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Corrections page

A subpage has been created at Talk:BP/Corrections and resources, where errors or omissions are noted, along with the action taken.

Deepwater Horizon impact on fishing and tourism

In the current version of the "Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill" section, there is a paragraph focusing on impact on economy of the Gulf states, which specifically mentions tourism and fishing. I would like to propose adding some information to the section on this topic and also to raise a couple of concerns with the existing language. The paragraph is as follows:

The spill had a strong economic impact on both BP and the Gulf Coast's economy sectors such as fishing and tourism. In late 2012 local fishermen reported that crab, shrimp, and oyster fishing operations had not yet recovered from the oil spill and many feared that the Gulf seafood industry will never recover.
I am going to remove this section. Tourism was a short term issue--has certainly recovered--and is best discussed in the main article. I did a lot of reading and for the most part crab, shrimp, and oysters have seemingly returned, though some habitat has been lost due to fresh water and oil. On the other hand, in some cases the dollars figures can be deceiving because the prices have gone up. As for fish and other sea creatures, it's too soon to know what long term survival will be. Also, the shrimpers, etc., in this area are small businesses and do not have the ease of recovery potential of large operations that can shift money from here to there, etc. Most of them are people who have lived from the waters of the Gulf and know nothing else. I still have not been able to find out how many of them have been made whole and are working as they were before the spill. At any rate, this is information that needs to be written up in the main article rather than the BP article. I looked at a few of NOAA's figures and here are a couple of examples:
Perhaps others can find different figures? Gandydancer (talk) 01:13, 15 February 2014 (UTC)
The above didn't work. Try this: Gandydancer (talk) 01:29, 15 February 2014 (UTC)
We can update that. I'd not favor removal. Coretheapple (talk) 15:21, 15 February 2014 (UTC)
Can you suggest some wording? Gandydancer (talk) 19:27, 15 February 2014 (UTC)
Well we might want to look at this peer-reviewed study. I can get it if it isn't available from free sources. Apparently it's not a simple issue despite some of the press reports. Coretheapple (talk) 19:43, 15 February 2014 (UTC)
Good find. Here it is: Gandydancer (talk) 19:59, 15 February 2014 (UTC)
OK, good. It's a very short section, and we can just add a sentence or two saying things have gotten better or whatever. But the impact on tourism, even if transitory, was a big story and I think warrants the brief treatment it got here. In fact, if things have improved, that is all the more reason to retain and update. I think that people just assume that things are cruddy down there in the Gulf, and may not be aware if there's been a rebound. Coretheapple (talk) 20:06, 15 February 2014 (UTC)
I added what had been dropped out about the settlement, as that was the No. 1 priority in this article and was a gaping and embarrassing omission. I then added some text concerning the rebound in tourism. There was a Fox report and a Reuters report recommended by Arturo, and I used both along with the Journal article. The actual article appears to be diffferent from the somewhat longer link that you provided above. To be on the safe side I downloaded the actual journal article, which was a bit shorter possibly because of formatting. There was a preliminary online version and a November 2013 version, published January 2014, and I quoted from the latter. Coretheapple (talk) 17:30, 17 February 2014 (UTC)

Citations missing

One quick fix needed here is to re-add some citations for the economic impact, as at some point the citations supporting the first sentence appear to have been snipped and the one source remaining refers only to impact on BP's stock price. I am not sure what sources would be best here, whether they should be from early in the spill or more recent.

Information on tourism recovery

This leads to my next suggestion, which is that there is no information to clarify the whether the impact on fishing and tourism in the Gulf is ongoing. I would like to suggest adding some information to the section on these two points. There are multiple sources mentioning the improved performance in the tourism industry from 2011 onwards, for example:

Quote: "This year wraps up with not only better tourism numbers than before the oil spill, but better than any year on record. Florida’s oil-impacted beaches in the Panhandle saw tourism shoot up 61 percent over 2010. Alabama rose 51 percent, while Mississippi gained 7 percent."
Quote: "The U.S. Gulf Coast is a hot destination again two years after the massive BP Plc oil spill made the region a tourist dead zone, with the petroleum giant pumping more than $150 million into promotions to help the region recover."

