Facing new threats — including toxins from illegal marijuana grows — the fate of this little-known mammal hangs in the balance.
Don’t miss this fascinating video by Day’s Edge Productions for bioGraphic, an online magazine about nature and sustainability.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, populations of the fisher (Pekania pennanti) — a forest-dwelling member of the weasel and otter family — were in steep decline across much of its native range of northern North America. Both fur trapping and habitat loss from logging and urbanization took a heavy toll. However, once trapping bans and timber harvest restrictions were put in place, the species rebounded in many regions.
Unfortunately, that trend hasn’t carried over to the West Coast of the U.S., where an isolated population of fishers, known as the Pacific fisher, continues to struggle. Scientists estimate that only 4,000 Pacific fishers remain, with just 300 left in California’s Sierra Nevada Range. These individuals now face a new and rising threat: illegal marijuana grow sites that are cropping up on public lands. Growers use poisons to protect their plants from rodents, and these chemicals are indiscriminate killers.
Despite the Pacific fisher’s high vulnerability to extinction, this little-known mammal has yet to receive federal protection under the Endangered Species Act. In the absence of this type of government regulation, an uneasy collaboration among scientists, conservation organizations, and the timber industry has filled in to take its place. For now, these efforts offer hope for the Pacific fisher — but without endangered species status, there are no assurances that current protections will continue into the future.
(The Revelator is published by the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the organizations featured in the above video.)
Deep-sea mining could soon become a reality, experts warn.
Could deep-sea exploration give way to deep-sea mining?
For the past two years the Okeanos Explorer, an exploration vessel operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Organization, has been crisscrossing the Pacific Ocean, diving in U.S. marine protected areas to improve our understanding of the 95 percent of deep ocean that remains unexplored. The ship transmits live video feed from hi-def cameras on its two remotely operated vehicles — “ROVs” — to scientists both onboard and onshore (and members of the public like you and me, with internet connections).
The chosen dive locations for the three-year CAPSTONE (Campaign to Address Pacific monument Science, Technology, and Ocean Needs) expedition — seamounts, trenches and ridges — are hotbeds of life. The ROVs find “new” species all the time.
Photos: Photo: NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research
The dives also document what would be destroyed by mining.
You see, these locations contain deposits of manganese and rare earth elements, valued for use in computers, cellphone and rechargeable batteries for electric and hybrid cars. The technology to exploit the minerals has been elusive, but the likelihood that these places will be mined continues to hover on the horizon.
According to Professor Cindy Lee Van Dover, a marine scientist at Duke University, there’s a lot of activity in the maritime sector related to building technologies — though she doesn’t think any active commercial mining is yet taking place on the seabed. She did point out that two mining licenses for exploitation (a step beyond exploration) have been issued for deep-sea work in Papua New Guinea and Saudi Arabia.
Deep-sea mining involves three materials: polymetallic nodules, polymetallic sulphides and cobalt-rich ferromanganese (Fe-Mn) crusts. The first, better known as manganese nodules, and the second, found around hydrothermal vents, are likely to be developed first, according to Dr. Christopher Kelley, science advisor to CAPSTONE.
The third — perhaps the most interesting and environmentally sensitive — won’t be far behind. Ferromanganese crusts are laid down on the flanks of seamounts by minerals precipitating out of seawater at 1 to 5 millimeters per million years. Seamounts are often inhabited by animals that grow extremely slowly and have low reproductive rates.
Such habitats don’t rebound quickly after intervention. Mining these deposits, which are up to three times richer than deposits on land, involves stripping the crust off the hard substrate and getting the lode to the surface — an invasive and difficult process. China currently controls most terrestrial rare-earth element production, so other countries see the potential for big profits beneath the sea even with technological difficulties to overcome.
Why is this important to know? Well, countries have control over resources in their Exclusive Economic Zones, so the United States can extend leases to mine in the Marianas, which are a U.S. territory. The International Seabed Authority controls mining in the “Area,” which is what it calls the 64 percent outside national jurisdiction. The United States has not ratified the Law of the Sea and so is not a party to the authority — yet it does attempt to abide by its stated commitment to minimize harmful effects of deep-sea mining. Okeanos Explorer, according to its website, provides crucial baseline information “to gain a better understanding of the communities that are at risk and put measures in place to mitigate the impacts of mining and help preserve these unique communities.”
I have followed the ship’s expeditions since I stumbled on its web link last summer, which offers a much closer view of corals, sponges and sea cucumbers than I have ever seen SCUBA diving. During broadcasts the scientists discuss previously undiscovered gorgeous and unusual life forms; they even redefine species parameters in real time, by phone link and in a chat room. Before the voyages of the Okeanos and other exploratory vessels, the bottom of the deep ocean was believed to be fairly barren — but as it turns out, it teems with animal life (no plants though; they need sunlight to live). Bright white LEDs on Deep Discoverer, the main ROV, uncover vibrant colors that seem out of place in this sightless, lightless world.
What’s the future of these missions? In early March of this year, under the new, anti-science Donald Trump administration, NOAA seemed poised to lose 17 percent of its budget. Fortunately a May 1 congressional compromise to keep government functioning through September spared the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, which contains the office that operates Okeanos Explorer. The agency has declined to elaborate on how future funding prospects may fare, although its own 2018 budget request cuts $12.5 million from its ocean exploration program. Meanwhile, Trump’s proposed “Taxpayer First” budget, announced last week, also contains a broad 15.8 percent cut to the Department of Commerce, under which NOAA operates.
