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EPA hit with lawsuit over dispersants
Wesley Loy For Petroleum News
A coalition of conservation, wildlife, trade and public health groups have filed suit against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency over the issue of dispersants used to combat oil spills.
The groups contend the EPA has failed to put sufficient dispersant rules into place in compliance with the Clean Water Act. They say some 1.84 million gallons of dispersants were applied in the Gulf of Mexico following the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010 “despite widespread recognition that little was known about the health and environmental effects of applying such massive quantities of dispersants, and applying them beneath the ocean’s surface.”
The 42-page suit was filed Aug. 6 in the District of Columbia federal court.
The plaintiffs are Alaska Community Action on Toxics, Cook Inletkeeper, Florida Wildlife Federation, Gulf Restoration Network, Louisiana Environmental Action Network, Louisiana Shrimp Association, Sierra Club and Waterkeeper Alliance.
The environmental law firm Earthjustice filed the suit on behalf of the groups.
Arctic harm feared The first page of the complaint says the EPA and Administrator Lisa Jackson are being sued “for their ongoing failure to publish a schedule that identifies dispersants and other oil spill control agents eligible for use in oil spill response, identifies the waters in which these agents may be used, and identifies the quantities of these agents that can be used safely in such waters.”
“We sent EPA a notice of intent to sue in October 2010 following the debacle of the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster and the unprecedented use of dispersants during that response,” Earthjustice attorney Hannah Chang said in a press release. “Our filing ... will push EPA to take further action to follow through on its promise to get a much-needed rule in place.”
Bob Shavelson of Cook Inletkeeper, an Alaska conservation group, said: “The oil industry learned from the Exxon Valdez that ‘out of sight, out of mind’ is its preferred spill response strategy, so the first tool out of the box these days is dispersants. But dispersants add toxic insult to injury for Alaskan fisheries and Alaskans have a right to know about toxic pollution around our coastal communities.”
“These dispersants would likely have devastating effects on the sensitive marine waters, fish, marine mammals and coastal communities of the Arctic,” said Pamela Miller, executive director of Alaska Community Action on Toxics. “We cannot allow a repeat in Alaska of the uncontrolled experiment with dispersants that followed the BP spill in the Gulf.”
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