 I'm Susan Farrity, I'm the Director of the Marine Affairs Institute, I've been here for almost three years. Prior to that I worked for a conservation organization and ocean issues. Prior to that I was a practicing attorney. Prior to that I was a boat bum with many of these SEA types that are here. So our second panel shifts, it's nice when the agenda actually works the way that I hope it will from talking about how all this happened to the damages that it caused. I thought we had a really great lead up into that both from the federal and the state side talking about natural impacts as well as human impacts of this. So that's what this panel is focused on. The challenge and the opportunity of this panel is that it's right before lunch, so hang in there. It's also the panel today with the fewest lawyers on it, yay! I'm in a building full of lawyers all day long and I love them but it's really nice to get other perspectives and as I mentioned earlier in the day, these issues are so interdisciplinary that we're really fortunate to have the horsepower that we have on this panel. So I'm very briefly going to introduce each of them right now while I'm standing up here that I'm going to go sit and do my moderator thing and turn them loose. So Jill Rowe is going to lead off first. Jill is a marine biologist with Applied Science Associates. Her presentation has been reviewed and approved by NOAA lawyers because her company is doing natural resource damage assessments and Dave, you know the drill, everybody got approved, they got their blessing. So she has done natural resource damage assessments on a number of spills and so she's going to bring us up to speed as she can with an alive and active case on what's going on down in the Gulf. Second, we have Jim Oppolock who taught this morning over at URI and raced across the bridge in the gale to join us. He is the professor and department chair of the Department of Environmental and Natural Resource Economics at URI, our good partners across the way. I don't even know where to begin with his extensive damage, extensive experience assessing economic damages as a result from oil spills so I refer you to the program. We're really fortunate to have him. And finally we have another part of our southern contingent here, Kevin Dean who's a lawyer with Motley Rice in their Charleston, South Carolina office. I told you it wouldn't snow. I didn't tell you it was going to be a nicer spring time up here than Charleston so. But thank you for coming all this way. Kevin works in catastrophic injury aspects of his firm, represents many clients in the Gulf, including the gentleman to his left, Hal Chittum, who's a long time golf businessman, and most recently the proprietor of, let me get the name right, Hal. No, cutting horse boats? Cutting horse yachts. So we're going to get a number of perspectives on this panel. The science, the economics, what a lawyer does when you have a client that's injured in an event like this and the literally the human face of facing something like this. So Jill, I'll let you kick it off. Thank you very much, Susan. Yes, so as you have heard, I am Jill Rowe and I'm a marine biologist so I have absolutely no law background. So I'm going to be a little different from some of the speakers here today. So I'll be talking more about the Natural Resource Damage Assessment for the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. And the name that I have here on the presentation is Deborah French McKay and she's the project manager of this from within ASA. And she's got 30 plus years of experience in this Natural Resource Damage Assessment. And we are working under Dave Westerholm and the NOAA Office of ORNR. We have a contract with them, a support contract that we've had for about 25 or so years to conduct natural resource damage assessments and to aid in the assessment of those for oil spills. So I won't go into too much detail here on the separate procedures that are needed for oil spills, as you heard them previously in this mornings between Steve and Dave. But I will just kind of go briefly over it. We've heard quite a bit about the response. Again, of course, the objective is to control and release and minimize the impact of the spill. So as we heard, Coast Guard is in charge and the responsible party as we had been told before to pays and performs much of the effort for this. And then they get the advice from the federal and state agencies. But what I'll be focusing most on today is the natural resource damage assessment side of things. And again, as you've heard previously too, that's part of the Oil Pollution Act procedures that need to be followed for that. And then of course, there's penalties and private claims. But again, our primary focus, and I'll be telling you mostly what ASA and how we've been working together with NOAA and the RP on these things. So in general, the objective of a natural resource damage assessment is to restore the injured public trust resources and to compensate for the public losses. So a claim is considered the injuries or the impacts, and in this term, in this case, the interim losses of the resources. And that could be both ecological and by human use. So the damages that you're claiming for are typically in monetary value and that preferably would claim for the cost of restoration. You would also look to do economic value of the resource injuries. Then the other claim is assessment costs. And of course, they need to be reasonable assessment costs. So this is just kind of a breakdown of who has been involved in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, NERDA. So the trustees, as you'll hear, the trustees, and there's the RP, the responsible party, as you've heard previously this morning, too, the trustees or the government agencies with the responsibilities to protect the natural resources. So the NOAA, ORNR have trusteeship over fish and other water column biota, benthic and wetland biota, marine mammals, and sea turtles. The US Fish and Wildlife Service has trusteeships over birds, and then they have a concurrent trusteeship with sea turtles. The National Park Service has trusteeship over any natural resources that are in and using the parklands. And then the states have trusteeship over all resources in and using state waters. So for this, the states that are obviously involved are Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, and Florida. So we have been working together with a lot of these state and, of course, the NOAA trustees. So in general, first part of the Oil Pollution Act procedures, the trustees must invite the responsible party to cooperate. And if it's a cooperative, then the trustees take the lead, and then the RP agrees to pay the assessment costs up front. But of course, it's not a blank check. So we have to work together with them on that. And then there's what's called these technical working groups, or I will refer to them as twigs. And those are set up for each of the resource category to help evaluate the injuries and ultimately try to come up with some potential restoration alternatives. So the twigs work together to develop work plans. And that's the main responsibility of these twigs is to develop and then implement these work plans. If the RP agrees to the plan, then it becomes cooperative. And the RP then pays the costs up front. However, if the RP does not agree to these work plans, then the trustees of the government must bear the costs only until or if the costs are recovered during settlement or in court. However, if the whole, and right now I should tell you we are currently working as a cooperative nerda. If for some reason or if it ever became not cooperative or if any kind of nerda ever became not cooperative, the government would bear all the costs until the damages could eventually be recovered. So this is just an overview of some of the twigs that have been set up as part of this natural resource damage assessment. And again, the NOAA and the federal government takes the lead on these twigs. But they are sat in. There's lots of people from the state agencies and the state trustees that are involved, as well as US Fish and Wildlife, National Park Service, and the such. And then also the RP then gets to sit in on these twigs as well, because it is a cooperative assessment. So we have an offshore and shelf twig. We have the water column and modeling twig. And Deborah French McKay is the lead with some other NOAA folks as well on the water column and modeling fish and plankton. And then there's also the deep sea and benthic communities. Then there's some near shore habitats and communities. And I'm helping to co-lead some of the fish twig part of that. And so there's the shallow water habitats, oyster reefs, SAV or submerged aquatic vegetation and submerged or shallow coral reefs. So these are all individual twigs that are responsible for taking care of and trying to determine what plans and different ways of assessing impacts to these resources. So then there's also the onshore habitat and communities. And then you also have twigs for selected species groups. So there's a mammals twig, a turtles twig, shoreline and birds, and then terrestrial mammals and invertebrates. And then there's a separate whole twig on economics or they would work on looking at the damages from the spill. And there's also a restoration twig. And finally, so as you can