Beyond the budget itself, Trump last month ordered a review of drilling rules instituted after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, a move that, according to the “Presidential Executive Order Implementing an America-First Offshore Energy Strategy,” will encourage energy exploration and production. The order also states “The Secretary of Commerce shall, unless expressly required otherwise, refrain from designating or expanding any National Marine Sanctuary under the National Marine Sanctuaries Act…unless the sanctuary designation or expansion proposal includes a timely, full accounting from the Department of the Interior of any energy or mineral resource potential within the designated area” (emphasis added).
On April 26 Trump ordered Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to reconsider the status of recent national monuments. Four of them are areas under exploration by the Okeanos, including the Marianas Trench Marine National Monument. This comes after NOAA’s March 13 decision to add the monument to the national inventory list for possible change to marine sanctuary status. Marine national monuments and marine sanctuaries offer similar protections, but monuments are established by presidential proclamation and sanctuaries by the marine agency, with extensive public input.
In July 2015 scientists from the United States and New Zealand wrote a report, published in the journal Science, favoring the use of networks of marine protected areas to “reduce uncertainty about future mining activities and protect existing mining claims and economic investments, all while safeguarding deep-sea biodiversity and ecosystem function at relevant geographic scales.” The report came out in advance of an international meeting that formulated a draft code for regulating mineral exploitation in international waters. Similar mining-test activities are ongoing on national seabeds, yielding vital data for conservationists: By illuminating the Pacific areas protected by the United States, the Okeanos makes us acutely aware of what could be destroyed by a political push to dig up these minerals.
The original work for the report was done in 2007-2008 but Jack Kittinger, coauthor and senior director at Conservation International Center for Oceans, stands by the research conclusions. While he feels that a number of issues could affect how soon mining becomes economically viable, whether of manganese nodules or ferromanganese crust, “implementation of marine protected areas and protection of seamounts should be done regardless of what’s going to happen with deep-sea mining,” he says. “It’s good precautionary principles. It’s good PR.”
Budget cuts could still affect the Okeanos, but certainly won’t doom deep-sea mining. Yet if the planning process incorporates preservation, it’s possible to avoid the scenario — with Trump’s emphasis on promoting business and rolling back regulations — that the government will grant deep-ocean leases and a new section of the Earth will be pillaged without effective oversight or sufficient public understanding.
Anyone who has ever spent a summer in a city knows the pain of the heat island effect. Buildings and roads absorb heat and sunlight and emit it as heat at night, causing temperatures to soar as much as 22 additional degrees. Well, according to new research, climate change will make this an economic hardship for most cities, costing them up to 10.9 percent of their gross domestic products. That’s compared to 5.6 percent for rural economies. The costs come from spending more on cooling plus worker health effects from decreased air and water quality. Installing “cool” pavements and roofs, the authors say, could help reduce those costs — not to mention the risks.
Texas Billionaire Jeffery Hildebrand’s operations have left a long trail of environmental and safety violations, with few repercussions.
The Revelator’s five-part investigative series this week on Texas billionaire Jeffery Hildebrand’s Hilcorp Energy companies exposed a blatant history of environmental and safety violations in Alaska and Louisiana that has put endangered wildlife at risk and workers’ lives in serious jeopardy.
The reclusive Hildebrand built his fortune by rehabilitating played-out oil and gas fields previously abandoned by other fossil fuel companies. His strategy involves deploying an aggressive cost-cutting workforce and advanced technology to extract remaining supplies of oil and gas that previous exploitation left behind.
Hildebrand created a corporate culture based on six-figure bonuses for every employee when certain production goals are met. Generous rewards can certainly boost employee morale, but our investigation shows they also can lead to a workforce that puts increasing production ahead of protecting the environment and worker safety.
As with most environmental violations, state and federal regulators in the fossil fuel industry rarely impose fines substantive enough to act as a significant deterrence. That has definitely been the case with Hilcorp. Alaska regulators, for example, fined Hilcorp $200,000 for an incident that nearly killed three workers. But the fine was equal to only two of the $100,000 bonuses Hildebrand paid to each of his 1,000 or so employees in December 2015.
In Louisiana, the series revealed, a Hilcorp employee appears to have provided false information to federal regulators when he denied the company used tugboats to drag drilling barges through oyster beds, destroying the oysters and contributing to rapid coastal erosion. Hilcorp is Louisiana’s largest oil producer and has benefited from years of lax regulatory oversight.
The series also shows the impact of massive taxpayer subsidies provided to the fossil fuel industry to stimulate production. In Alaska, the availability of hundreds of millions of dollars a year in subsidies was the fundamental reason Hilcorp purchased declining oil and gas fields in Cook Inlet and on the North Slope.
Hildebrand entered Alaska in 2011, when oil prices were above $100 a barrel and the state was flush with cash and willing to dole out subsidies. But the oil market crashed in 2014, and our investigation reveals that Hilcorp’s financial outlook in Alaska is now in question.
Compounding the publicity-shy company’s Alaska problems were the very public failure of two methane undersea pipelines last winter. The leaks exposed the serious dangers of operating 50-year-old infrastructure in treacherous Cook Inlet, which is subject to ice sheets, high tides, strong currents and powerful winds.
