Where's Jeff?

Our own Northwest Florida congressman, Jeff ("Mr. Oil Spill") Miller (R-Chumuckla) has been almost invisible the past several weeks. We thought maybe we'd missed his resignation letter, or possibly Massachusetts had agreed to that great trade Rick Outzen proposed.

No such luck. Today's PNJ paraphrases him as saying, weirdly, "the amount of oil spewing into the Gulf means oil company BP could always be doing more to combat it."

His exact words make even less sense:

"With the amount of petroleum product that's in the Gulf, there's always something that BP can do," Miller said. "I hope that everybody continues to force BP as the responsible party to do the right thing."

Wait a minute. Miller wants "everybody... to force BP?" Hey, wasn't that what he promised to do? Remember this headline, from one month ago, May 8, 2010? Take a look:

"Miller Seeks $1 Billion from BP for Oil Spill"

Where's that billion dollars, Jeff?

The man is pathetic. Congressman Jeff Miller just doesn't get it. It's no wonder he's been hiding lately.

For years, Mr. Oil Spill has been a loud and frequent "drill, baby, drill" cheerleader for putting more and more oil rigs off the Florida coast. He never met an offshore drilling permit he didn't like.

To cite just one example, four years ago Miller voted in favor of H.R. 4761, which would have would have opened up all of Florida's coasts to drilling rigs. As MJ reporter Josh Harkinson writes, the bill included "comically pollyannaish" text that claimed:

[I]t is not reasonably foreseeable that . . . development and production of an oil discovery located more than 50 miles seaward of the coastline will adversely affect resources near the coastline... .

Back home, Miller also never missed an opportunity to tell us what fantastic technological advances the drillers had developed to extract oil since the bad old days of the Exxon Valdez. Fact is, he didn't know what he was talking about. Period.

Despite the language of Bobby Jindal's 2006 bill quoted above (yes, that Bobby Jindal), in fact the oil industry did nothing -- absolutely nothing -- to advance public safety, reduce the risks of a catastrophic well blow-out, or develop effective remediation efforts for undersea drilling. As former EPA administrator and oil executive William Reilly said on the Rachel Maddow show the other night, the remediation and "response technology is about as primitive as it was in the Exxon Valdez case."

So now "Mr. Oil Spill" thinks "there's... something BP can do?" Oh, that's helpful.

The time for BP to "do" something, Mr. Oil Spill, was long before BP's oil well exploded and Northwest Florida's beaches were threatened with ruin. That's when you and your "drill, baby, drill" should have been demanding BP 'do something' about developing new public safety techniques and remediation technologies.

Beach Business: Wednesday May 12 Oil Spill Update

"It's never a pretty sight to watch academic administrators foraging for grant money."

1. Biding Time on the Beach.

There's still no sign of oil on Pensacola Beach. So far as we can discover, there's only one unverified report of a "red shiny surface in sunlight in Santa Rosa Sound near shore."

This was posted anonymously on the "Reports" page of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, a web site that relies to some extent on "citizen journalists" -- always a tricky business when any dog has access to the internet.

Purportedly, the sheen is "more visible with polarized lenses in sunlight" and the "water generally appears darker, sediment present." Another anonymous report, also unverified, claims at Navarre Beach --

Air causing burning in lungs near sound, water now black in areas, very dark with red color near shore, looks like soot or coal was dumped. Worse by the day. Was clear only three days ago. The "slick" on the Gulf is the least of our problems. The sediment is already in waterways.

Despite southeast winds, NOAA maps suggest the oil slick has been growing and creeping closer to Pensacola Beach. An early morning Public Radio report reads one version of the NOAA map (above, top) as showing the oil slick is now about 90 miles southwest of Pensacola.

2. Hungry Academicians.

The big news in today's Pensacola News Journal is yesterday's visit to the University of West Florida campus by Frank Brogan, chancellor of the State University System of Florida, and FSU's Ross Ellington, vice president for Research. They were here "to speak with faculty members and discuss difficulties the university has faced while preparing for the oil spill."

During their day-long visit, Brogan and Ellington were briefed by university faculty members and researchers, including Richard Snyder, director of the UWF Center for Environmental Diagnostics and Bioremediation.

"BP Holding Back," reads the front page headline. (Click left) But what we're told is that UWF's researcher "voiced frustration about the difficulties... trying to get information from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection and other agencies monitoring the effects of the spill."

"They won't even tell us where they're sampling, none the less what they're sampling or testing for," Snyder said.

None the less? Ah, well. Maybe it's just a failure of communication.

Much less -- as Mr. Snyder might put it -- UWF appears to have solved the problem on its own, just as university scientists did in the good old days when the Florida state legislature actually funded higher education. Dr. Judy Bense is president of the UWF, to be sure, but for her research still comes first. Coastal studies students already have been dispatched to Pensacola Beach and "independently set up four water and sand sampling sites."

"We reached the point where we decided we had to do something," Snyder said. University researchers will maintain the sites for at least 10 weeks, or until they run out of money, Snyder said.

In case anyone's not clear on why, exactly, Tallahassee academic brass would come to Pensacola to complain about how difficult the Florida Department of Environmental Protection in Tallahassee is being, FSU's Ellington hastens to add:

"We're not here to set policy. We're not here to say, 'This is what you should do.' We're here to be a resource for the local, federal and state agencies."

That was the good cop talking. Brogan, playing bad cop, vows to use the state university system's "collective political and scientific clout" so all state universities will "be allowed to contribute to the response process."

It's never a pretty sight to watch academic administrators foraging for grant money. Even the metaphors they use are unintentionally telling. Chancellor Brogan speaks of being "denied a seat at the table." Mr. Snyder weirdly refers to "a bowl of scientists." These guys are hungry!

