Disaster that never was: Why claims that BP created history's worst oil spill may be the most cynical spin campaign ever

The warm, white sand stretches for miles as clean and flat as a freshly laundered bed sheet.



The turquoise sea is so clear that I can see silvery fish playing around my toes as I take a cooling paddle.



If there is any more pristine resort in which to spend a summer holiday than Pensacola Beach, on the Gulf Coast of Florida, I would like to find it.



And yet, at a time of year when usually there is barely room to unfold a deckchair, the shore is eerily deserted.



THEN: At the height of the oil spill, Pensacola Beach was an obvious victim

NOW: David Jones shows how quickly the beach has recovered from the spill

Ask Pensacola’s fretfully quiet seafront traders why the tourists have all stayed away and they angrily recall one chaotic day back in late June.



Then, hungry for dramatic TV footage to support Barack Obama’s announcement, that the BP - or, as he preferred, ‘British Petroleum’ - oil spill was ‘the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced’, news networks descended on their town.



They quickly found what they were looking for: shocking images of Pensacola’s famously white beaches thickly-coated with sticky, black crude oil and apparently beyond salvation.



The apocalyptic message was reinforced in doom-laden interviews with locals. ‘It’s damn near biblical. This place is done for!’ lamented 36-year-old Kevin Reed, whose family have swum and sunbathed in the area for generations.



His anguish was understandable.



Broader success: Pensacola Beach is no isolated success story. The beach at Pass Christian, Mississippi, has also been cleaned remarkably

Yet, as I saw this week, nothing could be further from the truth. Strolling along the beach for an hour, I found just one, pea-sized tar-ball which crumbled to nothing between my fingers.



When, as a young boy, I played on Morecambe beach in Lancashire, worse things often washed up from the nearby ICI refinery.



Moreover, if the U.S. TV news crews had returned just three days after their original visit, they would have seen that the black morass had already been removed by some of the 20,000 clean-up workers hired by BP.



The workers are still there - only now they are using toothbrushes to sift out even the tiniest particles of oil.



But, of course, after a ‘catastrophic’ oil spill, a spotless beach doesn’t make dramatic viewing and who wants to know?



Bouncing back: Experts, both from the government and from BP's oil recovery teams, say wildlife his recovered well - fish stocks especially

Certainly not the politicians, nor the green-lobby tub-thumpers, nor the compensation claimants and their mega-bucks lawyers.



Until this week, it didn’t fit with the White House’s British-bashing script, either. In recent days, though, we have witnessed an extraordinary U-turn in America’s attitude towards the great spill.



It began when a respected Time magazine environmental writer voiced the near-heretical proposition: that the effects of the Deepwater Horizon disaster on April 20 had been massively hyped.



His article was largely based on the opinions of Professor Ivan van Heerden, a brilliant but controversial marine scientist fired by Louisiana State University after publishing a book about Hurricane Katrina that said cataclysmic flooding was inevitable because the protection given to the coast was wholly inadequate.



He said: ‘There is just no data to suggest this is an environmental disaster - although BP lied about the size of the oil spill, we’re not seeing catastrophic impacts.’

Also recovering: Marsh grasses, with new growth, are seen along the Louisiana coastline

Emboldened by the academic’s willingness to go against the accepted wisdom, other leading scientists have concurred, with similar views being expressed in influential U.S. newspapers such as the New York Times and Washington Post.



It was against this background that the Obama administration made its own dramatic U-turn this week.



In a humiliating climb-down, it conceded in an official report from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that the ‘vast majority’ of the spilled oil had already gone.



The rest, it said, had probably diluted and didn’t appear to pose much of a threat.



According to 25 leading U.S. government and independent scientists, the feared catastrophe to the coast’s fragile ecosystem had been averted.



The cynical spin from Washington suggested that Obama had successfully browbeaten BP into mopping up its mess - with Mother Nature lending a helping hand.

What more suitably upbeat message with which to mark the president’s 49th birthday?



So were the doom-mongers really so wrong, and if so, then why?



Why was one of Britain’s greatest companies so demonised? Why did America’s politicians and president so hysterically over-react?