The rise and decline of the Cook Inlet oil and gas industry from the 1960s to today corresponds to a stunning decline in the number of the endangered Cook Inlet beluga whales (Delphinapterus leucas), which are facing extinction unless fundamental changes are imposed to protect their environment.
The Revelator will continue to report on Hilcorp’s nationwide operations as well as the environmental impacts of the fossil fuel industry in Cook Inlet, the North Slope and elsewhere.
Feds give company two years to install modern pipeline-testing technology.
(Editor’s note: This is the final story in The Revelator’s months-long investigation into Hilcorp Energy. You can find the entire investigation here.)
Newly released documents reveal that privately held energy producer Hilcorp Alaska has managed to avoid both federal and state fines in the wake of the company’s very public pipeline failure in Cook Inlet, which leaked methane gas into the fragile ecosystem for nearly four months. Cook Inlet is home to endangered beluga whales, among other at-risk wildlife.
The federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration and Hilcorp quietly signed a “consent order” more than six weeks ago that sets deadlines — some as far in the future as September 2019 — for the company to inspect and repair the damaged pipeline and additional methane pipelines associated with Hilcorp’s Middle Ground Shoal oil and gas field.
The consent order — a binding legal agreement privately negotiated between Hilcorp and the pipeline safety administration, signed April 11 but not posted on the government website until early May — does not require Hilcorp, the largest oil and gas producer in Cook Inlet, to conduct additional inspections of its extensive oil and gas facilities in the area. These include a second methane pipeline that failed last month, which ran from the company’s Steelhead platform to shore days before the order was signed. The pipeline was shut down, but no information has been released on how much of the greenhouse gas escaped into the environment.
Environmental groups requested earlier this year that the pipeline safety administration require a system-wide inspection of all oil and gas pipelines in Cook Inlet. An agency official not authorized to speak publicly told The Revelator that the administration is “reviewing this request and will respond appropriately.”
The federal consent order’s lack of a penalty is alarming to Lois Epstein, engineering and Arctic program director at The Wilderness Society, who reviewed it. “They should be fining the company when they have these kinds of problems,” she says.
Bob Shavelson, advocacy director at a Homer, Alaska environmental group called Cook Inletkeeper, says the consent order is a “little stronger than we have seen in the past,” but adds that oil and gas operators in Cook Inlet continue to “get special treatment from regulators.”
Kristen Monsell, a staff attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity’s Oceans Program, says the consent order fails to protect Cook Inlet’s beluga whales, fish and local communities from offshore drilling in the Inlet.
“Giving the company years to inspect and repair the rest of its damaged pipeline would be laughable if it weren’t so reckless,” she says, calling the company’s aging pipelines and infrastructure “nothing but a recipe for another disaster.” (The Revelator is published by the Center for Biological Diversity.)
Hilcorp has not issued a public statement concerning the consent order and did not respond to The Revelator’s written questions.
Houston-based Hilcorp arrived in Alaska in 2011 when it purchased Cook Inlet oil and gas production and pipeline facilities from Union Oil Company. See “Hilcorp Runs Aground,” Part I of our series.
Hilcorp’s cost-cutting philosophy collided with Alaska regulators. See “Hilcorp: Putting Lives in Danger,” Part II of our series.
Alaska to Conduct Oil and Gas Assessment in Cook Inlet
“The scope of the project is to perform an inventory of the oil and natural gas sub-sea infrastructure and platforms of Cook Inlet and identify the regulatory framework that dictates their operation,” stated Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation spokesperson Candice Bressler, in a May 23 email.
But the assessment will not include a visual inspection of the undersea pipelines, Bressler said. She said a taskforce of “interested regulatory agencies” has been formed to develop the scope of oil and gas infrastructure assessment. There is currently no date by which the assessment will be completed, and Hilcorp is not paying for the assessment.
The state agency issued its final report on the pipeline leak on May 22, saying Hilcorp divers completed permanent repairs on a 3/16 inch wide by 3/8 inch long crack in the pipeline on May 19 — four days after the consent order deadline to complete the permanent repair.
Methane leaked from the pipeline at a rate of between 210,000 to 310,000 cubic feet per day for nearly four months. Prior to the leak, the pipeline transported between 1.6 million and 2.5 million cubic feet of gas per day.
By comparison, Enstar Natural Gas Company’s 136,000 Alaska gas customers use about 33 billion cubic feet of natural gas a year, equal to about 665 cubic feet of gas per customer each day, according the Anchorage Daily News.
Harsh Conditions and a History of Leaks
Cook Inlet’s powerful tides and currents have long been known to cause pipelines to shift and scrape against dangerous rocks, and that’s what caused Hilcorp’s Middle Ground Shoal pipeline to crack, according to the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation. The crack was the third for the same pipeline since 2014, which Hilcorp purchased from Exxon Mobil subsidiary XTO in 2015.
The first leak, in June 2014, lasted five days and released 240,000 cubic feet of methane a day, according to Bressler. The state “does not have an official record” of a second leak that occurred in August 2014, she said.
XTO, however, told federal regulators that both leaks were caused by rocks scraping against the pipeline, according to pipeline safety administration records. The 2014 leaks were 42 yards apart and about two-thirds of a mile from the latest failure.
The latest methane leak began in late December 2016 but was not visually verified by Hilcorp until Feb. 7. The company issued media statements and notified the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration it could not repair the leaking pipeline until the ice cleared from Cook Inlet.
