EPA chief on Gulf Coast: No ‘Armageddon,’ but years needed to track spill impact

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said on the one-year anniversary of the BP oil spill that an environmental “Armageddon” was averted in the Gulf of Mexico but that years of monitoring are needed.

Jackson — who leads a federal-state Gulf Coast restoration task force — visited the region a year after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig that led to the months-long spill of several million barrels of oil.

Asked on CNN on Wednesday about how the oil has affected undersea wildlife, she said some petroleum remains from the spill in the complex Gulf ecosystem.

“There have been thousands of samples by private researchers, but also by government researchers and it is starting to paint a picture of the ecosystem out there, and there is still oil in the ecosystem. We know that now. We know that there is some limited oil in the marshes and in most cases that is being allowed to dissipate naturally, and that is the best thing for those marshes,” Jackson said.

“But what I say to people is that we need several years of data to ensure there is no collapse of any part of the ecosystem,” added Jackson, who leads the federally established Gulf Coast Ecosystem Restoration Task Force.

Jackson — a New Orleans native — was in the city Wednesday and toured marshes and wetlands along the Louisiana and Mississippi coasts. 

The Gulf Coast faced a suite of environmental challenges, including wetlands loss, even before the BP spill. “There has been so much damage for so many decades,” Jackson said, noting she took a helicopter flight Wednesday over a bay that was marshland 20 years ago.

“We are dealing with big changes to an ecosystem that in many ways is resilient but is ironically fragile at the same time,” Jackson said.

She added:

“What we need at this point is for people all along the Gulf, not just in Louisiana, to come together to advocate for the Gulf and to say to their elected leaders and each other, 'We are stronger together. We have to come together and make this Gulf ready for the next 100 years, resilient, strong, and we have to repair it.'”