In order to get to the bottom of one of the most shameful buck-passing operations in recent times, I spent this week with those involved at the sharp end.

Pensacola just happened to be my first stop. Quite clearly, one clean beach doesn’t begin to tell the full story - particularly as it is relatively easy to remove oil from sand, whereas the sensitive wetlands further west are altogether more difficult to repair.

Journeying from Florida, through Alabama to the vast, swampy bays of southern Louisiana, however, what struck me most forcibly was that everything looked so normal.



What a contrast to the scenes I witnessed 21 years ago reporting on America’s previous worst oil disaster, when the Exxon Valdez supertanker spilled hundreds of thousands of barrels of crude oil into the Prince William Sound, Alaska.



Taking a close look: Even when U.S. President Barack Obama visited the Gulf coast at the beginning of the crisis, it was difficult to see the impact

Then, I flew over huge, multi-coloured ribbons of oil and waded into thigh-deep pools of the stuff - horrible proof that the Exxon chiefs were lying when they claimed no oil had reached the remote bays.



I spent another grim day helping animal rescuers to scrub matted seabirds and otters.



The area’s ecology was devastated, and an estimated 250,000 birds and 2,800 otters died, plus hundreds of seals and at least 22 killer whales.



But last Wednesday in the Gulf of Mexico, when I went out with one of the Shore Clean-up Assessment Teams (SCAT), whose job is to observe the coastline and chart the location and condition of oil pollution, I felt at times as though I was on an enjoyable sea-nature tour.



One British journalist, who was guided by a populist Louisiana politician whose agenda was obviously to exaggerate the problems, reported seeing extensive areas of oil and claimed ‘fresh waves’ were still swamping wetland areas - even though the BP rig was finally capped three weeks ago.



PR disaster: CEO Tony Hayward's hapless bungling caused untold damage to BP's image in the U.S.

Of course, since an estimated 200 million gallons has gushed into the Gulf since April and around 50 million gallons remain in the water or on the shore (four times more than the entire Exxon Valdez spill), it is hardly surprising that some heavy pockets can be still found.



But what is truly remarkable is that they are so few and far between. Sailing from early morning to mid-afternoon in sweltering heat on Wednesday, the team I accompanied charted the coastline of two marshy islands off Louisiana’s southernmost tip, Casse-tete and Calumet, covering some 25 miles.



With fishermen still banned from returning to the waters until a final all-clear is given - and charging $2,000 (£1,250) a day to rent their flat-bottom boats to spill response workers, it is clear why BP has been forced to make available a staggering £12.5billion for the clean up, compensation and other legal obligations.



But as our team leader, 41-year-old scientist Stephane Grenon, told me as we skimmed across the shallows, using a craft able to reach the shore is the only sure way to tell whether oil is present.



This is because the wetland fringes in this region are always surrounded by a thick, dark-brown plant sediment known as ‘coffee ground’ for its resemblance to the dregs left at the bottom of the cup.



Even from a few feet away, this sediment can be very easily mistaken for oil, and often when passing boats or aircraft report spotting oil on the shore, this is what they have really seen.



This is one reason why the extent of the coastal oiling has been exaggerated. Indeed, Grenon, a veteran of 25 spills, says he is constantly amazed at how little pollution he finds.



He says: ‘I know it sounds ridiculous, but it’s probably the largest spill there has ever been and yet there’s hardly any oil.



‘The ecosystem around here is also used to oil. It’s been here forever, and there are more than 4,000 oil wells in the Gulf.



‘So there are spills and natural seepage all the time, and the fish and plants adapt to deal with them. I’m confident the area will make a full recovery.’



Grenon works for a BP-contracted spill clean-up company, but suspicions that he may have been painting an over-rosy picture were allayed by the three other scientists in the team who represented the federal and state governments.



‘I expected to see miles of oil, but I haven’t seen that,’ said one of the team, David Culpepper, a geologist with NOAA.



‘I’ve been out on the water about 25 days, and I’ve only seen one dead bird - and I’m not even sure if that had any oil on it. And I’ve probably seen ten dead fish.’



Our skipper, Gerrard Cheramie - no BP apologist, but a gnarled Creole fisherman who knows these waters so well that he can sniff the scent of speckled trout shoals - was equally realistic.