And, the company said, it could not stop moving methane through the line. Hilcorp claimed water could infiltrate the pipeline through the crack and possibly release oil left over from when the line was used to transport crude oil rather than methane.
The company continued to pump onshore methane through the leaking pipeline to two oil-production platforms that used the gas to power their equipment. Hilcorp transported about 3,700 barrels of a mix of oil and water back to shore a day through another eight-inch pipeline that runs parallel to the methane line, federal records show.
Concerned that rocks could also damage the oil pipeline, causing an oil spill, the safety administration issued a “proposed safety order” to Hilcorp on March 17 requiring the company to visually inspect the line. Hilcorp shut down the oil pipeline on March 25 after discussions with Alaska Governor Bill Walker.
The oil pipeline remains shut down, states Bressler. Hilcorp continues to operate the repaired methane line at low pressure to supply energy to the offshore platforms — enough to operate lights and other maintenance operations.
Consent Order Requires Hilcorp to Upgrade Inspection Technology
The federal consent order requires Hilcorp to install in-line inspection monitoring technology, also known as “smart pigs,” in its Middle Ground Shoal gas pipelines.
Smart pigs are robotic devices capable of detecting gouges, metal loss, excessive bending and other anomalies in pipelines. For decades they’ve routinely been used by the oil and gas industry. The term “pig” comes from the squealing sound made by the device as it moves through a pipeline.
However, the Hilcorp pipelines in Middle Ground Shoal were not designed to use smart pig technology. Shell Oil Company installed the eight-inch pipelines in 1965, making them the oldest undersea pipelines in Cook Inlet, according to Shavelson.
The two pipelines are so old they don’t have the necessary equipment to launch and recover the pigs, said Epstein. Still, the order requires Hilcorp to somehow deploy smart pigs or an alternative federally approved technology and make necessary repairs on the failed pipeline segment by Sept. 30, 2018.
The 7.2-mile section runs from the shore to oil production Platform “A.” The leak occurred 2.6 miles from Platform A in about 80 feet of water.
Hilcorp is also required to use smart pigs and make necessary repairs to the additional gas pipelines that extend from Platform “A” to three other offshore facilities by Sept. 30, 2019.
The consent order also requires Hilcorp to conduct “high-resolution sonar inspection” of its entire Middle Ground Shoal methane pipeline system within 90 days of this year’s spring thaw. The inspection is supposed to identify sections of pipeline that are “not adequately supported” and “thus susceptible to excessive bending or current-induced vibrations that may damage” the pipeline.
In addition, the company must identify pipeline segments greater than 20 feet that are not supported by the seabed and where the gap between the pipeline and the seabed is greater than 8 inches. Federal safety officials initially sought inspections of pipeline segments greater than 10 feet not supported by seabed, according to a March 3 proposed safety order.
To accomplish these inspections, divers will need to traverse Cook Inlet’s dangerous tides to determine “those areas that require mitigation to address the threats of excessive bending and vibration induced failure.” The inspections must be completed by Oct. 31.
Hilcorp must also employ divers to inspect areas where the pipelines cross rock outcroppings in order to address the threat of additional damage.
Finally, the inspection of the pipeline segment that failed last winter must be completed by Oct. 31, 2017 and the rest of the Middle Ground Shoal gas lines by Oct. 31, 2018.
The consent order contains no cost estimation of the mandated inspections.
Carl Weimer, executive director of Pipeline Safety Trust, a Bellingham, Wash., citizen’s group that monitors pipelines nationally, said the consent order’s pipeline monitoring requirements are “reasonable.”
“Due to the short work window in Alaska it seems to us the required initial fix, sonar testing, diver inspections, modifying the pipeline to accommodate smart pigs, and then proceeding with the smart pig testing and any needed repairs all seems to be reasonable,” Weimer stated in a May 23 email.
Will Hilcorp continue to avoid punishment for the Cook Inlet leak?
The Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation considered the methane leak to be a “discharge of hazardous substance” that is prohibited unless approved by the state.
The state has not yet fined the company or sought restitution for damage to the environment. Bressler stated in a May 24 email that the state does not comment on ongoing investigations or potential enforcement actions.
Additional federal actions against the company could still be pending: Hilcorp and federal safety regulators held private discussions on May 9 that could lead to a second consent order in connection with the oil pipeline, according to an administration official not authorized to publicly discuss the negotiations.
The nature of that order remains to be seen, as do the long-term environmental impacts of Hilcorp Alaska’s four-month methane leak.
Rutger Bregman’s book Utopia for Realists offers solutions and an ambitious “dream big” vision.
Regulations protecting our air, water and public lands are under attack by President Trump and his industry-backed, science-denying political appointees. They’re even trying to derail nascent efforts to reduce the carbon emissions causing climate change and ocean acidification.
Things seem bleak. So it’s easy to fall into a grim pessimism and feel that the only thing the conservation community can do is play defense. We need to be realistic, right?
Yet Dutch writer Rutger Bregman has just the opposite advice: This is the moment to dream big and create a better world.
Bregman’s book Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World was a big hit in Europe when it came out in 2014, sparking a basic minimum income movement that’s gaining international attention. The book was just released in the United States this spring (Little, Brown and Company, $27).
Its basic premise is that as society made progress toward alleviating many of the problems that have plagued humanity — disease, hunger, violence, isolation, ignorance, fear — we stopped striving for utopia and left human progress up to the technocrats. We accepted the world as it is as the endpoint of human history.
