In 2010, Pulitzer Prize-winning animator Mark Fiore created this humorous and poignant take on the BP oil spill.

Three years ago this week, a disastrous oil spill began in the Gulf of Mexico, eventually hemorrhaging 210 million gallons of Louisiana sweet crude into the water. Now the media has moved on and public anger has cooled, but the full extent of the damage is finally coming out—and it’s clear that the spill was even worse than we thought.

Newsweek:

"It’s as safe as Dawn dishwashing liquid.” That’s what Jamie Griffin says the BP man told her about the smelly, rainbow-streaked gunk coating the floor of the “floating hotel” where Griffin was feeding hundreds of cleanup workers during the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Apparently, the workers were tracking the gunk inside on their boots. Griffin, as chief cook and maid, was trying to clean it. But even boiling water didn’t work.

“The BP representative said, ‘Jamie, just mop it like you’d mop any other dirty floor,’” Griffin recalls in her Louisiana drawl.
...

Griffin did as she was told: “I tried Pine-Sol, bleach, I even tried Dawn on those floors.” As she scrubbed, the mix of cleanser and gunk occasionally splashed onto her arms and face.

Within days, the 32-year-old single mother was coughing up blood and suffering constant headaches. She lost her voice. “My throat felt like I’d swallowed razor blades,” she says.

Then things got much worse.

Like hundreds, possibly thousands, of workers on the cleanup, Griffin soon fell ill with a cluster of excruciating, bizarre, grotesque ailments. By July, unstoppable muscle spasms were twisting her hands into immovable claws. In August, she began losing her short-term memory. After cooking professionally for 10 years, she couldn’t remember the recipe for vegetable soup; one morning, she got in the car to go to work, only to discover she hadn’t put on pants. The right side, but only the right side, of her body “started acting crazy. It felt like the nerves were coming out of my skin. It was so painful. My right leg swelled—my ankle would get as wide as my calf—and my skin got incredibly itchy.”

We already knew that BP had lied about how much oil had gushed into the Gulf (210 million gallons, according to government estimates) , as lying to Congress was one of the 14 elonies to which BP pleaded guilty last year in a legal settlement with the DOJ. What is now finally coming to light thanks to an anonymous whistleblower, is how BP managed to hide such a massive amount of oil from the public, and the media.

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Official Trailer for "The Big Fix" a Green Planet Production by Josh and Rebecca Tickell.

On Earthday, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig sank creating the worst oil spill in history. According to the global media, the story ended when the well was capped – but that’s when the real story began. By exposing the root causes of the oil spill and what really happened after the news cameras left the Gulf states, filmmakers Josh and Rebecca Tickell uncover a vast network of corruption.

The New Orleans Times Picayune says THE BIG FIX is “a full-on, no-holds-barred bit of investigative journalism” into the dark secrets surrounding one of the largest man-made environmental catastrophes in American history.

THE BIG FIX is “a damning indictment” (Time Out New York) of a system of government and corporate collusion that puts the pursuit of profit over all other human and environmental needs. Through “smart, covert reporting that shames our news media” (The Village Voice) The Big Fix is “a mandatory-viewing critique of widespread government corruption” (LA Weekly).

H/T Upworthy.com

[Image via Flickr]

By Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica

When the Obama administration temporarily banned BP from federal contracts Wednesday, it pointed to BP's "lack of business integrity" and conduct relating to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion and spill.

The sanction, however, has been years in the making.

BP has been criminally convicted in four previous cases — including a 2005 explosion in Texas that killed 15 workers — and the EPA has been considering broader debarment proceedings against the company since at least 2005. The agency had actually been nearing a decision on a contract ban in January 2010, just a few months before the Deepwater Horizon tragedy unfolded, killing 11 workers and sending more than 200 million gallons of oil into the sea.

"This is not just about the Deepwater Horizon, but about a whole lot of things and a whole lot of parts of BP," said a former government official familiar with the debarment process. "It wasn't just narrowly scoped... they are looking at it as a systemic corporate-wide issue."

A limited suspension of government contracts for a specific facility or subsidiary operations, called suspension and debarment, is standard practice after a criminal conviction.

BP pleaded guilty on Nov. 15 to federal criminal charges of manslaughter and lying to Congress and agreed to pay more than $4 billion in fines relating to the Deepwater Horizon accident, which killed 11 workers and sent more than 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Three of the company's managers have also been criminally charged.

But the broad sanctions announced Wednesday target the BP corporation writ large — the British-based parent company and 21 international subsidiaries are included — and reflect a mistrust for BP's operations that has been growing over more than a decade.

In this case, experts close to the case say, the timing of the government's announcement was significant.

It came just hours before the government sold new rights to drill in the Gulf of the Mexico and seems intended to prevent BP, the largest leaseholder in the Gulf, from expanding its operations there until all of its problems are resolved.

"Suspensions are always timed to prevent something from happening," said Jeanne Pascal, a former EPA debarment attorney who led the government's investigation into BP from 1997 until she retired in 2010.

"A debarment says you have chronic bad behavior, and we think you present chronic risk for the government and that you will continue this behavior," said Pascal. "The immediate need was the issuance of new leases (Wednesday) in the Gulf of Mexico."

Wednesday's actions represent the government's effort to protect its fiscal resources and protect the public economic interest by not using taxpayer money to support actions that could cost the government more money later on.

After several past BP accidents, including two oil spills in Alaska and close calls at several U.S. refineries, private consultants and government investigators have pointed to wide-ranging problems within the company's culture. The critics have warned that BP has consistently prioritized speed and profit-making over safety and regulatory compliance.

The type of suspension ordered Wednesday is a part of what the government calls a "discretionary" debarment, which means it is considering this broader "corporate culture of noncompliance" and longer history.

