Governor Bob Riley
State Capitol
Montgomery, AL

Dear Governor Riley,

As you know, on April 22, 2010, the semi-submersible drill platform Deepwater Horizon sank in nearly 1,200 m of water in the northern Gulf of Mexico. After several attempts to close a failed blowout preventer valve, it became clear that estimates of as high as 50,000 barrels of oil may have been released each day. We are now more than 50 days into the greatest environmental disaster in the history of this country and the related economic sectors have been placed in great jeopardy. As a result, British Petroleum has recently announced their intention to provide $500 M to universities to conduct basic research in the Gulf of Mexico.

Florida and Mississippi have already designated specific academic consortia within their respective states to receive British Petroleum funding that would be distributed on a state by state basis. You have recently visited the Dauphin Island Sea Lab (DISL), which is the functional base of operations for our state-wide Marine Environmental Sciences Consortium (MESC). The presidents of twenty one Alabama colleges and universities constitute the Board of Directors of MESC, and I have the privilege of serving as the Chair of Board and its Executive Committee. Dr. George Crozier is the Executive Director of DISL, which is fortunately the identifiable institutional entity in support of the MESC.

The Executive Committee members (Auburn U., Troy U., U. of Alabama, U. of North Alabama, and U. of South Alabama) have agreed to recommend that you designate Alabama’s existing academic consortium, MESC at DISL, as the research institution to receive any state-wide designated BP funding  in support of research in the Gulf of Mexico. The administrative structure of MESC allows for the receipt and rapid distribution of such funds throughout the member institutions of the consortium. The immediate need is for a rapid response to the disastrous exposure of Gulf habitats to crude oil, toxic dispersants, and the products of their combination in the waters and on shore.

Scientists within Alabama universities and at DISL are particularly well positioned to play a key role in evaluation on both the short-term and longer-term impacts of this potentially catastrophic event on the health of and ecosystem services provided by the Gulf of Mexico. This position is backed by our collective international reputations for excellence in ecosystem research and outreach, the available historical data-bases, the similarity of habitats and compositions of organisms throughout the north central Gulf of Mexico and our central location within the impact region.  For example, DISL supports a five-year history of direct involvement with the Alabama/Mississippi continental shelf which dates back to the baseline study for the proposed offshore LNG (liquefied natural gas) terminal. You funded subsequent work which was expanded three years ago to incorporate State and Federal concerns making this pre-spill database extraordinarily valuable. DISL has also initiated a comprehensive, pre-spill evaluation of Alabama’s near shore and coastal ecosystems, and can also support a strong data management and synthesis center to ensure the documentation, archiving, and the accessibility of data of collected by collaborating investigators. This potential centralization of scientific findings derived by MESC scientists would be highly valuable to a number of user groups, including other researchers, the educational community, managers, policymakers and the general public. These intellectual and logistical assets are invaluable to the core of MESC, upon which a coordinated program could be constructed to assess the impacts, short- and long-term, of the oil spill.

Dr. Crozier has been authorized to manage this effort as the Executive Director of MESC, with the assistance of an advisory committee provided by the existing Board of Directors.  Distribution of funding would be conducted under peer review, possibly overseen by the Chief Research Officer from the MESC institutions. We envision the distribution of funds to parallel the “RAPID” model provided by the National Science Foundation which has already funded several oil spill studies in our state.

If we can provide further clarification of this recommendation, please do not hesitate to contact any of us directly. On behalf of the Executive Committee of the MESC, I hope this proposal merits your consideration.