But the reality is, argues Bregman, that most people are stressed out, unhappy, worried about the plight of our planet, and working either too much or not enough to meet their needs. So Bregman uses deep research and a lively, convincing writing style to explore ideas like universal basic income, drastically shortened workweeks, open borders and other radical ideas for fundamentally reordering society.
While the book largely avoids environmental issues (perhaps its greatest flaw), the solutions Bregman proffers for improving human happiness and creating a better, fairer economic system would bring benefits for addressing climate change and other environmental crises as well.
While working the San Francisco Bay Guardian a few years ago, I explored the connection between the long hours Americans work and our impact on climate change and habitat destruction. My article “Save the World, Work Less” drew on some of the same source material Bregman used in his book, concluding that reducing work hours is good for humanity and the planet.
What struck me during my reporting was that it was once widely assumed — across the ideological spectrum — that the increased productivity enabled by new technology would translate into fewer work hours and increased time for leisure, activism or other pursuits of our choosing.
Not only did that not happen, but even the goal was largely forgotten following World War II. Bregman chronicles similar societal amnesia when it comes to a universal basic income (which even President Nixon seriously considered in 1969), open borders and other utopian ideals.
The point is that we shouldn’t let the rich and powerful today dictate what’s possible, particularly given the self-serving limits they place on utopian dreams. Now is the moment to be bold.
“Don’t let anyone tell you what’s what,” Bregman writes in his book. “If we want to change the world, we need to be unrealistic, unreasonable, and impossible. Remember: those who called for the abolition of slavery, for suffrage for women, and for same-sex marriage were also once branded lunatics. Until history proved them right,” he concludes.
The Trump era will end, as bad as it is and may still become. The question is what we’re going to replace it with. If you take climate change, the current mass extinction crisis and other dire planetary threats seriously, then you may agree that tinkering at the margins won’t be enough.
Maybe we all need to help create a utopia that the people and wildlife of the world really need.
Programs to protect endangered species face the axe, as does the entire Marine Mammal Commission.
President Trump submitted his 2018 budget proposal on Monday, and it was far from wildlife-friendly. Advocates immediately criticized the so-called “Taxpayer First Budget,” pointing out that it slashes funding and changes priorities for many critical conservation programs.
The proposals, which are not final, include:
A 6 percent reduction in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s budget, and, according to numbers provided by the Service, around a 5.3 percent decrease in funding for recovery efforts under the Endangered Species Act. (That latter number is a story in itself, as it reflects last year’s tumultuous budget process.)
A 32-percent reduction in foreign-assistance funds, potentially including some programs to combat wildlife trafficking and related organized crime. “American security and global leadership depends on equal parts defense, diplomacy and development,” Cristián Samper, president and CEO of the Wildlife Conservation Society, said about the cuts in a prepared release. “Without strong support for all three, the world is a more dangerous place.”
The elimination of the Marine Mammal Commission, a 45-year-old program that supports whales, seals, manatees, polar bears and other species — all at a cost of just 1 cent per taxpayer per year. As commission chair Daryl J. Boness wrote in a prepared release: “The proposed elimination of the Commission comes at a time when decades of marine stewardship are achieving success because of a strong American environmental ethic that balances economic needs with the conservation of our natural resources. We are loyal to our Congressional mandate to responsibly manage and protect marine mammals and their ecosystems, which are vital to our economy, prosperity, and future.”
Opening up the biodiversity-rich Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas leasing. ANWR, as it’s sometimes better known, is home of more than 200 bird species and a host of other wildlife. Environmental activists have long opposed such drilling efforts, but they remain in favor among Alaska’s Republican officials.
Of course, none of this is written in stone. President Trump’s budget proposal is just one step in a long process to fund the federal government for the coming year. Figuring out which of these cuts will remain at the end of that process will take weeks, if not months. The Revelator will be watching.
Hilcorp Energy’s history of violating Louisiana coastal protection regulations leads to citizens’ Clean Water Act lawsuit.
(Editor’s note: This is part three of The Revelator’s months-long investigation into Hilcorp Energy. You can find the entire investigation here.)
Gleason Alexis was ready with his camera phone to record the destruction of his family’s oyster beds by contractors working for Houston billionaire Jeffery Hildebrand’s Hilcorp Energy Company.
For the third time in five years, Alexis says, Hilcorp contractors used tugboats to drag an oil-drilling barge through a shallow Louisiana wetland where his mother has had a lease to grow oysters for more than 15 years. The lease is in Barataria Bay, on the Louisiana coast south of New Orleans.
Each time, Alexis says, the Hilcorp contractors’ drilling barge and tugboats cut channels into the seafloor, destroying the oyster beds and stirring up silt that deposits on other nearby oyster beds, smothering the shellfish.
“Every time it kills another generation of oysters,” Alexis, 49, says. It takes about three years to grow a generation of oysters. “Once the bottom is damaged it pretty much won’t repair itself,” he says.
Alexis says he saw workers at a Hilcorp well site in late January 2016, and they told him they were preparing the area for work. On Jan. 28, 2016, attorneys representing the Louisiana Oystermen Association sent a “cease and desist” email to Hilcorp asking the company to stop actions that could damage oyster leases.
The next day, while inspecting the oyster beds, Alexis saw a tugboat dragging a drilling barge through his family’s oyster lease.