While the EPA is the lead agency, its debarment decision affects the Department of Interior and Department of Defense, among other agencies. BP is among the U.S.'s largest corporate contractors and supplies more than $1 billion a year worth of fuel to the military.

The temporary suspension order issued Wednesday is the first step in a still-to-be-made decision about whether BP should be formally debarred, or banned entirely from contracts for a specified length of time.

For now, EPA officials tell ProPublica that the suspension could last anywhere from two to 18 months, depending on the final terms of the Department of Justice's plea agreement with BP. If the civil suits against BP remain unresolved, the suspension could stay in place longer.

As part of its criminal plea announced earlier this month, BP agreed to hire ethics and safety monitors for its Gulf operations and regularly evaluate its facilities for safety and environmental compliance. If the court approves the plea agreement, those terms would become a part of BP's probation, and thus a term of the suspension and debarment proceedings, an EPA spokesperson told ProPublica.

A spokesperson assigned to speak on behalf of BP told ProPublica that the company had not intended to bid on new Gulf leases in Wednesday's sale, and was not aware of the EPA's suspension decision until after their bids were due. But a Nov. 15 press release and filings with the SEC both suggest the company knew a ban could be coming.

BP was not explicitly banned from participating in the sale of new rights to drill in western Gulf of Mexico waters Wednesday, but would not have been allowed to win any leases if it had competed for them, a Department of Interior official said.

Since the 2010 spill in the Gulf, the government has granted BP more than 50 new leases in the Gulf of Mexico. BP is the single largest investor and leaseholder in the Gulf, where it currently operates seven drilling rigs.

"BP has invested more than $52 billion in the United States," the company said in a statement, "more than any other oil and gas company and more than it invests in any other country." It emphasized that it employs 23,000 people in the U.S. and said it supports nearly a quarter of a million American jobs.

So far, BP has spent more than $14 billion on cleanup and settlement costs related to the Gulf spill, and expects to pay more than $37 billion — including in criminal and civil settlements — by the time it is finished. In addition, the company has stated a renewed focus on safety and reorganized its corporate operations to increase safety and environmental accountability.

"I believe BP is genuine and sincere" in its efforts, said Tommy Beaudreau, director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, in a press conference held Wednesday after the government's lease sale.

BP also emphasized that it is working speedily towards a resolution with the government.

"BP has been in regular dialogue with the EPA and has already provided both a present responsibility statement of more than 100 pages and supplemental answers to the EPA's questions," it said in a statement. "The EPA has informed BP that it is preparing a proposed administrative agreement that, if agreed upon, would effectively resolve and lift this temporary suspension."

Suevon Lee contributed reporting to this story.

Questions on the latest BP news? Join our live chat November 29 at 1 p.m. ET, with reporter Abrahm Lustgarten. 

A new report on the BP oil spill aftermath find disturbing numbers of "Eyeless shrimp and fish with lesions are becoming common, with BP oil pollution believed to be the likely cause." Fishermen and scientists alike say they've never seen anything like it.

Recently I shared a report on the Gulf Coast fishing industry written by Dahr Jamail, a reporter for Al Jazeera who has been covering the BP Gulf oil spill since early on in the days of the disaster. Once again, Jamail - the journalist from Qatar - reports on these latest findings. You can check out the American mainstream media and read all about President Obama eating dog meat as a child when his step-father fed it to him in Indonesia, and other really important stuff.

And so it seems that not all of the creatures of the sea have been killed off by the effects of the oil spill, and BP's use of toxic dispersants. There are fish with sores and lesions, mutated shrimp, deformed crab and fish, fish with oozing sores, underdeveloped blue crabs lacking claws, eyeless crabs and shrimp (Shrimp lacking even eye sockets), crabs with their shells soft instead of hard, full grown crabs that are one-fifth their normal size, clawless crabs, and crabs with shells that don't have their usual spikes, shrimp with tumors on their heads, crabs that are dying from within (Alive, but when opened smell as if they are already dead.), and more.

Why is this happening? From the report:

"The dispersants used in BP's draconian experiment contain solvents, such as petroleum distillates and 2-butoxyethanol. Solvents dissolve oil, grease, and rubber," Dr Riki Ott, a toxicologist, marine biologist and Exxon Valdez survivor told Al Jazeera. "It should be no surprise that solvents are also notoriously toxic to people, something the medical community has long known".

The dispersants are known to be mutagenic, a disturbing fact that could be evidenced in the seafood deformities. Shrimp, for example, have a life-cycle short enough that two to three generations have existed since BP's disaster began, giving the chemicals time to enter the genome.

Pathways of exposure to the dispersants are inhalation, ingestion, skin, and eye contact. Health impacts can include headaches, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pains, chest pains, respiratory system damage, skin sensitisation, hypertension, central nervous system depression, neurotoxic effects, cardiac arrhythmia and cardiovascular damage. They are also teratogenic - able to disturb the growth and development of an embryo or fetus - and carcinogenic.

Cowan believes chemicals named polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), released from BP's submerged oil, are likely to blame for what he is finding, due to the fact that the fish with lesions he is finding are from "a wide spatial distribution that is spatially coordinated with oil from the Deepwater Horizon, both surface oil and subsurface oil. A lot of the oil that impacted Louisiana was also in subsurface plumes, and we think there is a lot of it remaining on the seafloor".

Jamail attempted to get answers to questions arising from his investigation from various government agencies, as well as BP. One agency referred him to another, some couldn't or wouldn't talk, and while BP refused to comment for a televised interview, they did offer a statement:

"Seafood from the Gulf of Mexico is among the most tested in the world, and, according to the FDA and NOAA, it is as safe now as it was before the accident."

Right. Somehow, I don't think anyone will run in to any of the executives from BP at any of the Gulf Coast eateries enjoying the seafood cuisine anytime soon.