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Contractors have yet to formulate plan to remove Davy Crockett from Columbia Camas, Washington - Contractors have rung up $5.3 million in costs for the beached and broken barge Davy Crockett, as of the end of last week. And that’s before they’ve even formulated a plan for removing the 431-foot derelict from the north bank of the Columbia River between Vancouver and Camas. Workers have cleared away enough debris that divers were able to safely access fuel tanks at the bottom of the vessel. They found what was described as remnant amounts of heavy bunker fuel, which has the consistency...

MOBILE, Ala. -- Ken Feinberg has repeatedly told oil spill claimants that they have two options if they disagree with decisions of his Gulf Coast Claims Facility: file an appeal with the U.S. Coast Guard, or sue BP PLC in court. A Florida business owner has pursued a third option: sue Feinberg. John Mavrogiannis, owner of Pinellas Marine Salvage Inc. in Tarpon Spring, Fla., has filed a lawsuit in Florida Circuit Court in Pinellas County, accusing Feinberg and the claims operation of gross negligence and fraud. Neither Feinberg nor his spokeswoman could be reached for comment Monday. Brian Donovan, Mavrogiannis’s...

Camas, Washington - The U.S. Coast Guard will step in to dismantle and remove the beached and broken barge Davy Crockett, now languishing on the north bank of the Columbia River between Vancouver and Camas. Gov. Chris Gregoire said she was pleased by the Coast Guard’s announcement on Thursday. “The issue remains of how we improve the monitoring and management of large derelict vessels so that we avoid these types of costly and intensive response efforts in the future,” Gregoire said in a prepared statement. State authorities have attributed the sad state of the 431-foot converted barge — beached, broken...

CAMAS, WA--New details show the owner of a barge leaking oil into the Columbia River near Camas has had a history of being cited for violations dating back to 1998. Currently, the U.S. Coast Guard and the EPA have launched two separate federal investigations into Brett Simpson. The Coast Guard has paid $2.1 million so far in the cleanup effort of the barge spill. A bill they say they were forced to pay ever since Simpson disappeared. "For the past 13 days he's not been part of this removal effort," said Capt. Danny LeBlanc from the Coast Guard. "We've not...

Sales of Gulf of Mexico seafood are getting a boost from the military after being hammered by last year's BP oil spill, which left consumers fearing that the water's bounty had been tainted. Ten products, including fish, shrimp, oysters, crab cakes, and packaged Cajun dishes such as jambalaya and shrimp etouffee are being promoted at 72 base commissaries along the East Coast, said Milt Ackerman, president of Military Solutions Inc., which is supplying seafood to the businesses. Gulf seafood sales fell sharply after a BP gulf well blew out in April, spewing millions of gallons of oil into the sea....

Energy Policy: An administration that has no respect for Congress, the courts or the Constitution has been found in contempt for reissuing a drilling moratorium that a U.S. district judge found overly broad. The Obama administration's trouble with the courts has continued with a judge's ruling last week that the Interior Department's reinstating of a drilling moratorium followed by a de facto moratorium via an overly restrictive permitting process constituted contempt. The administration had issued a drilling moratorium in May in waters deeper than 500 feet after the explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig off Louisiana that...

(Camas, Washington) The ugly demise of the beached and broken Davy Crockett, now the subject of a multimillion-dollar federal recovery effort, unfolded only after years of neglect. The former Liberty ship has languished for almost two decades along the north bank of the Columbia River between Vancouver and Camas. At one point, a former owner warned the U.S. Coast Guard that the 431-foot vessel appeared to be at risk of coming loose from its mooring and careening into the nearby shipping channel. However, little changed except the vessel’s ownership. By the end of last year, benign neglect evolved to active...

The federal judge who struck down the Obama administration's moratorium on deepwater drilling after the Gulf oil spill held the Interior Department in contempt Wednesday, and ordered the federal agency to pay attorneys' fees for several offshore oil companies. "Such dismissive conduct, viewed in tandem with the reimposition of a second blanket and substantively identical moratorium and in light of the national importance of this case, provide this court with clear and convincing evidence of the government's contempt of this court's preliminary injunction order," he wrote.

President Obama's oil spill commission spent six months examining the "root causes" of the Gulf disaster, yet never inspected the failed blowout preventer -- the part of the well that could have, as its name suggests, prevented the explosion. At a House Natural Resources Committee hearing this week, the co-chairman of the National Oil Spill Commission faced a barrage of questions from Republicans and Democrats about why their final report is long on regulatory recommendations but short on engineering explanations. Lawmakers took issue with the commission’s apparent lack of effort to explain the failure of the blowout preventer. Republicans said...