“I was prepared to film the mud and wheel-washing so I would have some kind of proof,” he says of the Jan. 29, 2016 incident. Here’s that footage:
Wheel-washing, also known as prop-washing, is a method for dredging channels in shallow wetlands. Powerful tugboat engines are operated at high speed to forcefully churn the water to create a current that cuts channels into the seafloor.
“Prop-washing through oyster leases rips up and smothers hard bottom that is carefully cultivated by oyster farmers for harvest,” says Scott Eustis, coastal wetland specialist for the Gulf Restoration Network. “But that hard bottom and shell, or rip rap, is also a form of erosion control for the coastal marshes.”
For decades, oil companies used prop-washing to move their oil rigs into the marshes. The process has been linked to the steady erosion of Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, estimated at an acre per hour. (See a photographic timeline showing the erosion of Louisiana’s coastal area since the 1930s, produced by ProPublica, here.)
“The coastal law forbids prop-wash if there are practical alternatives to suction the sediment,” Eustis says.
Hilcorp, Eustis says, is one of the few companies that continue to use the process, even in areas where the state is trying to restore marshes. The corporation has been acquiring oyster leases to allow it to cut channels without conflicts with oyster growers, according to state records gathered by Gulf Restoration Network.
The channelization, Eustis says, makes a marshland restoration project located in the same area as some of Hilcorp’s oyster leases more expensive and perhaps even impossible to achieve.
“Every other company seems to get it but Hilcorp,” Eustis says, pointing out that the company is the largest oil producer in Louisiana. “They are a company whose business model is rip and run, and their acquisition of oyster leases is a plan to pollute.”
The prop-washing incident across Alexis’ leasehold is now the primary example in a federal Clean Water Act citizens’ lawsuit filed against Hilcorp last June by the Louisiana Oystermen Association.
Michael Brown, a New Orleans attorney representing the oystermen’s association, says Hilcorp did not obtain a state “coastal use permit” and federal Clean Water Act Section 404 permit required before damaging wetlands with dredged or fill material.
Initiating the permitting process would have given the public an opportunity to comment on Hilcorp’s plans to move the oil-drilling barge and its impact on wetlands — a process that could have forced the company to use alternative, more expensive methods to access the well site, Brown says.
“All of that is thrown out the window when Hilcorp fails to apply for the permits,” Brown says.
Hilcorp spokeswoman Lori Nelson said the company “cannot comment to ongoing litigation” with the Louisiana Oystermen Association. She said Hilcorp “has a strict adherence to all state and federal regulations.”
The oystermen’s association, as well as Brown’s law firm, notified the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), which oversees 404 permitting, and the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources Office of Coastal Management (OCM) of Hilcorp’s prop-washing on the same day that Alexis videoed the tugboats dragging the drilling barge.
“In response to USACE and OCM inquiries, Hilcorp denied wrongdoing and illegally misrepresented key facts to enforcement personnel,” Brown’s law partner, Joel Waltzer, stated in a Dec. 19, 2016 letter to the Office of Coastal Management.
According to the letter, the Army Corps held a Feb. 1, 2016 conference call with Hilcorp to discuss the complaints. Hilcorp officials told the Corps their equipment had drafts between 4 feet and 6 feet and that the channel was 7 feet to 8.5 feet deep, notes from the conference call show.
“Most importantly — we did not prop-wash and/or dredge to access the location in question,” Hilcorp environmental specialist Cory Johnson stated in a Feb. 1, 2016 email to Corps inspector Rob Heffner.
Heffner accepted Hilcorp’s assertion and, without conducting a field inspection, closed the case. “Therefore it was determined that it was unlikely their equipment caused any damage to the water bottoms or oyster leases in the area,” Heffner wrote in the case file.
A copy of the Hilcorp email and Heffner’s notes are included in Waltzer’s Dec. 19, 2016 letter to the Office of Coastal Management.
Hilcorp declined to respond to The Revelator’s written question asking why Hilcorp environmental specialist Johnson sent an email to the Army Corps stating the company did not prop-wash.
Waltzer’s letter also states the video evidence, documentation of the drafts of the tugboats and drilling barge and seafloor measurements taken by an Office of Coastal Management investigator after the dredging was completed on Feb. 5, 2016 show that Hilcorp cut a channel at least eight feet deep through oyster beds that averaged six feet deep.
Hilcorp has a long history of violating state coastal regulations, dating back to at least 2006. Most of the violations claim Hilcorp was conducting activities without a state permit. In almost every case, the state retroactively granted an “after-the-fact,” or ATF, permit to Hilcorp. The violations, compiled by the oystermen association’s law firm, include:
Illegally damaging a marsh with marsh buggies (2006). ATF permit granted. “We shouldn’t have to be on their back about this,” the Louisiana Department of Natural Resource’s file states. “They’re cutting corners.”
Dumped fill excavated from the water bottom in a manner that posed a navigation hazard, without proper authorization (2009). ATF permit granted.
Prop-washing without a permit (2011). ATF permit granted.
Hilcorp was forced to obtain three ATF permits after failing to submit coastal use permits for emergency repairs (2013).
DNR discovered Hilcorp destroyed 1.83 acres of marsh after telling the state “no excavation or fill will be required.” DNR required Hilcorp to apply for an ATF permit and to pay $87,856 to Coastal Mitigation Fund and pay a small fine (2013).