see, there's numerous people involved here. There's also then case support twigs. So you have a chemistry group that works on trying to help analyze and organize all the chemical samples that have been collected to date. And then also data management, information management to limitry. So that's whenever you have some kind of organism tagged and you're trying to figure out the data of where they're moving, that's part of the telemetry toxicity. And then as part of the NERDA representation, there's an onsite NERDA lead. There's an overseeing trustee council as well as an outreach group. So because this is a legal process, obviously, it may go to court. And because of this, the trustees and then the RP, and of course, in cases as BP, each designate experts. So those experts are people with PhDs with some type of demonstrable experience in the field of expertise. And then that expertise is then challenged and established through these pretrial Dobert hearings. Then eventually, the experts will produce technical reports, publications, and also testify. So the process from the trustee side of things for designating these experts is they're selected by the twig leads. And then they're vetted by agency management and lawyers. And then they eventually agree to the confidentiality. They have to agree to the confidentiality regarding the case development. And ultimately, they're contracted by NOAA via some of these outside prime contractors. BP also has experts and consultants. So their lead expert and consultant is Cardinal Entrix. And then there's Continental Shelf Associates Exponent Integral in ERM. So I won't go into too much detail here, but this is just kind of the day-to-day twig activities. There's numerous, numerous meetings, both in person and on the phone. So the very beginning of the spill, it was happening at least three to four times a week that each one of these twigs would meet on the phone for about hours or two hours of meetings. So it's primarily because there's so many people all over the country that are working on this. So calls are the most useful means of doing that. Now we've kind of reduced it down. There's lots of informal calls, management calls, and all that, so numerous calls. And then also, but the main responsibility of the twigs is to develop some conceptual models for the pathway, the exposure, and the injuries. And then also then, obviously, like I said, develop these work plans. And so those entail cruise plans. And then also some data analysis plans. So for the offshore shelf twig, the water column activities that have been going on is basically modeling. So within ASA, we have developed a model that's called SIMAP. And that is a oil-fates interjectory model where you would be modeling the oil both at the surface and the subsurface. And so we've been using this a number of times for a number of other natural resource damage assessments. So that was something, it's one of the very many features that could be used to help try to assess what the water column impacts are, especially offshore in the open water environment. But one of the main things that are needed for this modeling are hydrodynamics. So that's your current flow and your speed and direction. So that's one of the major inputs that we are relying on experts from outside. And so we have a large panel beginning to work together of trying to develop, there's a number of models that are already out there, and now we're just trying to decide which ones are the proper ones to be put into the model. So that's a very large task to try to get all of them on play, and then you might even do some kind of a, run the model a couple different ways which are different types of hydrodynamics to see what would best fit your observations. And then so like I say, we're very much involved with the oil-fates and then also the biological effects side of that for helping support the nerda. So as part of the water column activities, we've been very busy. In 2010, there were 14 cooperative cruises, offshore cruises, just to sample water alone. So we looked at CTD and DO and fluorescence, so all the physical parameters, also the chemistry of the oil. Now all of these could eventually be used into this model to help figure out the trajectory and fate of the oil. I'll go in a little bit more detail about this oil droplet size and densities input. It's very much, very, very important in figuring out the fate of the oil. So I'll go into that in a bit in the next couple of slides. And then in 2011, we're also gonna be doing some, and we're also starting to do some water column cruises. It's to look a lot at the seeps because there's natural seeps that are occurring out there. So the RP and the trustees are gonna be going out and trying to evaluate the natural seeps compared to what's out there naturally in terms of oil. And then also the data analysis. And as you can tell from 14 different cruises, that's a lot of data to be bringing in. So the data analysis part of this is just in the beginning phases. So this is just a picture of some of the ROVs that were deployed in some of those water column cruises. And then as you can see here, so these are some of the CTDs and the different instruments that were on the surface to help sample some of the chemistry in addition to doing some of the ROVs and looking at oil-sized droplets. So this is a generalized picture of looking at the processes that you need to consider when you're modeling the oil and fate transport. So down here, you can't see it probably because of the chairs, but down there, this is considered, this is simulating the well head. So the one of the key features, one of the key inputs that you have to look at when you're developing your transport and fate is your particle size attribution. So the larger the particles as they get released, this is oil droplets, as they get released from the well head, the larger ones will just rise the surface relatively fast. One of your key input, besides the particle size attribution, you also have to think about what your rise rate velocity is. So how fast is it rising from the surface or from the bottom? But so the larger particles will go to the surface and then they'll become sheens and the wind will make them into thicker oil. And then because they did develop or did add dispersants from the water surface that caused entrainment into the water column. But when if you don't have these very large particle sizes, you also have these very small particle sizes and those are the ones, droplets that are staying near the water, in the water column, they're becoming the most toxic to the organisms in the water column. The currents are moving them back, the deep sea currents are moving them back and forth, creating the subsurface plume. And then also these particles then become absorbed and adhered to the particulates in the water column and they'll go down into the sediment so they can ultimately impact the organisms, the informal organisms in the sediments. So there's a number of processes to consider here. It's naturally being dispersed within the water column but then because we also put dispersant, there's dispersant applied at the surface and then also at depth is causing this entrainment into the water column as well. And then we also have to take into consideration volatization. And I'll get into more detail too, we also are able to add response parameters into our model. So this is an overview of the SIMAP model. Right now we're really in this beginning part up here. We're working more on the physical fates part of it. Your major inputs are your scenario information, your wins. As I said, we're working a lot with the hydrodynamics experts in the area to try to come up with the proper model to be using because your biggest factors in transport are your wins and your currents. We also can be putting in the response parameters so you can put in the dispersants, how much dispersant was used, you're re-booming, you're skimming. I mean, even though skimming wasn't all that productive in this one, but there's a number of the response parameters can also be brought in. Habitats are important and then your chemical, the actual chemical breakup of the oil. So that's why all the beginning 14 cruises that we did were very important in helping determine some of the inputs for this fates model. Then eventually you get the trajectory and concentrations and you could put it through an exposure and toxicity model. We're not to this point yet, again, because we're working up here trying to get all the data input. And then ultimately when you're very done and you have a very good trajectory that you know is matching your observations, you can then be getting this pre-spill as biological database. So you wanna try to figure out the numbers and densities of organisms that were there prior to this spill. That can be brought in and then ultimately what you can get is these impacts and lost numbers in production and biomass by species. But again, we are up in these earlier phases here. Okay, so then just to say once we get the trajectory ready, you also have to make sure that you calibrate it based on a number of options. So you could look at observed oil movements. So this is a satellite imagery overflight. So once we wanna make sure that our trajectory is matching these observations, if it's not, then that means we need to tweak some of our inputs. So that