100 Days After BP Spill: Florida Scientists in the Spotlight
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
By: Steve Newborn, WUSF

July 27, 2010 -- Thursday marks the 100th day after BP's Deepwater Horizon well exploded, sending millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Since then, an unlikely group of people has been in the spotlight - ocean researchers. Scientists at the University of South Florida in Tampa have been especially prominent, since they immediately started sending research ships to the site of the spill.

Click here to listen to the story.

Two weeks after the oil started gushing, a dozen oceanographers gingerly approached a mound of microphones outside the USF College of Marine Science.  A research vessel based in St. Petersburg, the Weatherbird II, detected vast plumes of oil far beneath the surface. USF oceanographer David Hollander explained the findings to the assembled reporters.

"You can get particles so small that you can't see," Hollander said. "But if you have a filter that's fine enough, you can trap them. And that's what we did."

Earlier that week, BP CEO Tony Hayward publicly disputed what these scientists had found. He said the oil is on the surface, and "there aren't any plumes."

Hayward's statement led to the rare press conference by these academicians, who are normally cloistered in some anonymous research lab. Now, they were in a public battle with BP. Hollander even had trouble getting BP to release a sample from the well.

"I tried to get a piece of the oil from a BP representative and it was met with resistance," he said.

"Oilmania," as one researcher dubbed the phenomenon, was in full bloom.

On April 20, Bill Hogarth learned about the Deepwater Horizon explosion while he was watching television.  At the time, the Dean of USF's College of Marine Science had little idea how it would change his life.

"I didn't pay as much attention to it as I probably should have, to be honest with you."

Once he realized the scale of the disaster, he knew it put USF in a unique position, since the school was one of the few places that had ocean-going research vessels ready to go.

"Even BP called early in the game about the Weatherbird and I guess get the vessels they could get lined up, lined up," Hogarth said. "We needed to keep our vessels free for the state of Florida and for the research that needed to be done."

That research centered on three questions. The first was just how much oil was leaking from the well.  At first, BP pegged it at roughly 42,000 gallons a day. But Ian MacDonald wasn't convinced. The Florida State University oceanographer was one of the first researchers to publicly question BP's estimates.

"I cannot understand why BP persists in making these claims on television that are so patently false and so easily disproved," MacDonald said.

A month later, a senior BP executive told Congress that the volume from the spill could be as high as 2.5 million gallons a day.

Another question was where ocean currents would carry the oil.  Just one week after the spill, USF oceanographer Robert Weisberg sounded the alarm about the Loop Current.

“The bad news is that the longer the oil is out there, and the more the well leaks, the larger the likelihood that eventually oil may get entrained in the loop current,” Weisberg said at a later press conference.

Finally, there were the questions surrounding BP's unprecedented reliance upon chemical dispersants. BP used dispersants to reduce the amount of oil floating to the surface. But USF Professor Edward Van Vleet said in May the company was merely shifting the problem where it could poison marine life underwater.

"It's still just as toxic as the oil was at the surface," Van Vleet said, "but now that it's dispersed down into the water, it just becomes available to different organisms instead of organisms when it's at the surface that either feed at the surface or dive through the surface, such as birds or submarine mammals."

And now, these same researchers say people must remain vigilant, since there are still million of gallons of crude swirling in the Gulf.

"What does this mean for the long-term, for your food chain and the long-term fisheries?” asked Hogarth.

Hogarth says it will take $100 million to fully study the effects of the oil spill. So far, BP has agreed to fund one-tenth of that request.