As Louisiana begins the long recovery from the Deepwater Horizon disaster, scientists have rushed to the Gulf Coast, looking to answer burning questions about the impacts of the spill and its cleanup.
But some University professors say efforts by independent scientists to quantify those impacts are being hampered by pressures from BP and the federal government. And in the rush to build legal cases in the storm’s aftermath, they say the truth may be at risk of getting pushed aside.
Linda Hooper-Bui, an entomologist with the LSU Ag Center studying the effects of the spill on the area’s food web, said her research has been directly hampered.
Hooper-Bui said one of her graduate students was collecting ant samples in coastal Alabama when he was accosted by a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officer. Hooper-Bui said the student was told he wasn’t authorized to conduct research in the area because he did not have approval from the Deepwater Horizon Response Unified Command — the organization jointly run by the federal government and BP responsible for the clean-up effort.
The official confiscated the ant samples — after weeks of preparation, site selection and collection.
Hooper-Bui said those samples are still sitting in an office somewhere in Alabama.
“Having to start all over is pretty inconvenient,” she said.
Hooper-Bui’s case has since gone public — she has written op-ed pieces in The New York Times and The Scientist and has been a guest on NPR’s “Science Friday.”
“My life has been insane,” said Hooper-Bui, who said she has been flooded with media requests in the past few weeks.
Hooper-Bui said her complaints have resonated with a number of similar researchers.
“It became really kind of a common theme,” she said.
In the Times piece, entitled “A Gulf Science Blackout,” Hooper-Bui argued that problems with access, funding and “secrecy contracts” have hampered scientific efforts to determine exactly how damaging the spill has been — and what needs to happen to clean it up.
As BP and government officials struggled to clean up the oil washing ashore in the months after the rig sank, officials blocked off huge swaths of territory from public access for health and safety reasons.
But Hooper-Bui said the restrictions, which still persist in some places, are preventing independent scientists like her from collecting the data they need.
“If there’s not equal access, the results are going to be skewed,” she said.
Hooper-Bui said the problems with access were eased when Unified Command began scaling back the scope of the restricted areas. But “it’s still happening,” she said.
“Last week somebody told me they were blocked,” Hooper-Bui said.
Hooper-Bui said her team is planning an expedition to the coast in the near future for more sample collection.
“We are not confident we’ll get access,” she said.
But Hooper-Bui’s complaints aren’t universal. Gregory Stone, director of the University’s Coastal Studies Institute, said he hasn’t been hindered.
“I’ve been down there quite a bit, and I haven’t had any problems,” Stone said of the Gulf Coast.
Stone oversees the Wave-Current-Surge Information System for Coastal Louisiana, or WAVCIS, program, which uses a network of stations throughout the Louisiana coast to gather data on the makeup and movement of water in the Gulf.
Stone said two of his monitoring stations have been out of commission for most of the disaster, and he can’t repair them because Unified Command required his divers to get hazardous materials training before going below the surface.
But Stone said the safety requirement — while it prevents him from fixing the stations and retrieving valuable data — is necessary.
“This is a terrible incident, and I’m not going to put my divers in danger,” he said.
The training costs $25,000. Stone said he was able to get the money from Shell.
But not everyone is so fortunate in finding funding. Hooper-Bui said independent scientists like her must often operate on meager budgets provided by their institutions and grants obtained from outside agencies.
The funds pale in comparison to, for example, the huge corporate funds BP can muster or the money flowing into the government’s Natural Resource Damage Assessment program, aimed at quantifying the damage caused by the spill.
“We’re operating on a shoestring here,” Hooper-Bui said.
But those BP and government contracts don’t just come with funds — they also come with confidentiality agreements that prevent contracted researchers from talking to anyone, including the larger scientific community, about their findings, both professors say.
Both the government and BP are trying to build legal cases for the inevitable onslaught of litigation that will continue far after the immediate crisis is done.
The consequences of those lawsuits will be drastically affected by the quantifiable damage each side can “prove” the spill caused.
“It’s all about building a case,” Stone said.
Stone, who has worked in conjunction with both BP and the government, said he has been approached to sign on as a contractor. He refused.
“I don’t want to have my information tied up for three years,” Stone said.
Stone also doesn’t want to get involved in the likely ferocious legal battles that are sure to hinge on that research.
“I’m not going to take the state that has funded so much of my research to court,” he said.
Hooper-Bui said the problems with these “secrecy agreements” extend beyond simple inconvenience. She said they are problematic from a scientific standpoint.
“The way science is done, it’s done out in the open,” she said.
Hooper-Bui said most independent research is peer-reviewed — before publication, most of her articles are reviewed by two experts at the University and two experts at other institutions. That means the methods and findings have undergone open, rigorous scrutiny.
Hooper-Bui said the information under secrecy agreements doesn’t necessarily go through the same process. And it isn’t open to access by the scientific community at large.
She cites the Exxon Valdez oil spill, where similar agreements prevented the science from undergoing peer review and led to nebulous conclusions about the spill’s effects.
Hooper-Bui also said because sequestered researchers’ work is sought to support a legal argument, the conclusions reached from that work may be tainted — which is why independent researchers are so important.
“We have no agenda,” the professor said. “[Our conclusions] could go one way, they could go another.”
Unified Command officials did not respond to inquiries about their policies concerning the confidentiality agreements.
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Contact Matthew Albright at [email protected]