might be our particle size distribution, our winds, our currents. Shore oiling, a number of teams went out and actually did what's called SCAT. So they look at the actual levels of oiling along the shore. And then also these concentrations, so a lot of our early cruises went out and tried to give us droplets and watercone and dissolve hydrocarbons. So we will compare what our model is showing to those observations. Then, as I say, if they do not match exactly, then there's a number of sensitivity things that you can maneuver and make sure that you're matching your observations because that's the key component is to match your observations. So for the fish and plantain activities, again, we're focusing a lot on the modeling and the data analysis. So we're coming up with a conceptual model. As I say, the biological part of it is very important. So the densities and life histories and behaviors of the organism is an area. So we're looking at existing information as well as going out and we've been collecting new data since the beginning of the spill in 2010. You have to also look at the effects evaluations. And then here again, so we've done in quite a few cruises. Primarily, we're beginning them a lot in 2011, so in the spring and summer of 2011. Because again, in the very beginning of the spill, we were trying to get some of the inputs that come of the physical components, but now we're really starting to get into the biological. So these are just some of the different things that we've been collecting, both looking at plankton, which are your eggs and larvae, and then also your invertebrates and larger and smaller fish. Again, the data analysis is just in the beginning phases. This is just an image of some of the 2010 biological sampling I've done. This is the Bongo and Neustand Nets. This is just showing you there's a very historical wealth of data called the CMAP program. So that's where they went out and did a number of trials and sampling for the past 30 years or so in this area. But however, due to the complications of trying the logistics of sampling in this area, there had not been samples in this area right here. So back in 2010, we went out as part of the Garden Gunter cruise and added these new stations. So we're going to be comparing on the same grid format. So we're going to be comparing with the historical data as well. And this is just some of the 2011 sampling. This is the Mocnes. This is more deeper plankton cruises. And this is, again, just showing you the wellhead is right here. So we've been sampling all in the vicinity of the wellhead. And that's a picture of the Mocnes. And this is just a picture of, again, not only where we have, as ASA particularly been trying to develop and implement these cruises, we've actually been going out on the cruises. So at one point last summer, we had quite about half the company was out on cruises as well. So we've been busy. So this is just a picture of what's called the zipper. It's a plankton imaging device that's towed along the back of the boat. And it's taking pictures of images of plankton as they're towing along. So this is my last slide, just to show you some of the summary of the 2011 activities. Again, this is still, there's a lot of data that has been collected. And so we're still in the very beginning of the analysis phases. But we are going to be continuing our 2011 cruises, fish and plankton, and looking at the oceanography. Again, one of the big things is hydrodynamics. So we're working a lot to try to figure out the proper currents to be used. SEAPS, so we're going to be evaluating those. The data analysis is a very large component. Not only are we analyzing historical data, we're also analyzing the new data that has been collected since the spill. And then the modeling, so the SIMAP. And again, that's just one of the many models that could be used. And then the hydrodynamics. But again, all of these require work plans and scopes of work. And they are a cooperative process with BP. So if there's any questions, thank you. Professor Opelich? Thank you. So I'm Jim Opelich. I'm a professor of environmental economics at the University of Rhode Island. And I'm going to talk about restoration and its role in compensating for damages to natural resources. Now, obviously, restoration is going to come down the line in this process. And in my talk here, I'm not going to talk at all about the BP spill specifically, but I'm really going to talk about frameworks for compensating for damages using restoration. So oil spill liability, as most of you here probably knows, is responsible parties are liable for damages to publicly owned natural resources, as well as private damages and other things. But for publicly owned natural resources, restoration is the primary means of compensation. So you impact these publicly owned resources. And ultimately, the goal is to restore the resources. And then the responsible party then is liable for those costs. But the costs should not also be in quotes grossly disproportionate to the value of the resources. So one of the things that goes on in this process is assessing the cost of restoration, but then also thinking about what the value of the resource is and whether those costs are proportionate to the value. And that's one of the places where economics comes in. So one of the really interesting things I think about this work is you've got legal elements, you've got biological, you've got chemical, physical oceanography, you have economics. And the lines between all of these disciplines definitely blurs, and people get involved in all different aspects of it. So I think anyway, that's what I find really interesting about doing this kind of work. So damages include things like lost use values. What economists would call lost use values, such as commercial species, lost use value for commercial species. Recreational uses like beach use. It includes things like recreational fishing and other types of use values. It also includes what we sometimes call indirect use values. Things that are used, but maybe not directly, but that they contribute to things that are used. So things like ecological effects, like food web effects, habitat effects. You might impact a habitat, and that indirectly affects ultimate use. But also one of the most challenging things to deal with is what's called non-use values or sometimes called passive use values. So there are values for things like turtles, for example, that may not be commercially caught or necessarily used recreationally, but nevertheless have a value to society. Things like birds in many cases. Birds are highly valued by society, even if we're not eating them or photographing them or whatever. But also there's non-use values for other marine communities. So things that are not so well known, but still people have values for. So for the restoration concepts, the two main restoration concepts are one, primary restoration, which means basically bringing the resource back to baseline condition. So the resource was impacted, you bring it back to what would have been had the spill not occurred. And that's kind of the obvious notion of restoration. But there's also what's called compensatory restoration. And that's the compensation for what's called interim losses. So in the meantime, between when the spill happens and the resource is restored to the baseline, that there are losses, the resources is down, the populations are down in that period, and that represents a loss. And responsible parties are required to compensate for those interim losses as well. So the usual diagram that you see depicting this looks kind of like this. You've got some type of a population, it might be bird populations or fish or whatever. And it's going along happily at baseline conditions. A spill occurs, the population drops because of the spill. Over time, some natural recovery would occur and presumably would return to baseline or maybe not return to baseline. So primary restoration speeds up the return to baseline. That's the concept of primary restoration. Perhaps the population would return to baseline on its own, but maybe it would take a long time or maybe it never would return on its own. So primary restoration is returning the population to baseline. Compensatory restoration then looks at the interim losses that would occur. For some period of time, the population was lower than it would have been had the spill not occurred. That represents a loss to society and the responsible party is also liable for compensating for those losses. And so the idea is you might restore above baseline conditions and over some future period, you have an enhancement of the resource above baseline and the idea is you balance that compensatory restoration against the interim losses and again, the responsible party is liable for both primary and compensatory restoration. So restoration scaling, how do we figure out how much restoration is necessary? As you can imagine, this is a very complex condition. First of all, you have to decide how much to restore. How do you compare spill-related losses to augmentations of the populations that result from restoration? And some of the key questions there are injury. What was the injury? This is the stuff that Jill is working on and will be working on for the next several years. What was the extent of the injury? Trying to figure out what that is, is a difficult