Hilcorp was required to apply for two ATF permits after conducting well repairs. (2015)
Hilcorp allegedly removed an oil pipeline prior to receiving a permit. DNR is conducting an investigation (2016).
Hilcorp spokeswoman Nelson stated that the company does “not agree with the assessment of ‘after-the-fact’ permit attainment” and that Hilcorp “attains necessary permits as required for our operations.”
In addition to the DNR violations, the Louisiana Office of Conservation, which is in charge of drilling regulations, has an 18-page list of operator warnings, violations and compliance record for Hilcorp, with numerous civil fines issued against the company. The list is attached to the oystermen association’s initial pleading in the Clean Water Act lawsuit.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has also reached 10 consent decrees with Hilcorp for Clean Water Act violations in Louisiana in the past decade, EPA records show.
After initially denying that it had done any work on the well site near Alexis’ oyster lease that required a permit, Hilcorp, once again, is a seeking an after-the-fact permit. Hilcorp’s request for retroactive approval triggered strong opposition during a March public hearing, according to The Lens, a New Orleans nonprofit news site.
“Hilcorp is a bad operator in coastal Louisiana,” The Lens reported Michael Roberts, president of the Association of Family Fishermen, as saying during the hearing. “They’ve done hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage to these people’s [oyster] leases, if not more. It’s time that every future permit for Hilcorp is done with the utmost scrutiny so that they start obeying the law.”
A DNR spokesman told The Revelator that the agency is not expected to make a decision on Hilcorp’s ATF application for months.
The oystermen’s association’s Clean Water Act lawsuit survived Hilcorp’s motion to dismiss when a federal judge ruled in January the case could proceed.
And the lawsuit is already having a direct impact on Alexis’ family. In the years following Hurricane Katrina, his brother had a tugboat contract with Hilcorp while he focused on the family oyster business.
“Hilcorp has been good to my family,” he says.
But that was before the conflict over the oyster leases eventually led to the federal lawsuit.
“When that happened, they took my brother off the vendors list,” Alexis says. His brother, he pointed out, has nothing to do with the oyster business.
Over the past 12 months, the company has been responsible for more than 23,000 gallons of oil spills.
Editor’s note: This is part of The Revelator’s months-long investigation into Hilcorp Energy. For the rest of this series, click here.
Hilcorp Energy’s oil and gas operations in Louisiana have been involved in at least seven oil spills since July, including two spills that dumped thousands of gallons into the Mississippi River and marshlands along the Louisiana Gulf Coast.
Scott Eustis, coastal wetland specialist for the Gulf Restoration Network, says Hilcorp’s history of regulatory violations and operating shortcuts contribute to the company’s repeated oil spills.
“If Hilcorp applied for permits properly, surveyed properly, and maintained equipment properly,” he says, “they would not have all these accidents.”
Hilcorp spokesperson Lori Nelson said in a May 10 email to The Revelator that “Hilcorp has a long history of investment which helps build and maintain Louisiana’s energy development.”
She said company “adheres to all state and federal regulations and attains necessary permits as required for our operations.”
Hilcorp’s Louisiana oil spills in the last 12 months include:
July 25, 2016: A Hilcorp abandoned pipeline leaked 4,200 gallons into the Lake Washington oil field in Plaquemines.
Aug. 23, 2016: About 42 gallons of crude oil was spilled due to an equipment failure in Little Lake Marsh.
Sept. 5, 2016: A pipeline owned by Hilcorp subsidiary Harvest Pipeline Co. was cut during dredging operations to rebuild an island and released 5,250 gallons of crude oil along the shores of Cheniere Ronquille Island.
Oct. 8, 2016: About 12,600 gallons of oil were released from the company’s Caillou Island Tank Battery in south Louisiana. Most of the oil was contained in a recovery system. On Oct. 11 about 1,050 gallons of oil was discovered on Timbalier Island that is believed to be associated with the discharge from Caillou Island.
Oct. 21, 2016: Approximately 126 gallons of crude oil were released from a storage facility in Lafitte, LA into a canal and nearby marsh area.
March 21, 2017: An abandoned wellhead leaked an estimated 840 gallons of crude oil into the Mississippi River.
April 5, 2017: A pinhole leak in a low flow oil line released more than 80 gallons of crude oil in Jefferson Parish.
A new book dives into the toxic history of the companies that poisoned dozens of young women.
Just over 100 years ago — on Feb. 1, 1917 — Katherine Schaub reported for the first day of her new job at Radium Luminous Materials Corporation in Newark, New Jersey, not knowing the job would eventually kill her.
Schaub, and hundreds of other young women just like her, found themselves employed thanks to the radium craze of the early decades of the 20th century. In the Newark factory, and others like it, women hunched over trays full of wristwatches, upon which they meticulously painted glow-in-the-dark numbers with a proprietary concoction containing something they were told was perfectly safe: radium.
Discovered less than two decades earlier, radium was considered something of a wonder material at the time, used on everything from toothpaste to furniture cleaner to purported medicines.
The watches, though, were something less trivial, intended for soldiers fighting in World War I. Thousands of them shipped from the Newark factory. To produce the watches, the girls would put fine-haired paintbrushes into their mouths to form a precise tip and then dip them into the radium paint, a process they repeated for hours on end.