See above; also updated with citation to a journal article. Coretheapple (talk) 17:31, 17 February 2014 (UTC)

Information on fishing

Also, in a previous discussion, I mentioned a concern with the current sentence regarding reports from fishermen. This sentence relies on anecdotal information and opinion rather than figures and I would like to ask editors to consider whether this sentence should remain. Whether or not it should, I suggest also adding in recent data on the state of the fishing industry, for example the NOAA official figures regarding catches in 2011 onwards:

Quote: "Catches throughout the Gulf of Mexico rebounded in 2011 to the highest volume since 1999, following a curtailed 2010 season due to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill."

2012 NOAA figures are also available, although the report does not compare against previous years' catches. If a source providing a comparison is needed, the NOAA's Annual Landing Statistics page allows you to run a query comparing several years. From that query you can see that catches for the Gulf in 2011 and 2012 were higher than in previous years.

If editors would prefer to add in an official response from BP regarding tourism and fishing instead, the company's State of the Gulf website includes a page focusing on this topic, here:

Once again, these are suggestions and I hope that editors here will consider them. Thanks. Arturo at BP (talk) 21:47, 5 February 2014 (UTC)

Uh yeah, that's helpful. So is this. I'll see if I can get the actual study, but feel on more secure ground linking not just to the journal article but also to the coverage thereof in reliable secondary sources. Coretheapple (talk) 17:35, 17 February 2014 (UTC)

Whilst trying to find the original study I ran across this, which is very important to add to the articles as it is the exact opposite of what we were told during the spill: "The study also found that the 'weathered' oil — which had been broken down by wave action and chemical dispersants used to keep the oil out of fragile wetlands — was more toxic than fresh oil." The Australian petrarchan47tc 18:36, 18 February 2014 (UTC)


Here is the study: Gandydancer (talk) 20:21, 18 February 2014 (UTC)
Another site (other than the Science journal: The most recent stock assessment, conducted in 2012, estimated the spawning population to be at only 36 percent of the 1970 baseline population. Additionally, many other pelagic fishes were also likely to have spawned in oiled habitats, including yellowfin tuna, blue marlin and swordfish.
Read more at:
What exactly do you expect people to do with that source in this article? Such information is of too narrow a focus to belong in the general article on BP. It may warrant a brief mention in the oil spill article and definitely in the environmental impact sub-article, but not here.--The Devil's Advocate tlk. cntrb. 23:41, 18 February 2014 (UTC)
People that work on this article work on two other BP articles that deal with environmental issues as well. Gandydancer (talk) 04:35, 20 February 2014 (UTC)
And both of the other two environmental BP articles have talk sections where this can be more appropriately discussed. Geogene (talk) 23:41, 26 February 2014 (UTC)
Okay. We have a source conflict between NOAA and Al-Jazeera. NOAA is a government science agency that keeps the official statistics, AJ is a media outlet that has been making hysterical pronouncements ("the Gulf will never recover") all along. Al Jazeera has lost so much credibility with their apocalyptic reporting that I don't think they're RS on covering this event. (Do you think AJ's stakeholders just might, plausibly benefit from stirring up political opposition to US energy production?) So on fisheries I'm kicking AJ out and leaving NOAA in. I'm also taking out the heart study because there's nothing there we don't already know--PAHs are bad for fish. No, really? Geogene (talk) 00:00, 27 February 2014 (UTC)
No, we don't "kick out" reliable sources no matter whether you like them or not. NOAA hasn't got perfect credibility, and we do not necessarily consider government agencies to be reliable sources at Misplaced Pages. In the midst of BPs biggest trial of all time, which right now is looking specifically at ecological damage to determine the amount of the fine, I think these sudden and very prolific changes to all related articles should be of great concern to those interested in an encyclopedic take, as opposed to the take of the US government or BP. There's nothing authentic looking about this activity and its timing, imo. petrarchan47tc 00:47, 1 March 2014 (UTC)