Updated 9:48 p.m. Carol Browner, an key adviser to President Obama on energy and environmental issues, plans to leave the White House, an administration official said Monday night. Her departure comes as something of a surprise. Browner had been deeply involved in negotiations over climate legislation, which passed the House but died in the Senate. And she had been a key part of the team helping to deal with and stop the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico last year. The administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency for eight years under President Bill Clinton, she had been...

House Republicans drove home the new political reality on Capitol Hill on Wednesday by convening a series of hearings aimed at scrutinizing President Obamas first two years in office and sending a message against what they see as his expansive government agenda. With two hearings examining the implementation of the health care law and another dissecting the administrations handling of the Gulf oil spill - some of the first oversight hearings under the new House majority - the Republicans signaled that they would make up for lost time by shining a light on issues that they say Democrats have tried...

While the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the Obama administration's subsequent six-month moratorium on deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico are common knowledge, the fact that the federal government has turned the tragic accident into an ongoing economic calamity seems to be drawing scant attention. Though the drilling moratorium was officially lifted three months ago, it has been replaced with an ongoing de facto ban.  But the full scope and damaging consequences of the federal government's reactions to the gulf spill go well beyond deep-water drilling. While the moratorium was limited to deep-water rigs, the work stoppage...

(ORANGE BEACH, Ala.) - Folks on the Gulf Coast gave the man in charge of doling out compensation claims a piece of their minds during oil spill town hall meetings Tuesday. Kenneth Feinberg quickly found out what he probably already knows: there is no shortage of frustration among business owners and fishermen. "Why don't you go to all these deck hands, waitresses and other people who got their money and left town. We the business people have no employees to hire," one claimant complained. The crowd was polite but skeptical. Feinberg was accused of everything from holding back on claims...

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va., Jan. 18, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- The Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC), which has used the power of the law to defend the South's natural resources for 25 years, today released its third annual list of the top ten places in the South that face immediate, potentially irreversible damage in 2011. This year's list shows that the nation's most urgent environmental issues are playing out in the Southeast, especially the way we produce and use energy. For more detailed descriptions of each endangered area, SELC's protection efforts, photographs and video, visit www.southernenvironment.org/topten "Our region is headed down a path...

Last April, an environmental disaster occurred that remained in the headlines for months. With each day, a new estimate seemed to be offered regarding the impact this event would have upon the Gulf region. You recall that event, don't you? It was the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig and the resulting oil spill. Now, a mere nine months later, consider the actual extent of the environmental and economic damage versus what was expected or warned of at the time the rig exploded. In a study released earlier this month, a team of scientists stated that the natural gas...

If the government does not take drastic steps, another deepwater oil spill like the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico could devastate the coastal areas of the United States, an oversight commission warned Tuesday in a long-awaited report to the president. More research, funding and oversight are needed to help prevent another disaster, concluded the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling. "As drilling pushes into ever deeper and riskier waters where more of America's oil lies, only systemic reforms of both government and industry will prevent a similar, future disaster," said William K....

Federal study confirms microbes have eaten most of the Gulf Oil Spill A study by researchers from Texas A&M and University of California in Santa Barbara have found that all of the methane gas released from the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico have been consumed by tiny microbes. Methane gas amounts 100,000 times higher than normal at the time of their release have completely disappeared after only 120 days. Some scientists had raised concerns that dissolved methane and other oil residue would continue to plague the Gulf for years or even decades. This is turning out not...

Last August, just two days into a research cruise to study methane gas spewed into the Gulf of Mexico by the Deepwater Horizon gusher, Texas A&M University oceanographer John Kessler turned to one of his colleagues and said, "Well, it looks like it might be gone. What do you think?" The huge wallop of methane burped up from deep inside the earth was, in fact, missing. Kessler and his colleagues now report in Science that a huge swarm of gas-gobbling bacteria swelled to consume nearly all of the estimated 200,000 tons of methane dumped into the gulf. ..... Besides providing...

<p>The worst of the explosions gutted the Deepwater Horizon stem to stern.</p> <p>Crew members were cut down by shrapnel, hurled across rooms and buried under smoking wreckage. Some were swallowed by fireballs that raced through the oil rig’s shattered interior. Dazed and battered survivors, half-naked and dripping in highly combustible gas, crawled inch by inch in pitch darkness, willing themselves to the lifeboat deck.</p>

The day after the midterm elections in November, panelists at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy discussed the various factors that had contributed to the Democrats’ losses—most surprisingly, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. One speaker with excellent Democratic connections in Washington noted that top White House staff were consumed by the spill and its political fallout for much of the spring of 2010. As staffers now lamented privately, this had diverted attention from other pressing issues—above all, the sputtering economy. The political fortunes of the Democratic party were not the only collateral damage from the...