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” “My life has been insane,” said Hooper-Bui, who said she has been flooded with media requests in the past few weeks. Hooper-Bui said her complaints have resonated with a number of similar researchers. “It became really kind of a common theme,” she said. in the Times piece, entitled “a Gulf Science Blackout,” Hooper-Bui argued that problems with access, funding and “secrecy contracts” have hampered scientific efforts to determine exactly how damaging the spill has been — and what needs to happen to clean it up. as BP and government officials struggled to clean up the oil washing ashore in the months after the rig sank, officials blocked off huge swaths of territory from public access for health and safety reasons. But Hooper-Bui said the restrictions, which still persist in some places, are preventing independent scientists like her from collecting the data they need. “If there’s not equal access, the results are going to be skewed,” she said. Hooper-Bui said the problems with access were eased when Unified Command began scaling back the scope of the restricted areas. But “it’s still happening,” she said. “last week somebody told me they were blocked,” Hooper-Bui said. Hooper-Bui said her team is planning an expedition to the coast in the near future for more sample collection. “We are not confident we’ll get access,” she said. But Hooper-Bui’s complaints aren’t universal. Gregory Stone, director of the University’s Coastal Studies Institute, said he hasn’t been hindered. “I’ve been down there quite a bit, and I haven’t had any problems,” Stone said of the Gulf Coast. Stone oversees the Wave-Current-Surge Information System for Coastal Louisiana, or WAVCIS, program, which uses a network of stations throughout the Louisiana coast to gather data on the makeup and movement of water in the Gulf. Stone said two of his monitoring stations have been out of commission for most of the disaster, and he can’t repair them because Unified Command required his divers to get hazardous materials training before going below the surface.

But Stone said the safety requirement — while it prevents him from fixing the stations and retrieving valuable data — is necessary. “this is a terrible incident, and I’m not going to put my divers in danger,” he said. The training costs $25,000. Stone said he was able to get the money from Shell. But not everyone is so fortunate in finding funding. Hooper-Bui said independent scientists like her must often operate on meager budgets provided by their institutions and grants obtained from outside agencies. The funds pale in comparison to, for example, the huge corporate funds BP can muster or the money flowing into the government’s Natural Resource Damage Assessment program, aimed at quantifying the damage caused by the spill. “We’re operating on a shoestring here,” Hooper-Bui said. But those BP and government contracts don’t just come with funds — they also come with confidentiality agreements that prevent contracted researchers from talking to anyone, including the larger scientific community, about their findings, both professors say. both the government and BP are trying to build legal cases for the inevitable onslaught of litigation that will continue far after the immediate crisis is done. The consequences of those lawsuits will be drastically affected by the quantifiable damage each side can “prove” the spill caused. “It’s all about building a case,” Stone said. Stone, who has worked in conjunction with both BP and the government, said he has been approached to sign on as a contractor. He refused. Independent researchers face problems with oil spill studies

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