From Panel challenges Gulf seafood safety all-clear:
  • "Citing what the law firm calls a state-of-the-art laboratory analysis, toxicologists, chemists and marine biologists retained by the firm of environmental attorney Stuart Smith contend that the government seafood testing program, which has focused on ensuring the seafood was free of the cancer-causing components of crude oil, has overlooked other harmful elements. And they say that their own testing — examining fewer samples but more comprehensively — shows high levels of hydrocarbons from the BP spill that are associated with liver damage...What we have found is that FDA simply overlooked an important aspect of safety in their protocol...We now have a sufficient number of samples to provide FDA with probable cause to include such testing, really. They need to go back and test some of their archived samples as well."
  • Study: FDA Allowed Unsafe Levels of Chemicals in Seafood After BP Oil Spill "The study found that by using flawed assumptions and outdated risk assessment methods, the FDA allowed contamination up to 10,000 times the level deemed safe, and failed to identify risks for pregnant women and children." (study)
  • Is this a reliable source? "The U.S. government says that seafood from the gulf is safe to eat and that cancer-causing chemicals are at acceptable levels for humans."*
Please explain, precisely, what you mean by "nothing authentic looking about this activity or its timing", by which I believe you mean my edits. A cursory review of your edit history shows you have a tendency to make exactly the same accusations against pretty much all editors that you don't agree with, that you have been doing this over a period of years, and that you have already been warned about this a few times before, with no change in your behavior. NOAA, by the way, has more credibility on science issues than Mother Jones. Also, you seem to emphasize individual papers over the scientific consensus in your weighting the two. Perhaps you should review the RS natural science standards. Geogene (talk) 19:37, 3 March 2014 (UTC)
As for the sources you listed above, consider that they're coming from an environmental attorney. It's a viewpoint that you can add, but it carries less weight than the established scientific consensus, which is basically the view of the Federal science agencies, that Gulf seafood is safe to eat. Also both studies are three years old and I see no evidence that they represent the scientific consensus. Doesn't mean you can't use them but you should weight them appropriately. Geogene (talk) 20:31, 3 March 2014 (UTC)


The article states:
"Although Gulf fisheries recovered in 2011, a 2014 study of the effects of the oil spill on bluefin tuna by researchers at Stanford University and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, published in the journal Science, found that toxins released by the oil spill sent fish into cardiac arrest. The study found that even very low concentrations of crude oil can slow the pace of fish heartbeats."
Why is there an "although" there? Presumably the fisheries were damaged by the spill, but the fisheries recovered. It's like saying, "Although the fisheries recovered, we recently found out how easily they could have been damaged..." This is irrelevant to the subject of the article because of the fact that the fisheries recovered...especially since the study was actually done in vitro in a laboratory, using models of Gulf seawater and aquarium fish, and not in the actual Gulf. We have data from fish in the actual Gulf that shows the effects to no longer be significant, while the study itself wasn't intended to predict the future of Gulf fisheries, but rather to show the mechanisms by which PAH exposure could be dangerous to fish, yes even at low concentrations. But use this study to try to imply the status of Gulf fisheries is to take the source out of context, a form of original research. Geogene (talk) 00:34, 27 February 2014 (UTC)

Reply from Arturo: Thank you for the thoughtful responses and edits, Geogene. Thank you Coretheapple, as well, for adding more context to the details in the article about the impact of the spill on tourism and fishing.

I am looking for further official figures on fishing from 2012 onward, but meanwhile I do have two suggestions for the additions to the Environmental impact paragraphs in the "Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill" section.

I noticed that in discussing dolphins and the Environmental Science & Technology study in both the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and Environmental impact of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill articles, Coretheapple included BP's statement from the source: "BP said the report was “inconclusive as to any causation associated with the spill”. How would editors feel about also including this statement where the study has been added to this article?

