http://www.thearcticsounder.com/article/1413scientists_lessons_from_spill_reflect_on

Scientists: Lessons from spill reflect on future

March 28th 1:38 pm | Carey Restino

With all the talk about the Exxon Valdez oil spill surrounding its 25th anniversary this week, a group of panelists met to talk about what was learned from the spill and the following science and had some strong messages for rural Alaska about how it could strengthen its pre-planning and response measures.

Alaska Natives need to be involved in contingency planning for spill response, the panelists said, and more testing should be done on the impacts of dispersants in the cold waters of Alaska. And those who live near Arctic waters should be concerned about the effectiveness of current spill response tactics in Arctic waters.

"Arctic spill response is basically smoke and mirrors," said Riki Ott, marine toxicologist and activist at a panel discussion Monday at the University of Alaska Anchorage. "It's not going to work."

Ott and others on the panel said they were concerned about the preauthorization of the use of dispersants by the U.S. Coast Guard in federal waters, including the waters off the Aleutian Islands, which see heavy shipping traffic, and the federal oil leases in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas.

Dispersants haven't been tested in Alaska's cold waters, said John French, an environmental toxicologist, and the patterns of water movement in Alaska mean that spraying dispersants offshore, where they are currently authorized, might be more detrimental than spraying them close to shore. French said in Alaska, water and nutrients move from the deeper areas of the ocean toward shore.

If you spray dispersants offshore, the nutrients impacted may disrupt the entire shoreline food chain, even up into the freshwater streams where fish spawn. At the very least, the interactions need to be studied further to see the potential impact, presenters said.

"We need to know what the interactions are in the ocean before we draw conclusions about what to expect," French said.

The use of dispersants in Alaska's waters were a concern to several on the panel following the Gulf oil spill, where they were used extensively and in ways they had never been used before. The scientific community is only just now, four years later, starting to have an understanding of the impacts the dispersants had on that environment.

Native voice not heard in Alaska oil spill response planning

Carl Wassilie with Alaska's Big Village Network said dispersant use should be a concern, especially for Native populations that depend on the ocean for their subsistence harvest. He said the further one gets from the urban grocery stores, the more populations should be paying attention to what oil spill response plans are in place as they could have a disproportionate impact on populations that depend on traditional food sources. He criticized federal agencies for not including Native populations properly in the discussion about spill response plans.

"There was plenty of opportunity to include tribes and citizens in planning," Wassilie said.

According to Wassilie, 13 tribes in Alaska have passed a resolution calling for a ban on the use of dispersants and asking for a seat at the table of the Alaska multiagency response team which makes decisions about how to respond to disasters such as oil spills.

"We're concerned about the exclusion of Alaska tribes," he said.

Current spill plan could impact 15 species, feds say

Rebecca Noblin of the Center for Biological Diversity said the center regularly brings legal action against state and federal governments for not complying with regulations under the Endangered Species Act that call for analysis of any clean-up plan's impact on threatened and endangered species. Typically, she said, federal agencies don't respond until legal action is brought against them, but in the case of Alaska, that wasn't the case. Following the plan to use dispersants in the Arctic, the center filed notice that the U.S. Coast Guard and the Environmental Protection Agency needed to asses possible impacts to endangered species, the federal agencies responded.

"They came back and said, 'You're right, we're going to do it,'" Noblin said.

The agencies recently completed their assessment and said there are 15 species that are likely to be adversely affected by the oil spill response plan, including whales and sea otters, she said.

While Noblin said it is concerning that so many species are being considered at risk from cleanup efforts, it's also good that the EPA and the Coast Guard are thinking about the situation realistically.

The next step is to send these recommendations to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Department and see what strategies the agency comes up with.
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