job. How quickly will the system recover if left to its own or will it recover? And then there's obviously a lot of other very complex issues, but then also on the restoration side, what's provided by different restoration actions? If we take an action, what do we actually get out of that? So if we decide to create an artificial wetland, for example, how much do we get from doing that? How long will the restoration project persist? In some cases, we might expect a restoration project to persist in perpetuity, but in other cases, it'll last for a while and perhaps degrade. And also there may be a time period over which it's ramping up. So if you create an artificial wetland, it takes a long time. Even if you're successful, which is an important question, it'll take a while for that wetland really to be functioning like a wetland. So one of the approaches that's used to compare losses to resources restored is what's called resource to resource compensation. And here what you do is you balance the lost resource against the restored resource. So this is kind of the obvious notion. So you kill X birds and what you wanna do is you wanna restore that same number of birds. But it's a little bit more complicated than that because you have to think about what happened to the system, how it decreased, how it recovered back over time, and what was the loss over that period. So a typical measure might be bird years. How many birds were lost and how many years were those birds lost for and how did they recover over time? And you kind of calculate that. And then you have to compare that with bird years provided by some type of a restoration action. We'll talk, I'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute. But the question, you know, how do you restore? Well, you can't just go to birds are us and buy a bunch of birds and release them to restore the birds lost. In fact, you have to take some type of restoration action that will enhance the bird populations. So one approach that's used sometimes to calculate benefits from restorations was called habitat equivalency. So the idea is you've lost some type of a resource like say birds and you can restore that resource by providing habitat. And what we have to do is figure out how much habitat you need to provide to restore to make up for those birds that were lost. So the restoration program in this case would restore habitat and we have to figure out how much habitat is required to compensate, to provide the same level of restored resource to balance against the lost resource and also the compensatory restoration versus the interim losses. So I want to give an example. Obviously, you know, as I mentioned, we're very early on in the BP case and this stuff will be happening over, you know, the next decade, perhaps several decades. So it's way too early to really talk about the BP spill but as an example to illustrate how this approach might be used, I'm going to talk about one aspect of the North Cape oil spill which happened here in Rhode Island in 1996. So the North Cape oil spill, 828,000 gallons of heating oil was spilled which is a good sized spill, nothing like BP spill but it's a good sized spill happened here as I mentioned in Rhode Island. And among other things, there were 402 estimated common loons that were killed by the spill. So I'm going to use this loon kill and restoration actions for loons as an illustrative example for this and this work was done, you know, by folks including the folks at ASA and Debbie French was pretty much involved with Debbie French McKay and others. So North Cape loon restoration, they looked at some different alternatives. One was to create some artificial islands for breeding habitat on lakes in Maine. So one of the big issues for loons was there wasn't much you could do in Rhode Island to restore loons but loons come down here in the winter and they go up to Maine during the summer. So what you can do is you can restore habitat for loons in Maine during the summer and provide more loons then to make up for the loons that was lost here. So one of the alternatives that was considered was creating artificial islands for breeding. So when the loons breed on islands, they're more protected from predators like foxes, et cetera. And so you might expect additional loons to be produced if we can provide more habitat. So there's a picture of a loon on an artificial island. Another alternative that was considered was purchasing threatened lake habitat. So there's lake habitat, lakes in Maine are being developed but also there's logging around lakes and the loons do better in lakes that are more pristine, that are less developed rather than more developed. So you can go in and you can either buy land or you can purchase development rights for land around lakes. And these two alternatives were considered and I'm not gonna talk about the details of why the choice was made but ultimately they decided that protecting the loon nesting habitat in Maine was the way to go. And so now we have to get into restoration scaling. How much lake habitat do we have to purchase in order to offset this loss of 402 loons in Rhode Island? So they estimated that there was about 3,749 loon years lost. And the idea is you killed 402 now, had the spill not occurred, they would have continued to live for some years into the future but died off slowly anyway if the spill hadn't occurred and therefore there's some number of lost years of loons due to that spill. So the restoration idea was, well if you can keep these lakes undeveloped, there'll be higher fledged success in the nests on these lakes and the life expectancy per fledge is about six years. So for each additional fledge you can provide each additional bird that leaves the nest. On average they live for six years and so you get six loon years per loon that you could restore by increasing the success at these nesting sites. And then the benefits were calculated for 100 years. So they were gonna in perpetuity protect this land but the idea is well we'll look 100 years into the future. Every year this land will provide new nests. Those nests will produce some number of loons. Each one of those would have lived on average for six years. We calculate the number of loon years in quotes produced by this acquisition of property, this protection of the lakes and balance that against the number of loons that were lost. And they estimated that they needed about 33 nesting sites to equate the lost loon years to discounted restored loon years. And this is all discounted and I'm not gonna talk about discounting presumably most people know what that means. So again you preserve 33 nests, those nests will be productive every year into the future for the next 100 years. How many additional loons do you get per nest? You kind of multiply that out and add it up, balance that against the 37, 49 years lost. So that's, okay. So second approach, service to service. I'm gonna go through these other approaches much more quickly. The idea is you replace lost services as opposed to the actual resource with restored services. So recreational uses. You might have lost recreational boating for example because an area was closed to boating for some period. Maybe the boats lost access to the ocean and you have to provide boating services in quotes to offset those losses in boating. Wetlands functions and services would be an example. So you oil a wetland, that wetland would have provided services had it not been oiled and we can look at the services that a typical wetland provides and then come up with restoration plants that balances those services. So the challenge here of course is you have to quantify the services. What services are provided by a wetland for example? Challenging issue. What services are provided by a wetland that was previously operating, became oiled, recovered over time. What is kind of a time path for those services and therefore how much was restored? And then the last approach I'm gonna just very, very briefly talk about is value to value. And here you replace the lost value from the publicly owned resource. The public had some value for the resource and you provide an alternative resource that's in quotes equally valued to those resources that were lost. Obviously great challenges here. So challenges for injury. Obviously quantifying the injuries, difficult establishing the baselines. The baseline really is what would have happened if the spill had not occurred, not necessarily what the conditions were like before the spill. So you need to say, well, the spill occurred, the resources come back, but how long will it take for them to get back to where they would have been had there been no spill? Obviously that's a challenge of predicting what it would have been. So forecasting the natural recovery. And then one of the big issues, one of the potential big issues here is double counting. Double counting is not allowed. You're not supposed to count the same losses twice. And so you have to identify cases where there's potential for double counting and try and avoid that. One example where there's a potential for double counting is when you talk about commercial fisheries. So commercial fish are a publicly owned natural resource and responsible parties are liable for losses to those publicly owned natural resources. That money would be collected by NOAA or somebody and used to restore those