Death for a dollar. Radium watch ad from the Granby Leader newspaper, Nov. 24, 1916
At the end of each day, the girls — their clothes and hair covered in tiny bits of radium dust — would walk home, glowing in the dark. The neighborhood called them the “ghost girls.”
In reality, they were the walking dead.
Years later the pain began to set in. The radium had settled into their bones and flesh, causing debilitating exhaustion, rotting necrosis and crippling bone fractures. But even as the women’s jaws and other bones began to decay, their doctors were at a loss as to why. The health risks of what later came to be known as radium poisoning had not yet made their way into the medial literature. So the women suffered as their bodies failed, and no one could tell them why.
The watch companies, however, had begun to understand what their wonder substance actually did to the human body. Rather than admit their mistake, they continued production and made every effort to hide any hint of their wrongdoing.
The truth eventually leaked out, but it was too late to save anyone. As the women’s bodies, in essence, rotted away, and as they died one by one, they struggled in court and in the press for any form of justice they could find.
Few found that justice, but those who did changed the world.
British author Kate Moore, who first encountered the Radium Girls while directing a play about them, now recounts their story in her meticulously researched new history book, “The Radium Girls” (Sourcebooks, $26.99). It’s a powerful, emotional and haunting volume — part medical mystery, part legal thriller, part horror story — that brings the women and their struggle to life in a way that eclipses previous articles, plays and documentaries.
“That that was my driving force,” Moore says, calling on Skype from her home in London. “I wanted the women to be real. I don’t think you can understand the tragedy unless you know who it is that’s been affected.”
To research her book, Moore unearthed reams of letters from the women, along with documentation from their health and court cases. She also tracked down surviving relatives who recalled the Radium Girls and shared their heartrending stories.
“A lot of the people I interviewed were in their late 80s or 90s,” Moore says, noting that some of the family stories might have been lost to time had she waited longer. The most moving of these interviews, she says, was with the great-niece of a Radium Girl named Catherine Donohue. “One of the questions I asked her was, do you remember Catherine crying out with the pain? Because I was trying to picture the scene of the sickbed and that sort of thing, and her response was that she didn’t have the energy to cry out. She would just moan.” She pauses. “That for me was really haunting.”
Unearthing the radium companies’ documents also gave Moore disturbing moments. “It’s not necessarily a new thing, but it was shocking reading,” she says, a hint of anger in her voice. “Just realizing they knew. There’s no two ways about it, it was a total cover-up. That was shocking to see that they knew they were killing these girls and it, you know, just didn’t mean anything.”
But from the horror of their decaying bodies came resolve. The Radium Girls, as they came to be known in the press, stood up for their rights, fought for themselves in court, and helped to create laws that would later protect millions of people.
“As I talk about in the book, it seems bizarre in a way that poisoning wasn’t originally listed as something that your employer could do to you,” Moore says. “It was the Radium Girls that got that put into the statutes. And then building from there, this was one of the first cases where employers were held liable.” Thanks to these women’s quest for justice, industrial employees in the United States have the right to know if they’re working with dangerous chemicals and to know the results of any company-sponsored medical tests. “They can’t conceal the results in the way that happened to the Radium Girls,” Moore says. “All of those are things that built from this case.”
Some of the protections took decades to materialize, but Moore says the ghost girls helped to pave the way. “It’s cases like the Radium Girls that have that kind of pressure that adds until something gets done,” she says.
Of course, that also makes the book — and the decades-old events it recounts — fiercely relevant today. “Hopefully Donald Trump won’t revoke all of those protections,” Moore says. “We were in the States at the end of January and talking to independent booksellers about the book, and they said how timely it is. People talk about bureaucracy and red tape and how it stops businesses from being able to be profitable, but a story like this actually reminds us that there’s a reason that red tape is there. We joke these days about health and safety laws, but actually they’re there for a very important reason — so that companies don’t put profits before people. They are supposed to be held to account if there is something dangerous they are getting employees to do.”
She adds that the book puts a human face on the need for worker-protection laws. “These laws that we now are supposed to abide by, they have human stories and faces behind them. They’re not just there for red tape, they’re there for a reason because other people have lost their lives.” (The Trump administration has already taken several actions that could increase worker exposure to toxins and reduce ability to track occupational injuries and illnesses.)
It’s also a reminder that the effects of little-understood toxins can take a long time to materialize — many of the Radium Girls worked for years before they got sick — and last for decades. While researching the book, Moore visited Ottawa, Illinois, the home of one of the radium companies, which is still an actively contaminated Superfund site. “That was the crazy thing about radium being used anyway, you know,” she says, incredulously. “It’s got a half-life of 1,600 years. Even though it was used on throwaway products and it was a kind of fun thing, it had this devastating legacy.”
Beyond the horror of what happened to these women, Moore says her readers have already found a positive message in “The Radium Girls.”
“It’s a story that gives hope and courage that in the face of implacable resistance and you know, the authority shouting down these people, these ordinary people who are fighting against injustice,” she says. “The Radium Girls did triumph. They did get the laws changed. They did make people see right from wrong, and so it’s the story that can give hope in these times as well, that when we bond together as the Radium Girls did, you can make change happen.”
She adds, “That’s what I really want readers to take away as the message. Read the book, remember the girls and let’s be brave like they were.”
The federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration and Hilcorp quietly signed a 
Bregman’s book 
British author Kate Moore, who first encountered the Radium Girls while directing a play about them, now recounts their story in her meticulously researched new history book,