As well, I noticed that Petrachan added new information about a study from the University of South Florida about weathered oil and fish health. An article about that study appearing in the Tampa Bay Times included a statement from BP. What are editors thoughts about including BP's response following Petrachan's edits? Thanks. Arturo at BP (talk) 19:53, 27 February 2014 (UTC)

I think that adding responses, if available, is always appropriate. I've been sidelined but I am sure that someone will get to it. Coretheapple (talk) 20:06, 27 February 2014 (UTC)
I appreciate the feedback, Coretheapple. I am curious about your decision to reinstate material related to the fishing industry from 2012. This was previously removed by Geogene. See the discussion above starting February 27th here.
I also noticed Geogene updated the article with BP's response to the University of South Florida's study on fish livers. Thank you, Geogene. What do you think about also including BP's response about dolphins in the Environmental impact section from this source? Thanks. Arturo at BP (talk) 21:25, 11 March 2014 (UTC)
I would also like a more detailed explanation from Coretheapple, per WP:BRD. The edit comment he left was not especially helpful, and this is now in the Discuss phase. The first part of the material in contention: "but reports of damage to the fisheries persisted through 2014." The source for that content was the bluefin study. Trouble is that the fish in that study lived in an aquarium in California, not the Gulf, so there are no "reports of fisheries damage" therein. It also doesn't apply to 2014 because the paper was finished and submitted for peer review in 2013, August, I think. So somebody even managed to get that wrong. This kind of thing is an alarmingly common problem in the DWH articles, all of which have some pretty serious WP:COMPETENCY issues for such an important subject. The second part of the content I dispute: "In late 2012 local fishermen reported that crab, shrimp, and oyster fishing operations had not yet recovered from the oil spill and many feared that the Gulf seafood industry will never recover." That's two years out of date and based mostly on anecdotes from fishermen. So nobody should be surprised that "may never recover" was deleted when NOAA says "have recovered". By the way, I think NOAA's claim is also a stretch, but it has more scientific credibility than AJ does. Geogene (talk) 02:30, 12 March 2014 (UTC)
One passage in WP:COMPETENCY reads as follows: "Some editors hold personal opinions so strongly that they cannot edit neutrally and collaboratively with other editors." Another is "Some people just can't function well in this particular collaborative environment." You may want to consider whether both, one or neither of these passages might apply to the person observing you in the mirror. Figureofnine (talk • contribs) 15:34, 12 March 2014 (UTC)
I think it makes sense to review and possibly roll back all of Geogene's edits since late February (which have all centered on the oil spill, Corexit, and environmental damage). If one were to look at the edit histories of the BP, BP oil spill and Corexit articles, there is no justification to allow this person's edits to remain. They have been made by edit warring, abusive words, and wiki-layering that speaks not of a relatively new and inexperienced user, but of someone who knows the score and even the editors here. We have had trouble here before with editors who have very abrasive personalities just like this, and it makes sense to expect that tactic to be used again, if (since) talk pages and RfC's aren't going so well for BP, yet multiple billions of dollars are on the line.
It does not make sense to ignore the obvious, and to allow this much tendentious editing and edit warring to take up 5 editors' time, when this editing does not look to be in good faith. Is it not pure common sense that when a giant company is fighting a giant court battle, that the content in dispute be more heavily guarded here at Misplaced Pages? It seems like there should be a more direct and less time-consuming way to deal with the obvious and expected, rather than to expect volunteers to keep up with the daily onslaught from Geogene. petrarchan47tc 19:00, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

Florida sues BP over oil spill environmental damage

For future addition ref petrarchan47tc 19:27, 8 March 2014 (UTC)

This would belong in the article on litigation from the spill. At best we can justify a few words noting such suits here, though I fail to see the need.--The Devil's Advocate tlk. cntrb. 21:51, 8 March 2014 (UTC)
I feel like this article is at risk of becoming another WP:COATRACK for the Gulf oil spill. Having said that, I actually think that the litigation related to the spill is more relevant to the company itself (and therefore this article about the company) than most of the DWH environmental issues are, at least beyond establishing that it was a Very Bad Thing for a lot of reasons. Geogene (talk) 17:41, 10 March 2014 (UTC)
  1. BP CEO Dudley Denied 2012 Share Bonus on 8% Stock Price Drop - Bloomberg
  2. Gulf fisheries in decline after oil disaster - Features - Al Jazeera English
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