Oil spill report card: Where are we now?

Five years after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, where are we now?

Marine and wildlife:

Impact: It didn't take long after the oil spill before horrific images of dolphins, pelicans and sea turtles, as well as sick and dying fish, coated in oil were broadcast around the world. We knew immediately the impact to our marine life, wildlife and fisheries would be huge. To this day, scientists are still calculating the damage.

What we know so far is grim. Ocean Conservancy has a four-page list of the marine life and coastal wildlife impacted by the oil spill that shows: An estimated 600,000 to 800,000 coastal birds died; and an estimated 200,000 offshore birds died as a result of the oil spill. Tens of thousands of sea turtles were located within the area of surface oil and of the 1,149 of the oiled turtles collected in the first year after the spill, 613 died.

Today: NOAA scientists are still digging into the cause or causes of high number of dolphin deaths in the areas of the Gulf most impacted by the oil spill. So far, 1,050 marine mammals — mostly bottlenose dolphins — stranded and died between April 30, 2010 and April 6, 2014. The deaths are continuing. Calculating the exact toll on marine mammals has been difficult, because only those that wash up on beaches or collected from the Gulf can be counted.

Scientists have discovered that even low levels of oil pollution can damage the developing hearts of fish embryos and larvae, reducing the likelihood those fish will survive. This raises questions about the future generations of fish populations.

Research also found red snapper had a lower recruitment rate in 2011 and 2010. Lab experiments found oil and dispersant were more toxic to oysters than oil alone.

Our beaches: The oil spill couldn't have happened at a worse time. Shorebird and sea turtle nesting season was kicking off. Nesting birds were not only facing danger from the oil, their nesting sites were invaded by helicopters and the army of oil spill cleanup workers and volunteers and media that poured onto our beaches in advance of the oil. Parents abandoned their nests. Some of those endangered and threatened shorebird populations today are struggling to rebound faced with setbacks from stormy weather, predators and vehicles. The National Seashore and Audubon Florida, however, have received BP early restoration dollars to step up efforts to protect nesting sites. Sometimes that protection is focused on a single surviving fledgling. These measures, including recruiting more volunteers and beefing up public education, have resulted in a few successes, including the skimmer nesting site on the Navarre Beach causeway and a few sites on Pensacola Beach.

Pros: One positive outcome of the oil spill said Caroline Stahala, Panhandle program manager for Audubon Florida, is in the increased public awareness about our coastal wildlife. This has resulted in recruiting a network of thousands of coastal stewards and more volunteers focused on protecting shorebirds, sea turtles and beach mice.

Challenges: Steve Lynch, Florida Audubon Society chair, urges all residents to stay involved in the Gulf Restoration process by attending meetings and communicating with their public officials to make sure the penalties from the Gulf spill go to true ecosystem recovery.

Tourism

Pre-BP: Tourism season in 2010 was shaping up to be a record-breaker with consumer confidence rebounding following the housing bust, recession and our area finally turning the corner on the slow and steady recovery from the 2004-2005 hurricanes.

Immediate impact:

•As soon as 24-hour media coverage made it clear BP's crude was slowly making its way to our shores, tourists quickly canceled hotel and vacation rental reservations all along Northwest Florida beaches.

•By June, Escambia County lodging revenue dropped 14.7 percent from the same period in 2009, and eventually tourist-dependent businesses reported 50-80 percent drop in revenue for June, July and August, a period that typically accounts for 58 percent of the annual tourist activity, according to a Visit Pensacola report on the oil spill. When business at beach restaurants and shops dropped off, seasonal employees lost jobs.

Today: Tourism is back on track and even hitting record numbers. Last year ended on a high note with tourists development taxes hitting $6,132,034, nearly double what was collected — $3,587,277 — in 2010.

Visit Pensacola president Steve Hayes and other tourism officials partially credit the oil spill for the uptick in tourism for a number of reasons:

•New visitors discovered we had white sand beaches thanks to international media coverage of the oil spill and BP's media campaign urging visitors to return to the coast as the oil was being removed.

•BP's infusion of $30 million in tourism grants divided among the seven Northwest Florida counties to promotions, advertising and incentives to attract visitors boosted tourism budgets for three years.

•Uniting tourism officials in Perdido Key, Pensacola Beach and Pensacola on a singular mission of restoring tourism instead of each one focusing on their area only. It's a partnership that persists today.

"BP dollars allowed folks to do things they probably would not have done before because the resources were not there," Hayes said. "The silver lining is people heard about us for the first time. It was a nasty way to hear about us. It allowed us to show unity on one message and create a major buzz."

