RAPID Proposal to Conduct a Comparative Study of Community Impacts of the 2010 BP Oil Spill

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On April 20, 2010 the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig owned by Transocean Ltd. and contracted to British Petroleum (BP) exploded and started burning in the Northern Gulf of Mexico. Located 50 miles off-shore, the rig sank leaving a breached wellhead gushing an estimated 20,000 barrels of oil per day. Initial attempts to stop the spill have been unsuccessful and experts estimate it could take up to three months or more to stop the flow of crude oil. The spill threatens several "at-risk" industries along the Northern Gulf including commercial and recreational fishing, tourism, and other enterprises tied to natural resources. Initial social impacts are already unfolding and are likely to continue and evolve over time. This RAPID research project will focus on how the BP oil spill affects renewable resource communities and groups. This unfolding disaster draws comparisons to the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill (EVOS) in terms of ecological, cultural, social, and economic damage and disruption, as well as potential long-term impacts. Over the past 21 years, this research team has documented human impacts of the EVOS with a focus on the community of Cordova, AK and this project builds upon and extends this research to the current BP spill. The overarching goal of the study is to capture highly perishable, time sensitive data regarding ways in which stakeholders in renewable resource communities along the northern Gulf of Mexico are reacting to this oil spill disaster. Specifically, the research team will focus thier data gathering activities on the community of Bayou La Batre, Alabama in order to make social scientific comparisons to Cordova. The research team will collect qualitative and quantitative data on how the disaster impacts not only the ecology of the region but the social and cultural systems of the residents. They will draw on research designs and instruments used in their previous EVOS studies to develop and conduct structured face-to-face interviews with purposive sample of individuals from key stakeholder groups and self-administered surveys to a random sample of community households. Primary data will be collected at two points in time with interviews occurring first, followed by the survey. They will begin by initiating a community case study of Bayou La Batre. This research will not only assist the research team in assessing the wider application of the theories and methodologies they have developed over the last 20 years researching the social, cultural, and psychological impacts of the EVOS, but has the potential to inform policy makers about effects outside of environmental and economic that can have a major impact on local community sustainability.