Gulf Oil Spill Story Revised Two Months After Publication

Examiner pulls and revises Gulf news story two-months-old, citing lack of independent confirmation.  

(TAMPA, FL) – Writing a story on the Gulf oil spill can cause a reporter to lose  sleep, especially if you live on the Gulf coast and are concerned about the health effects of the oil spill.  Maryann Tobin is a reporter for the Examiner.com, lives on the Gulf coast, south of Tampa, and sometimes loses sleep like most of us writing about this environmental nightmare.   
           
Maryann Tobin’s news story, “Florida Gulf Oil Spill: Plans to Evacuate Tampa Bay in Place” was pulled by the Examiner yesterday. This story was originally published back in May.  The source of the story was a Oil Price.com’s Wayne Madsen Report (WMR) of May 6st.   Tobin has written a series of hard hitting news stories  on the BP Gulf oil spill for several weeks.   The Examiner, based in Denver, CO, operates a network of news websites, allowing citizen journalists to share their knowledge on a blog-like platform in several hundred markets in the United States and Canada. Tobin is based in Brooksville, Fl, about 50 miles north of Tampa, where any story on the impact of the BP Gulf spill gets readers’ attention. 

Writing for the Examiner is a tough way to make a living. The Washington Post in  “The Examiner.com Now Wants to Become A Bastion Of Citizen Journalism,” reported that “writers are vetted and paid based on how many page views and advertising clicks their articles can produce.

I had used Tobin’s news story as a source in an article published this week on VeteransToday.com.  In Tobin’s original story, she reported that FEMA has plans to evacuate the Tampa Bay area in the event of a controlled burn of surface oil in the Gulf of Mexico, or if wind or other conditions were expected to take toxic fumes through Tampa Bay.    

There’s a very high reader interest in Gulf oil news stories.  The latest count of page views of my VeteransToday.com story of the FEMA plan to evacuate the Tampa Bay area showed 112,705 views and 145 reader comments as of July 1st. 

Why change the original story to only suggest the possibility of a plan to evacuate some in Tampa Bay?  A follow-up telephone call with Maryann Tobin did not provide any other clues other than her immediate boss had pulled the original story and wanted the revision published in its place. 

The  modified version, “Florida Gulf oil spill: Plans to evacuate some in Tampa Bay is suggested possibility” was published in place of the original version today.  

Today’s story in the Examiner said  that “the article has since been clarified to explain that the alleged plans were not independently confirmed and referred only to some people with respiratory problems along the coast in the event of controlled burns.  The information in the article came from an OilPrice.com report stating that “there are plans to evacuate people with respiratory problems, especially those among the retired senior population along the west coast of Florida, before officials begin burning surface oil near the coastline.”

The revised report reads  like a CPA audit report with enough disclaimers to confuse just about everyone who reads the story. 

It’s incomprehensible to me that FEMA or any other government agencies would not have planned for an orderly evacuation of those with respiratory problems if the toxic smoke from a BP burn-off was planned for any Gulf coast community. 

Crude oil and dispersants contain dangerous toxic chemicals. Medical experts support the toxicity of crude oil the need to relocate if there’s a persistent petroleum odor.  For everyone  in Tampa that doesn’t mean you should head to Boston at the first sign of a petroleum odor.

Dr. Kathy Burns, a toxicologist, in “Gulf Oil Spill Hazards” wrote that, “Crude oil contains hundreds of chemicals, many of them known to be toxic to people.”  Many of these chemicals are volatile, moving from the oil to the air and therefore can reach people many miles from the spill.    

Dr. Michael Harbut, a physician who has treated people who are made sick by chemical exposures, said that “if there is a persistent petroleum odor where you live or work, and you wonder if you should relocate for  awhile, the answer is probably yes.”

It’s a good bet that SOMEONE pressured the Examiner to pull and revise a two month old news story.  Is this part of a wider BP/government effort to keep “the lid” on Gulf oil spill  story? 

One Florida resident emailed me this week to say that she had called the Coast Guard to find out more information about the plan to evacuate Tampa Bay, if there was need for BP to burn-off crude oil.  She was told there was no such plan and the Coast Guard was trying to locate the source of the rumor. 

For Gulf  coast residents, I hope that FEMA or some other government agency, in fact, has plans to evacuate those individuals with respiratory problems, if there’s a need to burn crude oil and these individuals are at risk of  exposure.   To do nothing exposes people to an unacceptable health risk.   If there are no plans for this threat, then we  surely are in trouble. 

Maryann Tobin can be reached by email at: [email protected].