Pros: Rod Lewis, an economic analyst, crunched the 2002-2014 bed tax numbers and discovered an interesting trend. The post-spill recovery combined with the post-recession recovery drove growth in bed-tax revenues, which exceeded growth rates during the period leading up to the Great Recession, he said. The recovery has probably driven the growth past the point that it would have been had the Great Recession and the oil spill never happened. To demonstrate this point, let's assume that neither event happened and that bed tax revenue continued to grow from 2007 forward at a healthy 7.3 percent annual rate. If this were the case, total (2 percent seasonally adjusted) collections in 2014 would have been $4.2 million, which is just shy of the $4.3 million that was actually reported. The tourism economy, as measured by a major barometer, has actually grown past where it would have been had neither event ever happened. Although this is a debatable way to look at the numbers, it demonstrates the overwhelming strength of the recovery in the wake of the recession and the spill, he said.

Cons: BP windfall of tourism dollars has dried. We have to stay vigilant in promotions to attract tourists.

"We can't say we're up an X amount percent so we don't have to do as much," he said. "Northwest Florida competes amongst ourselves for summer business and we're competing with South and Central Florida. It's time to keep the pedal to the floor."

Seafood

The Pensacola area has a rich seafood history. Tourists and locals alike enjoyed a bounty of freshly caught Gulf and bay fish and shrimp and bay oysters. Almost immediately, that love relationship came to a screeching halt when oil and the dispersant sprayed on the oil to break it up fouled the Gulf of Mexico and closed fishing grounds.

Impact: Seafood consumers were warned to not eat the seafood until tests could be done to ensure it was safe to consume. Even though state and federal seafood agencies quickly declared that seafood safe, people today are still leery. Some people still avoid Gulf and bay-caught seafood. Many people still ask, "Is it safe?"

Today: Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services spent the first three years after the oil spill conducting 59,668 analysis on 3,693 samples of Florida seafood including finfish, shrimp, oysters, crabs, clams and lobster for possible oil contamination. Laboratory testing showed that Florida seafood products were safe and had not been affected by the oil spill.

Many scientists studying the impacts of the oil spill in the Gulf, including Wade Jeffrey, a University of West Florida marine scientist and scientist with the National Institute of Health, are convinced the seafood is safe. And in all of the oil spill related research Ocean Conservancy has reviewed, it has not seen anything that points to Gulf seafood being unfit to eat.

Con: When it comes to East Bay and Escambia Bay oysters, there's still few to be had on the commercial market. The beds died off a few years ago. There was speculation that the oil spill and dispersant was contributing to the die-off. Cal Bodenstein, a Santa Rosa County fisherman and member of the county's RESTORE Act council, however, said the BP oil spill had nothing to do with the die-off.

Over harvesting, illegal harvesting and too much rain and high salinity are all being blamed on the die off. A state plan to replenish beds with clutch on which oysters attach to is in the works. Bodenstein says he's confident the oysters will come back strong in five years.

Economy

Impact: Our tourism and seafood industry sectors of our economy took a beating in the days following the BP oil spill.

Data alone, bed tax and sales tax revenues and employment figures don't tell the complete story. The effects of lost revenue and lost income from workers in those industries rippled through the economy, Pensacola economist Rick Harper said.

Compounding the impact, the oil spill hit just as we were entering our peak tourism season, when many tourist-sensitive business count on the four months of strong revenue to get them through the slower, leaner months. And it hit just as people were making spring and summer travel plans.

The spill, "effectively wiped out tourism activity for the summer," Harper said. It impacted revenues not easily calculated in the data as tourism related, such as the summer beach wedding business, fishing and seafood sales, and even housing and condominium sales. Potential buyers looking at relocating to the coast may have decided to put that decision off a year or two, Harper said.

Today: In the last two to three years, employment, tourism and related tourism sales have been ticking up. In 2009 for the months of May, June and July, retails sales in the two-county area were $247.2 million. After the oil spill in April 2010, sales ticked down in May, June and July from 2009 to $231.3 million. Retail sales, however, nearly doubled for those same months in 2014, to $388.9 million.

Cons: Attorneys and economists, however, say many claims business owners and workers filed with the Gulf Recovery Fund, established by BP to reimburse people economically injured by the oil spill, has not been paid.

Nearly 87,000 claims have been submitted from Florida, according to data on the Deepwater Horizon Claims Center. Of the 7,202 claims have been submitted in Escambia County as of April, 16, 2,572 have received payments to the tune of $107,344,180. Of the 2,519 claims submitted in Santa Rosa County, 878 have qualified for payment totaling $28,714,108. (A majority of claimants have received some type of notification that their claims have been denied, are incomplete or have been offered payments.)

So far, for the five Gulf States, $5.046 billion in payments have been made. Deepwater Horizon Claims Administration, agency spokesman Nick Gagliano, says there is no cap on the amount of claims BP will face paying. With a new deadline for filing on June 8, he expects it will take two years to process all claims.