commercial fish. But at the same time, fishermen have claims for lost income to fisheries. And so there's a potential there that the same lost fish that are included in one are also included in the other. Challenges with restoration. Identifying successful restoration actions. You have to come up with a bunch of actions that are associated with all the resources that were impacted. Some of these resources, especially if we start thinking about deep water resources that are a mile down in the Gulf of Mexico. We don't know what's there. We don't really necessarily have very good plans for restoring many of those resources, et cetera. We also have to link restoration to action. So what action do you take and what level of resource restoration do you get from that? So I gave the example of loons as kind of how you can go about doing that, at least in that one case. And then again, forecasting restoration, recovery to baseline, and then also the compensatory element of that too. So quantifying restoration of resources. You plan on implementing some programs, say, for wetlands improvements, but what are you actually gonna get out of that over the next 50 years? Well, that's a challenge to do that. Identifying grossly disproportionate. It's gonna cost you some amount of money to do that. Are the benefits grossly disproportionate to the costs? Well, that's a pretty difficult question to answer, especially when you consider things like lost non-use values. Also collateral benefits. If you carry out an action, and not only does it enhance the resource that you're trying to improve, it may also provide other kinds of benefits and what is done with those, if anything. And there also may be collateral injury. You may restore some environment and in doing so, you may cause some damage either in the short term or you may be replacing environment A with environment B. You create an artificial wetland, but there was something there before the wetland was created. Some animals were living there at that point. Those animals might be lost as part of the process of construction, et cetera, et cetera. And the major challenge that I see in a lot of this is that this really is taking place within the context of legal advocacy and not pure science. So it's not really a pure scientific process, but there's the whole legal liability element under there that plays in all different elements of that. So. Well, it's all Kevin's fault. He's the lawyer on this panel, so if advocacy is the problem, he's gonna sort it out for us. Mm-hmm. Yep. Use it. Okay. Good morning. My name is Kevin Dean. I am an attorney and I'm proud to be an attorney and glad all of you guys are in law school. I'm from Molly Rice in Charleston, South Carolina. I do talk a little slower, so I am concerned that I won't get through this in 15 minutes. Luckily, my partner, Don Migliore, who's a champion in your community here and a partner of mine will speak a little faster and maybe get through any points I miss. The reason I wanted to bring up this slide, because I think it's very pertinent to my presentation real quick and my clients who's here, and that is Jill mentioned that right now, as far as both activities and the scientist activities, they are currently still at the very top of this chart collecting data and they haven't even got to the point where they're creating physical fakes of models or something that affects what she means earlier. And they can't get, currently, it's gonna be a while before they can ever figure out exactly what the impact is on our environment, how long this is gonna last, how long it'll go, what the actual scientific data is gonna show for quite a while. So that's very important and important if you can remember that. And I'll flip back to my slides. Now, at the peak of the oil spill, there was over 36% of the Gulf that was affected by the oil spill. The satellite estimates indicate that 20% of juvenile bluefish tuna were killed as a result of the oil spill. In samples of seafood, and I believe Mr. Weatherford mentioned this earlier, but samples of seafood have tested positive for anthracine and it's a toxic hydrocarbon and byproduct. Now, I take issue with whether some of this seafood actually got out into the community and still has the ability because so many of the scientists don't know about a lot of these dispersals. You had snappers and redfish kills all over Louisiana and other portions of these recreational communities. You had thousands of fish and well off were killed. And even after the well was capped, there's continues to be significant effects of the spill that continue to be seen. As of February 2011, just a few months ago, the rate of baby dolphin kills are washing up on the shores of Alabama and Mississippi are 10 times the normal rate. This is not caused from some freak of the environment. It's directly related to what we are going to see in the future with regard to the oil spill and it's going to have a significant impact on our environment. The US Travel Association estimates the economic impact of the oil spill is over 23 billion in a region that supports over 400 travel industries generating 34 billion in revenue annually. So I'm going to talk about the three remedies that are basically available to everyone and what the GCCF is really doing. I'm not going to talk much about state law. Florida has the best law. There's a US Supreme and a Florida Supreme Court opinion that was decided three weeks before the oil spill that gives Florida residents a lot more legal traction in Florida state court and that opinion is called CURD. I was reminded this morning on the ride over, Tim was happy enough to bring us over by Mr. Waldron that I don't know anything about federal maritime law and that's accurate. One thing I did learn in law school is when you are asked a question you don't always have to know the answer except for when you're standing in front of a judge. In front of a jury. So I'm going to skip maritime law let Mr. Waldron talk more about that but I'm going to spend most of my time talking about OPA and its effects on claimants. Pollution Act was passed as a result of the Exxon Valdez spill. It was passed because there was no system set up to compensate victims. The old law, the Robbins Dry Dock US Supreme Court 1927 case said you could not collect economic damages without physical injury to property. And so Congress fixed that with the Oil Pollution Act to provide a wider range of recoveries for potential claimants. There's a variety of damages. There's damages to national resources, damages to real and personal property, damages for loss of subsistence, which is using the waters to feed your own families. Damages for lost taxes, royalties and rents and then damages for lost profits or earning capacity which is a large majority of the 350 clients that I currently represent. Then damages for net cost of public services. Now there's two avenues of recovery under OPA. There's a responsible party, recovery aspect and then there's all liability trust fund. The reason I asked the question earlier this morning was it's gone, the money's gone. And to my knowledge, there's not been a single claim paid by the US Coast Guard. They've all been denied for all of the claims that have been presented. So unfortunately my advice to my clients is to stay away from the old pollution, old trust fund, because it's a waste of time and pursue our remedies through the GCCF until the litigation can extract justice from BP and others. There's strict liability under the Oil Pollution Act. It absolutely makes BP or the responsible parties responsible. And the responsible parties identified by the Coast Guard of the President. The problem with the Oil Pollution Act is that damages are capped at $75 million under the Act. Now fortunately in this case BP has waived that cap. They did it in a letter and in court with the judge. Now OPA does preserve these state law remedies I mentioned in the Florida, but it's a subject matter jurisdiction precedent. You must make a claim under OPA to the responsible party and wait 90 days before you file a lawsuit or go to the US Coast Guard. If you don't do that, then you're subject to having your lawsuit dismissed. Third parties are not named as a responsible party. They're not subject to OPA. Although BP has the right to collect its losses that it pays out under OPA against the other responsible parties. I mentioned OPA, it abolishes Robin's dry dock. Under OPA the president or the Coast Guard can identify responsible parties. Those have been identified as BP's and TransOcean which was the owner of the vessel, the Deepwater Horizon. Now the problem with TransOcean is there's an old maritime law which I have read about. The 1851 Limitation Act that limits, that allows TransOcean to limit its liability to the value of the vessel and its holdings which is currently at 27 million. TransOcean has given notice of requiring people to put their claims forward. There's originally a six month statute of limitations against TransOcean. The judge extended it for six month. That claim deadline expires in seven days. So technically anybody that has a claim against TransOcean must file a claim against TransOcean within seven more days or they'll be forever barred against TransOcean. Now what can the claims process do? Remember it's the responsible party, that's BP that's taking the responsibility at this