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Gulf oil spill: environmental group in spotlight

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A tiny nonprofit group — one paid staffer working in a one-room office in a small town in West Virginia — has been causing U.S. officials and one of the world largest oil companies to regularly backtrack and revise their estimates of the size and flow of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

SkyTruth first analyzed satellite and radar data on the spill and challenged the initial estimates that 1,000 barrels of oil were flowing daily from the broken wellhead about 130 miles southeast of New Orleans. The figure was quickly changed to 5,000.

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Saturday, the group updated its analysis to estimate that more than 11.1 million gallons of oil is contained in the slick, which would make it the largest oil spill in American history. John Amos, the group’s president, also revised the estimate of the rate of oil leaking to 25,000 barrels a day, saying it was a ‘rock bottom’ figure. There are 42 gallons in a barrel of oil.

The group’s findings have been a thorn in the side of industry and federal officials in a number of previous oil spills, and its aerial mapping and analysis of the extractive industry’s environmental footprint had drawn the wrath of mining and onshore oil companies. “We are the eyes for the environmental community and for people who care about the environment,” Amos said.
Federal officials questioned the accuracy of the group’s estimates. “Any exact estimate is probably impossible at this time,” Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said Saturday.

Unlike other rapid-response groups that flood the scene with staff, Amos and SkyTruth volunteers work from computers, downloading digital imagery from orbiting satellites operated by NASA as well as private companies.

“Anybody can browse the web and see the pictures; we want to get the underlying satellite image and bring it into our system at SkyTruth. We map-rectify it so it can be used to accurately measure and locate things, like the location of fisheries, wildlife refuges or other sensitive areas that could be impacted by this event.”

In the case of estimating the amount of oil in the gulf’s slick, Amos said it’s a simple matter to use the sophisticated maps to calculate the depth of oil and its spread: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has standard methods to extrapolate oil volume in oil spills.

But the satellite pictures don’t always work. On Friday, for example, Amos said the incoming storms blanketed the gulf, providing beautiful pictures of white clouds. “We had no idea what was going on with the slick,” Amos said.

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In that case, the group used information from radar imaging satellites to make their analysis.

Amos admits to being a “bit of an oil-tech geek,’ saying he admires the technological leaps the industry has employed as it pushes to retrieve oil from more and more far-flung places.

But he springs into action when accidents happen, “Because we’ve also found that in these situations often they happen in very remote locations,” he said. “The information coming from other sources is difficult to verify, and, unfortunately has proven sometimes to be demonstrably inaccurate.”

-- Julie Cart

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