Researchers firm on oil data

Bill Hogarth hopes the "us versus them" mentality is over.

When University of South Florida researchers stood before television cameras and the world in May to announce they had found evidence of vast plumes of invisible undersea oil in the Gulf of Mexico, the dean of the College of Marine Science didn't get kudos from federal officials.

Instead, Hogarth said, he got grief from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

"They were concerned about the data and wanted to know if we were sure of what we were saying," Hogarth said this morning. "They felt we were making statements that were not substantiated."

That wasn't the case at all, the dean said. And today, even as the gusher in the Gulf has been capped, he wouldn't change a thing that he and his researchers did.

"We had taken every precaution to make sure what we did was right. As a university, we need to inform the people," said Hogarth, himself a former NOAA employee of 16 years.

On Monday, Jane Lubchenco, the administrator of NOAA, met with Hogarth and some USF scientists to try to get on the same page. Hogarth described the meeting as productive .

Hogarth is confident the two sides can work together to share information and help determine the long-term impact of the oil in the Gulf. He and others say that things have improved in their work with NOAA.

USF officials aren't the only ones who have drawn the ire of NOAA.

Samantha Joye, professor of marine sciences at the University of Georgia, had a similar experience when she started talking about what she and others had discovered underwater.

"We felt like our wrists were slapped a little bit when we came forward and talked about the plumes," Joye said.

Ian MacDonald, a biological oceanographer at Florida State University, faults NOAA for not taking advantage of the vast educational resources that made up the state's oil spill academic task force.

"I would have thought there would have been a close working relationship," MacDonald said. "We formed the task force to make our expertise available to anyone who needed it. Nobody at NOAA took us up on our offer."

The FSU professor said it was ironic that NOAA talked of underwater oil in its report last week that said much of the oil could be accounted for.

"They were quite critical and they specifically challenged the veracity of their methods," MacDonald said of NOAA's rebuking of USF efforts. "They questioned the whole possibility. And yet that is what they say in their report."