point in time. BP can deny the claim, they can make a partial payment or they can pay the claim in full. If the claim is not satisfied within 90 days it gives the claim that the opportunity is to pursue other remedies which it currently is filing a lawsuit or going to the Coast Guard but as we now learn today going to the Coast Guard is not going to help us. Now Ken Feinberg was appointed by BP not the President of the United States to serve as the administrator of the fund. Feinberg and I'll let my partner spend more time talking about Mr. Feinberg. I may get out of control. But Mr. Feinberg for months and months and months said he was independent, that he was an independent arbitrator. We filed through the committee, I sit on a motion to have him stripped of those accolades that he was putting into the media. As a matter of fact the judge, Judge Carl Barbier and New Orleans found that Mr. Feinberg was appointed by BP without input from opposing claimants or plaintiff's steering committee and without an order of the court and that he was not a presidential appointee. And if you remember way back those were the things you were reading the news you don't read them anymore. We're still after Feinberg because he won't pay our claimants. It's a 20 billion fund but it's not limited to 20 billion and we believe that the amount of damage is going to exceed that. As a matter of fact as of yesterday when I checked they have paid out currently over $4 billion in claims. Ken Feinberg is being paid 1.25 million dollars every month his firm to administer the GCCF on behalf of BP. This is the letter where pursuant to OPPA they BP's council waived the $75 million cap that allows us to continue to go. The reason they did that is OPPA has a provision if we prove gross negligence then we can overcome the cap anyway and it was obvious this was gross negligence as you've already heard today. There's a lot of different types of claims there's the emergency advance payments that you could make that there's now a system. This is all new to the lawyers, to the claimants, to the regulatory agencies and to a lot of people because it's the first time OPPA has really been tested and looked at. So a lot of it you have to give credit some credit although I hate to do much to Mr. Feinberg and BP but it is the first time that this has been done and in the scale that we're looking at but you've got quick final claims which I believe is what they're doing right now you've heard these five or 25,000 dollar quick pay payments. People are hurting out there you're gonna hear from one of my clients in a minute and people are actually taking these five and 25,000 dollar payments because they can't feed their families or keep their businesses open and what they're doing is they're trying to extract these releases from as many of the over 850,000 claims that have now been filed with the GCCCF for payment. There's also provision under OPPA that you can file for interim payment claims which is what our advice is to our business customers because of Jill's slide that we don't know the true effects of this spill. All of our businesses we believe we need to cycle through at least one summer so we can get some statistical data and some scientific data to be able to advise our clients better. The full review final claims or what we're doing primarily is for individuals and I've already mentioned what I believe Mr. Feinberg's trying to do with getting rid of people. The emergency payment was interesting that the EAP process was over on November the 23rd but and everybody rushed to file their claims. We now as the lawyers on the plaintiff's side believe that they simply did that as an arbitrary deadline to see how many people would come out of the woodworks because it is a fact that my office filed a lot of claims but none of them filed after about November the 5th through November the 23rd were paid a single dime. They were simply denied. The claims during that period were for April 20th through October the 1st. As of April there's been 169,000 claimants that were paid these emergency payments that total about $2.5 billion. Now this is one of the letters that I got in November after I submitted a time of claim before November the 23rd with all the documentation that it needed to get time to consideration and it's a form letter and all the adjusters or all the people at the GCCF had to do was and they were required to tell us why they were denying these claims but if you see on the letter, there is a blank and this is how I got the letter. So I get Hal Chittum calling me wanting to know why his claim has been denied and the only thing I know to do is emailing the letter and telling him figured out on his own because I don't know. But they did this on quite a number of claims and we believe it was done intentionally that really had no reason of intent to pay claims. Okay, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, all support most of the efforts that have been taken by claimants pointing out problems with the GCCF process. The other big issue that I want to raise about the GCCF process is the Proxima Calls issue that they're raising. BP and with all due respect to the Coast Guard, they like to use the word calls by the spiel. Look to the Coast Guard's website this morning and it says calls by the spiel. The truth is, OPPA says as a result of the spiel and so I know it's hair splitting but we believe that the GCCF is placing a heightened standard on what is required for a claimant to prove their damages under OPPA because there is no geographical territorial basis for which you can file a claim. You don't have to have a house sitting on the water. You don't have to have a fishing boat in the water in order to make a claim under OPPA. So it's not tied to geographical proximity but the GCCF wants to try to do so. And it's specifically under OPPA but yet the final protocol from GCCF says a physical proximity that all spilt is one of the main factors that they use in looking at claims. Now, another interesting fact about how many claims have been paid. This is something you can get online and oh by the way, a longer version of this PowerPoint I provided to Susan, it'll be on the website as well as Judge Barbier's letter. I mean his order on the GCCF that I think is very important but you can see the red areas are where there's a concentration of claims and you can get some very good data about how many areas are being paid. Now, we believe there's some politics that goes into what areas get paid and what areas get paid first because there's a lot of these lighter areas that have just as many significant claims but you can see for Florida they go all the way to Key West all the way back up to the Panhandle, Alabama, all over the state, Louisiana, you see the red areas down on the coastal marsh areas, Mississippi, same at the bottom but they do affect others outside those coastal communities. Now, lastly, the way in which they're paying claims right now and it's really hurting businesses like Hal who's fixing to get up here and tell you how it's affected him. They're continuing to violate OPA, they're not paying claims within 90 days and they're putting businesses out of business and individuals in situations where they can't feed their families. They were supposed to pay all losses as they incur for our claimants but they're not doing it in a timely fashion. Their new methodology that they're using, they're saying they're gonna pay 70% of 2010 losses, 30% of 2011 losses into 2012. Now, if you actually do some of the math on that, it basically accounts to, they're only gonna compensate claimants for 16 months of losses which goes back to why I had a subpoena in my pocket I would hand it to Jill and see if she'd go with me to court next time because that's why it's so important for the science community to support in an objective fashion, the claimants to show that we don't know what the true effects of this are. That's why the GCCF compensating and trying to extract releases out of somebody just for a 16 month period is so inadequate. BP has authorization to look at claims over $500,000 to approve them or appeal them although I recently in a phone conversation with an actual GCCF rep had them tell me by phone that they have to get permission by BP to pay any claim over $250,000. So I'll leave you with the thought that it is important to understand that BP is controlling how much money goes out on claimants, when it goes out to claimants what criteria they have to meet and they're doing their darnest to try to get as many releases as they can to get rid of people which we believe is not appropriate but businesses continue to suffer. Thank you and I'll turn it over to Mr. Chittum. Good afternoon, my name is Hal Chittum and I'm the owner of Cutting Horse Yachts and Chittum skiffs were based in St. Augustine, Florida. By the way my presentation wasn't approved by anybody. Thank God. We build very specialized and technologically advanced sport fishing boats and shallow water flats boats, which is a fancy way of saying that we build very, very lightweight expensive boats. I'll give you a little history of flats fishing in case some of y'all aren't familiar with it. Flats fishing really has its roots founded in the Florida Keys and became popular after World War II ended. Fishmen like Ted Williams, a baseball player, came back from the war and