If all those claims were paid — both government and individuals — we'd see greater economic recovery, they say. More businesses might be making capital improvements, expanding or hiring more employees.

Deadline: Levin Papantonio environmental attorney Brian Barr is urging anyone who believes they have had an economic loss as a result of the oil spill to file a claim before the deadline of June 8. Nearly half of the Pensacola area businesses that are eligible to file claims have not. The Levin firm and others in the region are part a network of firms assisting people with those claims.

Health

Impact: Many people who came in contact with the toxic fumes and crude during the oil spill or who were exposed to the dispersant complained of nausea, headaches, dizzy spells, coughs and a host of other health issues.

Response: In 2010, the National Institute of Health mobilized to conduct the largest oil spill study ever, called the Gulf Long-term Follow-up Study (GuLF STUDY). That study is ongoing and is evaluating 33,000 oil spill cleanup workers for 10 years. NIEHS is also providing $25 million for Gulf coast universities to research the health of residents in their area, including pregnant women and children.

Preliminary findings:

•Oil spill cleanup workers reported increased physical symptoms, including cough and wheezing, and mental health symptoms, such as depression and anxiety, compared to non-oil spill workers.

•Exposure levels were higher for those working closest to the spill and during the active leak. Many of the measurements taken on land were at or close to normal exposure levels.

•A person's social environment may have an impact on their ability to cope with disasters or negative health outcomes. For example, individuals who have strong social support systems, or networks of families, friends and neighbors who can offer psychological, physical and financial support tend to be more resilient and able to cope and adapt to multiple stressors in post-disaster situations, according to a NIEHS statement.

Clinical exams: 1,000 people have received clinical exams from GuLF STUDY partners at the Health Sciences Centers at the University of South Alabama in Mobile, and Louisiana State University in New Orleans. The clinical research exams include lung function and nervous system tests, and screenings for diabetes and cholesterol.

Lesson learned: As a result of the 2010 oil spill, NIEHS worked with the National Library of Medicine, also part of NIH, and other agencies to develop the NIH Disaster Research Response Project. Key elements of this project include publicly accessible field-tested data collection tools, research protocols, training materials and exercises, and development of a network of trained research responders. The goal is to respond more quickly to collect vital health data early in the response. And to collect samples of air, water, and other materials and contaminants.

Next step: Researchers want to conduct clinical exams for about 3,000 more volunteers, and complete phone interviews with the remainder of the study participants in the next year. To participate, go to https://gulfstudy.nih.gov/en/index.html.

Oil spill restoration

Pre-BP: Our beaches from Perdido Key to Navarre Beach before the oil spill were so pristine the quartz crystal sand sang under our bare feet as we tromped through it.

One would have been hard pressed to find a tar ball or oil pollution on our beaches or in our waterways. Conservation efforts were paying off with endangered species rebounding and thriving. Our economy was slowly gaining ground after back-to-back impacts —the housing bust, 2004-05 hurricanes, and the recession. The last thing we needed was another disaster.

Immediate impact: Our economy felt the impacts of the oil spill almost immediately. By June, it was clear our coastal environment and the creatures that lived and thrived in it were in trouble. All along the impacted areas scientists began taking stock of the damage the oil spill was inflicting through the Natural Resource Damage Assessment, or NRDA. The assessment is complex and, in the case of an oil spill as large as the Deepwater spill, will take years.

Today: BP says it has spent $1.3 billion on 240 NRDA scientific studies. In 2011 it paid $1 billion to the five Gulf States, Department of the Interior and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to begin restoration while scientists conducted the assessment.

So far, Florida has received $175 million of that money to fund 57 projects, of which, 49 percent are environmental restoration and 51 percent are recreational projects. Locally, the money has been spent on dozens of projects such as dune restoration on Pensacola Beach, renovations and construction of boat ramps in Escambia County, Perdido Key boardwalk improvements, National Seashore ferry boats, sea turtle and shore bird conservation programs. More money has been earmarked for a fish hatchery in downtown Pensacola and asphalt cleanup in the seashore, and Navarre Beach dune walkovers and improving recreational opportunities on Escribano Point.

More money: Millions more dollars are expected to come our way once a New Orleans judge determines the amount of penalties BP should pay under the RESTORE Act and the Oil Spill Pollution Act litigation is finalized. Escambia County's share of RESTORE dollars is estimated be $100 million to $150 million. Santa Rosa's is estimated to be $20 million to $60 million.

Pros: Christian Wagley, who serves on Escambia's RESTORE Act advisory council, said, "We will be better off because of the oil spill and the availability of money, because it has forced us to look at the environmental issues and other issues we would not have looked at otherwise."