A university scientist we were speaking to just yesterday -- he's not based in Florida -- told us to watch out for marauding academicians. "They're all starving for grant money. They're stampeding to the coast in herds," he warned. "Be sure you don't get run over."

3. Mississippi Smelling.

The Biloxi Sun-Herald reports the "pervasive petroleum smells" of crude oil reached coastal Mississippi yesterday. Odors were detected in Bay St. Louis, Waveland and Gulfport:

What people likely are smelling is the volatile organic compounds that have evaporated into the air, one group of airborne elements the EPA is monitoring. These include benzene, toluene and ethylbenzene.

The smell is being described as " a burned-plastic odor, odd waxy smell and the smell of diesel exhaust... similar to smelling gasoline fumes at the gas pump." EPA air quality tests registered 3 parts per million, or 2 parts per million below the level that would cause the agency "concern" over health effects.

4. Blaming the Messenger.

A photo the Sun Herald is running in print and on-line shows a lone tourist sitting on the beach at Biloxi. From the caption we learn that the South Mississippi tourism industry is "concerned about the negative perceptions of the area created by the media coverage of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill."

That's so like Mississippians. Fifty years ago they blamed the media for making black people uppity enough to think they had the right to vote and send their children to public schools. Now, they seem to think that business would be just ducky if only the media would let Mississippi merchants lure uninformed tourists to the area. The only remaining issue is how to stop them, once they arrive, from breathing the air.

5. Tarballs on Orange Beach.

Tarballs began washing ashore yesterday at Gulf Shores, Alabama, just west of the Florida state line. The Mobile Register reports:

Crews in environmental protection suits were on the beaches of Baldwin County, gathering tar balls that started washing up earlier in the day... .
* * *
"The smallest was about the size of a hamburger patty, and the largest was about the size of a notebook," [Gulf Shores Mayor Robert Craft said. "They were big enough that people can avoid them. Right now, we don't know if they're hazardous, but we're telling people to avoid them and let the contractors clean them up."

If Gulf Shores is seeing evidence of the oil spill, Perdido Key won't have long to wait.

6. More Tourism Woes.

The Mobile Register also reports that Alabama's state tourism board is launching a $1.5 million advertising campaign this weekend with "print and television ads." According to the director of the state tourism department --

The first print advertisement will appear on the front of the Atlanta Constitution on Thursday, while three television commercials are being prepared for regional markets to inform potential visitors that area beaches are still open... .

She Who Must Be Obeyed has an idea for Alabama. Contemplating the likely toxic poisoning of a large percentage of the fish stock in the Gulf of Mexico, she was wondering the other day if the Flor-Ala Bar that straddles the state line will have to cancel its annual 'Mullet Toss' contest next year. "Instead, they could have a "Dead Fish Bones Throw," she said.

Hey! Maybe there's a grant opportunity in there, somewhere.

Jeff 'Oil Spill' Miller Punked by BP

The big news along the Gulf Coast yesterday was that BP's Deepwater Horizon oil well leak supposedly was coming under control. As Carlton Proctor of the Pensacola News Journal writes in today's paper, the uplifting news was "widely publicized... throughout the day."

Monday afternoon, U.S. Rep. Jeff Miller of Chumuckla, U.S. Sens. Jeff Sessions and Richard Shelby of Alabama, and U.S. Sen. George LeMieux of Florida, all Republicans, attended a joint news conference at the Mobile Regional Airport. They had flown over the giant slick in a Coast Guard aircraft.

At the news conference, the four touted that BP was making progress in cutting the flow of oil from its damaged Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico.

As one of the four politicians -- newly-appointed Florida Senator George Lemieux -- explained for the group at the press conference:

And we had some good news today that we hope that the leak is being somewhat shranken [sic], if you will. They've put some of the clamps on those hydraulic locks and they think that they actually are reducing the amount of flow.

We heard about all of this from several beach friends. Three called excitedly, four sent emails. Everyone wanted to know if it was true. All we could think to say was more or less, 'if you heard it from Jeff Miller it's likely baloney.'

By nightfall, regretfully, we were proved right. Jeff "Oil Spill" Miller and his senatorial cohorts had been punked by BP:

"We were operating on information given to us by the Coast Guard," Dan McFaul, a spokesman for Miller, said later.

For those who don't know, McFaul is the guy Miller hired to clean up the messes the congressman leaves behind. You might say he's "Miller's brain."

Long-time beach residents may recall that about a decade ago McFaul was one of the Tallahassee statehouse flack-catchers detailed to lie to them about their chances of incorporating Pensacola Beach as a self-governing city. McFaul is brighter than Miller by a factor of 10. Personally, however, we regard the two of them as sharing the same soulless lack of regard for the environment of Northwest Florida.

As it turn out, the myth that the oil leakage was slowing didn't originate with the Coast Guard at all. It was started by British Petroleum, itself. Randy Merrow of the Mobile Press-Register has the details:

British Petroleum Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles refuted a statement made earlier in the day by a BP employee, who said the flow of oil from the rig in the Gulf had been slowed.

That employee, Jeff Childs, said BP had successfully deployed a ram to reduce the flow of oil from the drill pipe. At an afternoon news conference, Suttles said the ram did move, but it failed to seal the leak properly.

To be sure, Jeff Miller and his Washington buddies were duped. But that's the point, isn't it? All these "drill, baby, drill" pols are so easy for oil corporations to fool! Big Oil has been doing it for years.

The Gulf Coast pols want so much to escape the consequences of their past "drill, drill, drill" voting records that they'll swallow just about any BP cover story immediately, without bothering to verify it.