discovered how unique and exciting shallow water site fishing when the clear flats could be. This type of fishing is typically more difficult than typical fishing and this quickly found a loyal group of guides and anglers who were building specialized boats and tackle. The boats were small hand-built wood skiffs with small outboard motors. The fish they looked after were tarpon, bonefish, permit, and redfish, to mention a few. The guides would pull the boat quietly across the clear shallow water and the anglers would sight cast individual fish. Most of the fishing was done with a bamboo fly rod and artificial flies. Over the next 30 years, boats changed from wood to fiberglass and the outboard motors got bigger and bigger and the boats also got larger and heavier. The equipment had changed and not always for the best. I had been coming to the Keys since I was 10 years old and for some time for someone addicted to fishing and the water, it was a paradise. After I graduated from college, I headed south and got a job managing a boat company called Hughes Boats. Bob Hughes built the first commercially available flatsboats and became the headquarters for guides and anglers in the early 70s. A few years later, I was living in the Keys guiding fishermen for a living. I did that for about 15 years and during that time, I owned 14 or 15 different boats. I was never satisfied with anyone and I started thinking about designing and building a boat from scratch. All of the early flatsboats were basically rebuilt ski boats or modifications of existing hulls and none were doing what was really needed. In 1979, I decided the time was right and I founded Hell's Bay Boatworks. We were building very lightweight flatsboats using modern materials and technology. The results were dramatic. Our 18 foot boat weighed 750 pounds and the competing boats weighed between 12 and 1800 pounds. This would allow us to put a much smaller motor on and carry much less fuel, which allowed the boats to draw less water, make it easier to pull and basically outfished all the other boats on the market. I sold Hell's Bay Boatworks because I wanted to build larger sport fishing boats between 45 and 85 feet and I knew the same gains could be possible with the technology we used on larger boats. I also had an idea for a new design of a flatsboat that I believed would be the next great leap forward. We formed cutting horse yachts and after several years of designing, prototyping and testing, we were granted a patent on a radical new hull shape. The finished boat was every bit as good as we had hoped and weighs only 425 pounds. Dozens of guides and anglers ran and fished the prototype and were finally ready to begin construction. We planned a big rollout with lots of print media, television shows, using the boat show, using boat shows as an advantage to show our boats off. Our first production boats, our first production boat was delivered the first week of May, 2010. Three weeks after the oil spill began. Our timing could not have been worse. Order cancellation happened immediately and future orders stopped coming. The phone kept ringing and we kept talking to guides and fishermen daily. They wanted new boats but were understandably worried about the consequences of the ongoing oil spill. Large areas of prime fishing grounds were being closed every day and new reports were coming out with dire warnings. The oil will enter the loop current and sweep across the Florida Keys and up the East Coast. A large oil sheen is spotted near the dry tortugas. It got worse and worse daily. Month after month, the oil kept flowing and the headlines were more devastating. We spoke to fishing guides daily and they told us of many cancelers, cancel charters and virtually no future bookings. Clients booked their trips many months in advance and they were worried about committing to a chance that the gold fishing would still be there. There are many places to go with less risk. When the guides anglers are afraid, the fishery is in trouble. They do not want to risk buying a new boat. We have no argument with this. We feel the same way. At this point, no one knows what may happen in the future with this fishery. I have made numerous trips to some of the best fishing areas since this bill. The guiding business continues to be very slow. People are going elsewhere to fish. I was in Louisiana with a guide that has 25 years of experience in an area that he has seen things that he never has seen before. Fish are going to places where he has never seen them and he has seen fish species show up in his area that he's never seen before in 25 years. The last day I spent with him four weeks ago, there were only three boat trailers at the boat ramp and we never saw another boat fishing the flats. This is not a normal situation for a beautiful day during the prime fishing season for big redfish. Oil is still coming ashore in Louisiana and the fisherman we talked to don't believe that millions of gallons of oil just disappeared with no ill effects. If that were not bad enough, we had signed a contract with a well-known fisherman in Florida to build a 68-foot sport fisherman to fish the big marlin tournaments in the Gulf of Mexico. He has a smaller 57-foot sport fisherman now that he uses to fish most of the sailfish tournaments in Florida. And his team has usually ranked number one or two for the last seven years. He needed a larger boat to make the long runs in the Gulf of Mexico necessary for marlin fishing. After months of watching the oil flow, almost all the tournaments, the marlin tournaments in the Gulf of Mexico were canceled and our client canceled the boat order. We really can't argue with his philosophy. He does not need a boat now that he can't fish those tournaments and we don't know when the tournaments will come back or if they'll come back. This was a $5 million sail that we lost and we've already invested several million dollars and many years of our lives to design, prototype and build moles for the most fuel-efficient boats of their type. We have several other boats that are ready to go into production to finish their design phase, but they are totally on hold at this point. We know how to build boats that fishermen need and want. But with the oil spill, may have put us in a position which may never recover. I've got a few slides here that may explain a little bit more of what we do with our boats and shallow water fishing. When I came to the Keys in the early 70s, I lived about 200 yards away from Ted Williams. I didn't know Ted Williams was a baseball player, I just knew he was a fisherman. He kind of liked that. I was lucky, I got to spend a lot of time with Ted and fish with Ted quite a few times and this was kind of the heyday of the fishing when it really got started. I'll show you a few more pictures of boats, there's some of the earlier boats. This was Island Rod of Fishing Club where I got it out of for 15 years, 1960 circa. Big heavy boats, larger engines. By the way, these may horrify you with the pictures of dead tarpon. This was 50 years ago or 40 years ago and this doesn't happen anymore. Tarpon are now strictly released. The fellow on the left is a very good friend of mine who's pushing seven years old and still guides more than 250 days a year in Olomarada. This was one of my earlier experiences of boat building. There weren't any manufacturers so I bought seven ski boat hulls in Thompson Boat Company in Canada, brought them down a truck and these two boats in the front there were sold to friends of mine and let them have them custom built. This is the drawing of our new boat. It was a difficult boat to build. We spent almost three years working the design of this boat to make it as perfect as we possibly could. This is building a finished boat recently. This was our first prototype launch. You can see the boat's very, very light, floats very high in the water. There was a dismal failure. We made 60-some changes to this boat and changed it over and over and over again. Our naval architect, after six months, we joked we almost had to put him on suicide watch. He had no idea where to go. But we, after many, many changes, here's another one, another failure. This is the finished boat. This boat can be built as little as 425 pounds which for about 18 feet long is incredibly light and quite often we'll run these things with a 60 horsepower motor. That chicken boat goes 43 miles an hour with two guys on it and fuel. It gets fuel economy like a Toyota Prius. It's close to 10 miles per gallon on the water cruising speed. This is setting up tarpon fishing in Alamorada. It's blowing about 30 miles an hour and the tarpon come down that light colored edge there. About 10 seconds after that was taken, he did hook a nice 130-pound fish. That is a casting basket that we also developed and patented to keep the line under control when you're fishing. This is Louisiana, back in December. This is a guy named Greg Arnold, very, very well-known guy in Louisiana. Interesting enough, we were building Greg's boat when the oil spill happened and he, at that point, was shut out of his fishing area and we had to work with Greg and he found someone else to buy the boat. So I think Greg is trying to buy the boat back from this gentleman now because he couldn't afford to pay for it since he was locked out of his fishery. Nice, fat, red fish in Louisiana. That's our