BP’s New Cover-Up Revealed

Cross-posted from Shannyn Moore’s website and via The Mudflats.

We’re getting reports from the gulf that BP is involved in another cover-up – in the literal meaning.

BP is trucking in sand to cover up the oil. Let me repeat that – instead of cleaning up the oil they are just bringing in sand from other beaches and covering it up. In the photos and the video you can see the layering of Grand Isle, LA sand, oil and then a sand of a different type. Photo-journalists have four independent confirmations by local Sheriff’s in Grand Isle, Louisiana.

CS Muncy, a freelance photo-journalist from New York has gone down to report the story on his own dime. He’s a friend of The Mudflats and has sent us these photos to get the word out. We’re asking you to support his work, you can donate through PayPal to OilSpillStory@gmail.com – Click the link here.

Video by Save Our Shores‘s Judson Parker

In an interview Wednesday with journalist Allison Kilkenny, Muncy said he “went down onto the beaches, and we started inspecting them. There were tar balls, tar residue, and there was some oil on the beach. Apparently, the day before there was a lot of tar balls, and BP was working in the area pretty heavily, and we started noticing there was a different consistency in the sand.”

Muncy added:

Closer to shore, there was this grainy, very rough shell-filled sand, and then you could see almost like a border where it just spilled over onto the beach sand, which is a very fine-grained sand. And it looked as if it was dumped. I mean, you could dig a few inches down, and you could see that it was a different type of sand beneath that, you know, without all the shell and grit, and what not. It looked very much like that. Our first assumption was, yeah, that they were dumping sand to cover up the tar balls. You know, when I first said that…to me, it sounded conspiratorial – more so than I usually think. But then, soon after, we were stopped by some local sheriffs – actually, scratch that, they weren’t local sheriff – they were working for the local sheriff, but these guys were bussed in from… (C.S. asks Judson if he remembers where they were bussed in from) …from Jefferson Parish – from way up north – he was a city guy, and there were two of them that stopped us, and they weren’t unpleasant about it – they weren’t mean – but we could hear them talking on the radio, and their job was to run us off. So they told us, no more pictures – at least no more pictures of them. In fact, they stopped me from going out onto the beach a little bit further, and taking more pictures. But, you know, we got to talking with the guy, one of them, and he said, ‘Yeah, they came here, and just dumped a bunch of sand on the beach.’ They were just shoveling it on. We could see the erosion and where the tar still was, and there was a total separate point from where the sand was dumped on.

UPDATE: The Times-Picayune reported Thursday that the Coast Guard “has put new restrictions in place across the Gulf Coast that prevent the public – including news photographers and reporters covering the BP oil spill – from coming within 65 feet of any response vessels or booms on the water or on beaches.

According to a news release from the Unified Command, violation of the “safety zone” rules can result in a civil penalty of up to $40,000, and could be classified as a Class D felony. Because booms are often placed more than 40 feet on the outside of islands or marsh grasses, the 65-foot rule could make it difficult to photograph and document the impacts of oil on land and wildlife, media representatives said.

Shannyn Moore is an award winning broadcaster, political commentator, and blogger based in Anchorage, Alaska. She can be heard on her daily talk radio show in Alaska on KUDO 1080AM Anchorage and KXLJ 1330AM Juneau from 11am-2pm AST. Her weekly television show, Moore Up North, is broadcast every Saturday at 4pm statewide on KYES Channel 5. Shannyn was a contributing author to the 2009 book on Sarah Palin titled Going Rouge.