He said: ‘The waves here are like a washing machine and you can already see they’re rinsing the oil away. Because the fisheries have been closed down as a precaution, I think our catches will be bigger than ever when we are allowed back.’



His one nagging worry, though, is that the oil may have sunk to the bottom of the sea or that the 1.8 million gallons of chemical dispersant will cause some as-yet unrevealed damage to the fish and shrimp breeding grounds.



It is a fear that has been voiced by some scientists, including Professor Ian MacDonald, an eminent Florida State University oceanographer, who dismisses this week’s U.S. government’s report that 75 per cent of the oil has gone as an unsatisfactory mixture of science and spin and warns that worrying unknowns remain.



'I know it sounds ridiculous, but it’s probably the largest spill there has ever been... and yet there’s hardly any oil. The ecosystem around here is also used to oil. It’s been here forever, and there are more than 4,000 oil wells in the Gulf. So there are spills and natural seepage all the time, and the fish and plants adapt to deal with them. I’m confident the area will make a full recovery.'

However, our captain’s fleeting doubts evaporated when he spotted a plump shrimp jumping magically from the waves.



‘Look at that! Sure looks healthy enough, don’t it?’ he exclaimed.



On Bird Island, we passed hundreds of pelicans nestling unsullied in the mangrove thickets. Then later we spotted pods of dolphins at play, redfish and the fin of a blacktip shark.



Surely these species wouldn’t have been so plentiful in a sick or dying environment? Although parts of the shoreline were stained with what David Culpepper termed a ‘bathtub ring’ of oil residue, new green shoots were already sprouting through, indicating that their roots were undamaged.



And at the day’s end, the team concurred that almost all the area they surveyed had improved or at least remained in the same condition in which it was found when last inspected a few weeks ago.



According to Dr Ed Owens, the veteran British oil spill expert who runs the SCAT teams, there are several reasons why the Gulf appears to have escaped so incredibly lightly.



First, the type of light oil that leaked here dissipates far more quickly than the medium crude that pumped from the Exxon Valdez, particularly in these warm waters.



Second, powerful currents from the enormous Mississippi Delta swept much of the oil away from the shore. In addition, there is the undeniable success of the clean-up effort, which is far more sophisticated and effective than those used to tackle previous disasters.



The combined result of these factors is clear from the statistics. Although more than 9,000 miles of shoreline lies within reach of the Deepwater Horizon rig, just 369 miles have been oiled - and only 53 of them with what are classed as ‘heavy’ deposits.

Compare this with the Exxon when, though the spill was 20 times smaller, the oil was so persistent and spread so widely that more than 2,000 miles of coastline were hit - and even today lumps of tar are occasionally found trapped between the rocks.



So, in Barack Obama’s words, which of these two terrible spills was ‘the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced’?



Back in mid-June, with approval of his presidency at an all-time low in the opinion polls, and critics drawing parallels between his mishandling of the BP crisis and the Hurricane Katrina fiasco that forever tarnished George Bush’s reputation, the answer was obvious.



Not only was it important for him to be seen to recognise the worst-case scenario - and appear to be doing everything he could to avert it - but he needed to find a scapegoat.



Thus, he turned on BP - a nominally British company, though half of its top executives and the majority of its workers are Americans - with a vengeance.



The company’s response was a public relation’s horror show, with its now sacked chief executive Tony Hayward the chief culprit.



He stonewalled questions put to him by a U.S. congressional sub-committee and at the height of the crisis he went yachting at Cowes.



And though it now seems he was right to describe the spill as a ‘drop in the ocean’, his timing and choice of phrase were appallingly ill-judged, especially as 11 oil rig workers died in the Deepwater explosion.



As a result, a staggering £43 billion has been wiped off the value of BP, and the company’s share price has plunged from 655p before the will to 425p, hitting many ordinary British people whose pension portfolios include the company’s stock.



What a terrible mess. And now, far too late, Obama tells us, without any hint of apology, that it isn’t really so bad after all.



If he had heard the pathetic cries of dying otters and seabirds in Alaska two decades ago, perhaps he would have chosen his words more carefully.