boat with Greg. Happy angler. That's just a pretty picture. We kind of think that's what everybody's looking for, a pristine, beautiful flat with no damage. Thank you very much. We've got about five minutes for questions. The first panel, oh, so many. I'm gonna start back with the time of the glory. I understand from the DP fund that DP can actually recover its own cost of cleaning from its fund that's its funding and that Mr. Piper has managed and so it's part of the initial design of it. And I was wondering whether that's actually happened over to those that the attention to wherever so is that. I think he's asking me. He's so hard. He should have texted me this question. Actually, it is true that VP has made claims back against the fund for some of its removal activities, but OPPA doesn't provide for that, is my understanding. There is no provision under OPPA that allows the responsibility to collect back from its own fund that it created. But what you have to remember, this is a mandated process, but it was not, it was voluntary as to the amount. They could have put three billion in there if they wanted to to start with. So what they did is VP makes five billion dollars every three or every four months. And so what they did, they figured out they would put one year's worth of net income into this fund. And they did, by December 31st, they fully funded the 20 billion dollars. I just don't know the numbers, but they have made claims as I understand it back against the fund to collect some of their money. And it's the same issue that I was talking about, oh, that concerns me, that the liability trust fund is broken down. Quick comment on that, though it would be that the oil spill had been trust fund responsible party if it deemed not responsible, at that point they had to make a claim against the fund. So if VP were to find that they weren't involved in some measure of that response and maybe it was trans-ocean or someone else, if they voluntarily put our resources to respond and they were found that response, they were not responsible party, even though in this case that's not the case, they could then make a claim against the fund. That has happened with other companies that responded on behalf of a spill, but then felt it wasn't their oil and weren't sure. And then later on, they claim against the fund itself, which they managed. Oh, so many hands. I can only take two and I'm sorry, all right. So you were first and you were next, and that's it. So this is a legal thing. My name's Ray Recovery, I've been Coast Guard 34 years at District High, I'm back and going out in my own state. Last six months I spent at the oil spill, three of those months I was actually the incident commander, so it was that in the lab. During this response, another big spill, so it happened on a lot of spills, but in a lot of big spills, this is kind of something that I had to deal with as an incident commander to make decisions that fell into the ethical realm. And when you have an ethical issue, obviously I'm gonna have to leave it to the social. And so I'm gonna give you an example of what happened. I'm gonna direct my question towards you. If you've had to deal with this, my example is that if you're not related, I don't want to contaminate that at all. But make an operational decision on something like this. It's not intuitive, okay. A lot of work on it was going to respond to the 50 year, a lot of science, a lot of technology, a lot of best practices. And so that's what you kind of want to make sure to see. Our response gets bigger, something of this nature. Other factors come into play, political issues. The media is pushing a lot of information out there, particularly now at this incident, when we talked about the immediate communication realm that we were in and stuff, and the public gets a lot of information. Public trust came into play. Is the public trusting you? They're getting information, might not be right, but they don't trust you. As a key success factor, we go forward to the media, we've got the fact that I didn't go into the White House and stuff. I'll give you an example. And this is when you guys remember the ship, the whale that was there, that was that big tanker that was built over the year. And they brought it in, and they cut the hull off so they could try to move water and pick up water and stand it up. Not a nerdy one, but this is an example of this. We knew BP, because we knew that that was not going to work. Like experts, the engineers, we knew that that was not going to work. Long story short is, BP paid for that, millions of dollars for that thing to operate. Why? Because it had nothing to do with technology, science, it had to practice it. It was a public trust, it was a movie, it was a type of book. You kind of want to do that to say no, you've got negative implications. I'm going to tell you that also happened. Okay? There were actions, not only in this film, I don't want to focus this film, but some of the big spills were, sometimes because those dynamics are happening, and you do things because of the public push of elected officials and pushing or something like that, that might not be in the best interest of the blind dramatic, it might cause more blind than the damage. But if you go forward and do a BP, he did that shift and they understood that they paid for it and stuff like that. Okay, here where I'm going with this, in the nerdy process, okay, if you have an RP, you're not necessarily still on a BP, because an RP has been going forward during the response and taking actions that they kind of knew, probably wasn't the best thing to do, but because of now these other external factors, which are way in extremely heavy on you, okay? They only take that, and there's more damage caused. The scenario formula, a lot of them come back and say, wait a minute, I, you know, there was damage caused by gear, and because this was not a good, a good response decision made based on science, technology, that practices these other factors came to play. I know that's a tough one. I have to be honest, there's some instances I kind of wish an RP would put back the time on that, because this setting expectations, you know, they get those decisions, maybe not in this field, but in another field, another field where the government might be paying for the tax dollars, that's that ethical piece that you kind of is struggling with. Do I care if BP cares about spending more money? I think he wants to, okay, they understand what it means just to their company, too. So you understand what's going on? Yeah, and I'm not so sure that I'm ultimately qualified. I don't know if Dave has a good answer for that as well. A short answer is any damage is caused during the response. It's claimable under natural resource damage assessment. So whether it was a foolish mistake or retrospect wasn't the right thing, they can argue that if there were circumstances that it doesn't matter, and if the damage was caused, it's damaged the environment and that's compensatable under natural resources. You need to recognize that you're saying, no, that isn't the standard practice that you're doing, Dave. You don't think that's going to cause more damage than good to the environment and certain people do. Now they may want to do a fight outside of that process for that action, but under current, it's a problem. So a perfect example of that Exxon Valdez, you know, they're cleaning rocks and the question when you're cleaning stuff like that is how hot do you make the water? You get the rocks nice and clean if you steam clean them, but you won't do all kinds of biological damage. And because of political pressure, they went beyond the water temperature that I think everybody there, everybody who knew what they were doing knew they shouldn't have gotten that hot. And now the people are coming back and saying, oh, because you use this extremely hot water and steam, it can cause more damage. And the responsible party is ultimately liable for that. Last question, John, then we're going to break for lunch. Okay, well, real quick, just to clarify, I hope that any works that it is to do with that, we're talking about an offshore facility. Does it's a liability for an offshore facility that's unlimited to move across in 75 million? BP, and there are many cases since open 90 where the responsible party's been successful. Once they reach their limits of liability, they'll stay in the spill, they'll pay money beyond the limits of liability on desiccations. And they'll go to the bank's pollution funds that are going to be compensated for anything above their limits of liability. Humans are broken, they've done a number of times. But in this case, since BP has gone to court, written letters say they'd waived them as a liability, it seems to me that the National Pollution Fund Center would reject any claims saying he waived them. So they're not going to go there. And just interesting comment, I'm thinking back to the days of Exxon about these, one of the things that was so important about that response was there was no fund back in those days. And it was really important to make sure that Exxon stayed in the spill. And we have the same situation here at 25 years later where it is that we don't have that money in the fund. I think we've got the same problem. We need to fix this. Thank you. Break for lunch and get back here as soon as you can.