BP accused of killing endangered sea turtles in cleanup operation

Environmentalists press Obama administration to put a halt to BP's 'burn fields' to dispose of oil from the Gulf spill
Suzanne Goldenberg, guardian.co.uk 25 Jun 10;

Endangered sea turtles and other marine creatures are being corralled into 500 square-mile "burn fields" and burnt alive in operations intended to contain oil from BP's ruptured well in the Gulf of Mexico, the Obama administration confirmed today.

The killing of the turtles – which once teetered on the brink of extinction – has outraged environmentalists and could put BP into even deeper legal jeopardy.

Environmental organisations are demanding that the oil company stop blocking rescue of the turtles, and are pressing the US administration to halt the burning and look at prosecuting BP and its contractors for killing endangered species during the cleanup operation. Harming or killing a sea turtle carries fines of up to $50,000 (£33,000).

"It is criminal and cruel and they need to be held accountable," said Carole Allen, Gulf office director of the Sea Turtle Restoration Project. "There should not be another lighting of a fire of any kind till people have gone in there and looked for turtles."

The Obama administration, confirming the kills, said BP was under orders to avoid the turtles. "My understanding is that protocols include looking for wildlife prior to igniting of oil," a spokeswoman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) said. "We take these things very seriously."

The agency this week posted a single turtle spotter on the burn vessels, but government scientists are pressing for more wildlife experts to try to rescue the animals before the oil is lit – or at the very least to give them access to the burn fields.

"One can't just ride through an area where they are burning and expect to be safe while looking for turtles. We don't expect that, but we would like to access those areas where we suspect there may be turtles," said Blair Witherington, a sea turtle research scientist at Florida's Fish and Wildlife Research Institute.

More than 425 turtles are known to have died in the spill zone since 30 April, Noaa said.

Conservationists say the losses could imperil the long-term survival of the creatures. All five species of turtles found in the Gulf are endangered or threatened: the Kemp's Ridley most of all.

But in a video posted on YouTube, Mike Ellis, a skipper from Venice, Louisiana, accuses BP of chasing away a boat of conservationists trying to rescue turtles caught in the oil and weed a few miles away from the leak.

"They ran us out of there and then they shut us down," said Ellis.

On days when the weather is fine and there is relatively no wind, BP conducts up to a dozen "controlled burns", torching vast expanses of the ocean surface within a corral of fireproof booms.

Biologists say such burns are deadly for young turtles because oil and sargassum – the seaweed mats that provide nutrients to jellyfish and a range of other creatures – – congregate in the same locations. The sargassum is also a perfect hunting ground for young sea turtles, who are not developed enough to dive to the ocean floor to forage for food.

Once BP moves in, the turtles are doomed. "They drag a boom between two shrimp boats and whatever gets caught between the two boats, they circle it up and catch it on fire. Once the turtles are in there, they can't get out," Ellis said.

The heartbreak for conservationists is that the convergence of sargassum and oil offers the best chance of finding young turtles before they suffocate on the crude. But it can also be deadly.

"When they breathe and come to the surface, they get a mouthful and a bellyful of toxic substance that is very much like wallpaper paste," said John Hewitt, the director of husbandry at the New Orleans aquarium. "If we don't remove them and clean them up, in three or four days that probably spells the end of the turtle."

Since the spill, the aquarium has taken in 90 sea turtles, scrubbing the oil off their shells with toothbrushes and washing-up liquid.

Even before the fires, the two-month gusher in the Gulf of Mexico was threatening the long-term survival of sea turtles.

"This is the worst calamity that I have ever seen for sea turtles," said David Godfrey, executive director of the Sea Turtle Conservancy. "This is really the cradle of sea turtle reproduction for the western hemisphere."The threat to the turtles could continue well after the gusher is capped. The oil spill is turning vast expanses of the Gulf into a dead zone, killing off the jellyfish, crabs and conches that are the staples of an adult diet.

Conservationists are also worried about the survival of the next generation of loggerhead turtles, which are about to climb up on to badly oiled shorelines to begin their nesting season. "They are doomed" said Godfrey.

Godfrey said his organisation was working on plans to dig up about 1,000 nests, or 100,000 eggs, from nesting grounds in the Florida Panhandle and transfer them to hatcheries for safekeeping. "It is a last gasp measure to save 100,000 young sea turtles," he said. "We need every one of these turtles to survive."

In The Line Of Fire: Rare Turtles Near Gulf Flames
Elizabeth Shogren NPR 25 Jun 10;

A YouTube video accusing BP of burning turtles alive is popping up on lots of blogs these days.

But animal rescuers in the Gulf have reported no burned wildlife so far, although some scientists say endangered turtles are at risk of being caught in controlled fires intended to contain the oil spill. Some experts are training turtle observers to go out with the boats that ignite fires.

Research scientist Blair Witherington put two and two together a couple weeks ago. He was on a rescue mission 20 miles out at sea near where the Deepwater Horizon exploded.

"We were out catching turtles in the oil lines and witnessing the flames of the fires nearby," he says.

As they did every day, Witherington and his team raced to catch as many turtles as they could. They looked for the coconut-sized animals in skinny lines of oil. The rescuers had to leave the area when it was time for clean-up boats to set the oil on fire.

"We knew that we might be missing some. After all, they're just an oily lump amidst lumpy oil. They blend in well," he says.

Endangering The Endangered

Witherington says some turtles may be able to swim away from the fires, but he's concerned that others may be getting trapped in the flames. He's says it's especially alarming to see turtles at risk because they're so rare, and the majority of the ones getting caught in the oil are Kemp's ridleys, the rarest of them all.

"There's a legal reason to care because they're protected under the Endangered Species Act, and one can't just go about killing sea turtles the way one kills ants or flies. And people really do care about them. I'd like to think that the world is a richer place because we have sea turtles. Each and every one of them," Witherington says.

He raised his concerns about the fires with Michael Ziccardi, a veterinarian from the University of California Davis who's been coordinating the turtle rescues. Ziccardi says so far Witherington's theory hasn't been proven.

"No wildlife has been reported burned," the veterinarian says.

But Ziccardi and other experts say there's no question that turtles are in the line of fire.

The problem is that the oil is collecting in the areas of the Gulf where currents come together. The points of meeting currents pull in stuff that floats, including the golden-colored seaweed called sargassum, which is prime feeding ground for lots of animals — including young turtles.

"They're in the same areas where the oil congregates. So they are at high risk," Ziccardi says.

Working Toward A Solution

Ziccardi says he is now on the verge of putting together a system that should help prevent turtles from getting trapped in fires. He's training a team of 20 observers, and they are going out with turtle rescue boats to learn how to spot turtles in the oil. Then they'll be sent out with the boats that ignite the fires.

Witherington says the observers' job will be to thoroughly examine the pools of oil for turtles before those pools are set on fire.

"The goal is not to allow turtles to die in oil, and not to allow them to die in fires set on the sea," Witherington says.

Witherington is not sure why it has taken weeks to come up with this simple solution for preventing turtles from dying in the burns. He's sorry he wasn't able to push the bureaucracy to move faster. But he was focused on the rescues.

"We were very much immersed in a task, and I can't say that I was paying as much attention as I should have," he says.

Witherington says even he can't argue for stopping the burns because burning is a crucial way of keeping the oil from coastal areas that are home to so much other wildlife. That includes mature turtles, which are even more essential for keeping the species alive.