pnj.com | Despite persistent denials from BP last week, thousands of pounds of weathered oil is being pulled from under the surface of Pensacola Bay every day.
During more than a dozen interviews last week, BP officials and spokespeople for a number of government agencies working on the Deepwater Horizon Oil spill response denied knowledge of oil in the bay.
Even as they spoke, however, Escambia County officials and local fishermen were reporting finding weathered oil, as they've been doing for weeks. BP's own crews were hand-scooping it up, and a submerged-oil team from BP's Deepwater Horizon Response Incident Command Post in Mobile was investigating.
"BP says it's all gone, but it's not. I've known it was out there for a month," said a commercial fisherman who asked not to be identified because he is working for BP in the cleanup and feared losing his job.
"We were recovering it in a boat ... scooping it up out of sand and dumping it into bags. They're just trying to keep it quiet. Out of sight, out of mind."
On Friday, Coast Guard Lt. Stephen West with the Incident Command Post finally confirmed an area of oil a quarter of a mile long and up to 50 to 60 feet off Barrancas Beach at Pensacola Naval Air Station.
He also confirmed that buckets of sunken oil were being pulled up in another area of Pensacola Bay, near Fort Pickens at Gulf Islands National Seashore.
On Saturday, Scott Piggott, who heads the Escambia and Santa Rosa cleanup operation for BP, said cleanup workers began noticing the submerged oil at Barrancas Beach in July.
"The last month, we've spent considerable effort to get people to concentrate on that," he said. "Then we notice the same phenomenon at the Fort Pickens site, and cleanup has been going on there for two weeks."
The statements from West and Piggott follow the federal government's claim earlier this month that 70 percent of the oil is gone, with much of it dissolved like sugar in tea, according to one White House official said earlier this month.
They also came after Escambia County supplied the News Journal with two of BP's daily reports to the county about the cleanup