boat out. So the rescue team waited, bored and restless, for the weather to clear so they could go out.
“You never know what you’re going to get when you answer these calls,” Emerson said. “It might not even be a pelican. A few days ago we had a call about an albatross, and it turned out to be a gannet. You have to answer every call, because you don’t know until you get there. But it’s a crap shoot every time.”
Sea Turtle Nests to Remain on Beaches of Northwest Florida and Alabama
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Contacts:
Patricia Behnke, 850-251-2130 (FWC)
Stacy Shelton, 404-679-7290 (FWS)
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| August 12, 2010 - A child peers into a cooler holding loggerhead turtle hatchling in Dauphin Island, Alabama. Photo by Catherine J. Hibbard, USFWS. |
After nearly two months of work to translocate sea turtle nests on Florida’s Northwest coast and Alabama’s coast, the unprecedented operation was suspended in mid-August as surveys found healthy, unoiled Sargassum available to hatchlings entering the Gulf. This type of seaweed is the main habitat for hatchlings.
The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC), working with partners from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decided sea turtle nests will remain to hatch naturally on Florida’s Panhandle beaches. Biologists determined that the risks to hatchlings emerging from beaches and entering waters off Florida’s Northwest Gulf coast have diminished significantly under current conditions and believe the risks involved with translocating nests during late incubation to the east coast of Florida now outweigh the risks of letting hatchlings emerge into Gulf waters. The nest translocations began in June to protect sea turtle hatchlings from potential impacts from the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
“This is the very best possible news,” said FWC Chairman Rodney Barreto. “The translocation of these nests was a last resort to make sure the hatchlings had a fighting chance of survival, so we are pleased to announce a suspension of the program.”
Soon after the April 20 disaster, biologists and managers from state and federal agencies began planning for the worst-case scenario.
“The prospect of hatchlings emerging onto a heavily oiled beach or entering a near shore oil slick was unacceptable,” Barreto said. “That led to the difficult decision to move all nests in this area. Fortunately, conditions have improved, and we can now begin to allow the nests to hatch naturally. However, we will continue to monitor offshore habitats to ensure they remain suitable for hatchlings.”
After leaving the beach, hatchlings head offshore and inhabit areas where surface waters converge and are characterized by lines of floating material, especially Sargassum. Post-hatchlings within this habitat are observed to be low-energy float-and-wait foragers that feed on a wide variety of floating items at or just below the water’s surface.
“Due to this low-energy float-and-wait strategy, we believe that post-hatchlings are at a lower risk of encountering any potentially submerged oil and are pleased that the remaining hatchlings from Northwest Florida and Alabama beaches will be able to emerge into their native waters," said Cindy Dohner, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Southeast Regional Director. “However, if oil resurfaces in or near the hatchlings' habitat, we may again determine translocation is the best option for the remaining nests."
