And some still are wary of the safety of Gulf seafood.
During a public hearing at the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill & Ecosystem Science Conference in New Orleans earlier this month, scientists and fishermen gathered to discuss ongoing research about the effects of the spill.
Grand Isle fisherman Dean Blanchard asked two senior scientists at the hearing why the Food and Drug Administration continues to say its testing of shrimp and other seafood taken from Louisiana waters is safe when juvenile shrimp are still traveling through oiled wetlands in the Bay Jimmy area of Barataria Bay, in Plaquemines Parish, which is still off limits to fishing and shrimping.
Steven Murawski, a fishery biologist who served as the chief scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration during the spill and now is teaching at the University of South Florida College of Marine Science, and Robert Dickey, director of the FDA Gulf Coast Seafood Laboratory and the agency's Division of Seafood Science and Technology responded that the FDA has not found contaminant levels of shrimp that is being sold to be at unacceptable levels.
"The bottom line is that the seafood is as safe to consume now as it was before the spill," Dickey said. "We're back to background levels. We were in the fall (of 2010) shortly after the spill dissipated."
Those levels remain 100 to 1,000 times lower than the official levels of concern for certain oil molecules called polychlorinated aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, he said.
Blanchard said that he and other fishermen were concerned that the Bayou Jimmy area had not been cleaned of oil and other contaminants to render it safe for fishing. Murawski agreed that the area needed close scrutiny.
"I think a number of studies talked about this week demonstrate that a substantial amount of oil remains in that marsh," Murawski said. "Seafood safety is a consumer issue. That area is closed because of contamination and it's important to make sure seafood is monitored."
Association of Family Fishermen representative Tracy Kuhns voiced concern about what she viewed as inaccurate claims by scientists at the conference that dispersants to break up oil were never used in inland areas. Kuhns said she and others watched planes spraying dispersant on oil floating in water near Bay Jimmy after oil from the gusher began moving ashore in May 2010.
"We have video of the spraying and video of all that oil popping back up when it was sprayed," Kuhns said. She said she turned the video over to the U.S. Department of Justice, and nothing has come of it.
"Our experience in the Barataria Basin, where we fish, they used dispersants in the estuary and Bay Jimmy, all that entire area, and it's still there today," she said. "Shrimp and crab and fish production have all been affected. Shrimp production in the Barataria Basin is 46 percent down."
Coastal researcher Donald Boesch, a New Orleans native who was a member of the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and is president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, stated that charges of widespread dispersant spraying had been raised in Louisiana, Florida, and Alabama, but had not been proven.
"We found no evidence except for two incidents involving short flights, where the planes dumped their load shorter than they should have," he said. "There was nothing that we could document that was less than 10 miles from the coast."
Both BP and the Coast Guard, which oversaw the oil spill cleanup, have repeatedly denied similar charges of spraying in inshore waters, saying that flight plans filed with the Coast Guard back them up.
But Boesch also reiterated that presentations Tuesday at the conference do indicate that contamination from oil is still being found in sediments in Louisiana wetlands, including in Barataria Bay.
"They do find contamination there and it's clearly the result of the spill," he said. "The question is how long will it last."
As Gulf Watchers and others have maintained, the situation in the Gulf will most likely show - as was the case with the Exxon Valdez spill in Prince William Sound - that environmental effects may take years to become apparent.
But questions and concerns still remain, Boesch said, including how to deal with the remaining oil contamination in marshes like along Bay Jimmy, or at Barataria Bay Mangrove Island, a brown pelican rookery that seemed to be recovering a year after the spill. But in 2012, the mangroves on the island were dying off, possibly because of rising water levels and the additional stress caused by oil pollution.
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