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There's just not enough recoverable oil from the BP Deepwater Horizon blowout left in most offshore and deepwater areas to warrant additional cleanup operations, National Incident Commander Rear Adm. Paul Zukunft announced Friday.
Cleanup operations remain under way along shorelines and in wetland areas in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, he said, where officials also will focus on oil mats -- weathered oil mixed with sediment -- found in shallow water just off beach areas. More than 6,400 workers and 360 vessels are still working on the oil spill response.
Zukunft's decision was accompanied by an announcement that the federal-BP oil spill response organization is transitioning into a long-term response role, with Zukunft returning to Coast Guard headquarters in Washington as assistant commandant for marine safety, security and stewardship.
Capt. Lincoln Stroh will become federal on-scene coordinator, overseeing the continued cleanup operations of the Gulf Coast Incident Management Team, which now becomes part of the Coast Guard's 8th District headquartered in New Orleans.
The decision against further cleanup operations at sea is based on a report from Zukunft's Operational Scientific Advisory Team that found no liquid quantities of oil from the Macondo well blowout in sediments beyond the shoreline of the Gulf of Mexico. None of the 17,000 water and sediment samples reviewed in the report exceeded EPA human health benchmarks for toxic chemicals or dispersants.
Less than 1 percent of water samples and only about 1 percent of sediment samples exceeded EPA's aquatic life benchmarks for polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, a cancer-causing substance used as a standard by the cleanup effort, according to the report, and analyses of individual samples found that none of the water samples that exceeded EPA standards were from BP's Macondo well.
Photo Ted Jackson
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