A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [50]
I’m not. Nor is anyone else I know. A few days later, even the president will say he regrets not realizing that oil companies did not “have their act together when it came to worst-case scenarios.” He will add a stern admonishment: “Make no mistake, BP is operating at our direction.”
It’s a mistake I will continue to make—often—in the upcoming weeks. Meanwhile, enraged over BP’s stonewalling and its refusal to entertain new ideas and alternate solutions—or to make any seemingly sincere attempt to collect oil at the surface—Plaquemines Parish president Billy Nungesser rails, “BP has taken over the Gulf of Mexico, and we’re doing nothing to stop them.”
Indeed, it feels to many as if the Coast Guard has handed BP the keys to our car and climbed into the back seat.
Louisiana’s governor declares a commercial fisheries’ failure to trigger aid. Within a week, the fisheries disaster declarations spread to include Alabama and Mississippi. Aid means tax dollars. Aid means that oil is not as cheap as it seems at the pump. We pay anyway.
Here’s who doesn’t get dispersants: the head of the EPA. Lisa Jackson, Environmental Protection Agency chief, exclaims, “Oh my God, it’s so thick!” as she assesses a cupful of the oily mess dipped from the mouth of the Mississippi. “At a minimum what we can say is dispersants didn’t work here,” Jackson actually says. She adds, “When you see stuff like this, it’s clear it isn’t a panacea.”
Panacea? As if perfection would be to just send all the oil out of sight, out of mind? Isn’t that BP’s dream scenario, to make it all seem to just go away by sinking it all below the surface? I don’t agree. At a minimum, what we can say is that dispersants don’t work if your goal is to avoid polluting the water on a massive scale.
Panacea? Dr. Susan Shaw of the Maine-based Marine Environmental Research Institute says, “The worst of these dispersants—sold by the name Corexit 9527—is the one they’ve been using most. It ruptures red blood cells and causes fish to bleed. With 800,000 gallons of this, we can only imagine the death that will be caused.” But that’s the problem: we can only imagine. It causes harm in laboratory tests at certain concentrations, but the dose makes the poison, and we have no clarity on what it’s doing in the Gulf.
Panacea? The Exxon Valdez disaster is what first linked Corexit to respiratory, nerve, liver, kidney, and blood disorders. Exxon Valdez cleanup workers reported blood in their urine. EPA data shows Corexit more toxic and less effective than other approved dispersants.
A BP spokesman calls Corexit “pretty effective,” adding, “I’m not sure about the others.” BP’s main reason for continuing to use Corexit appears to be its close ties to the manufacturer.
Panacea? Dr. Shaw writes in the New York Times after actually diving in part of the dispersant-and-oil mixture, “What I witnessed was a surreal, sickening scene beyond anything I could have imagined.” She describes the murky mixture drifting a few meters down, then concludes, “The dispersants have made for cleaner beaches. But they’re not worth the destruction they cause at sea, far out of sight. It would be better to halt their use and just siphon and skim as much of the oil off the surface as we can. The Deepwater Horizon spill has done enough damage, without our adding to it.”
The pressure seems to be pushing the EPA. Its officials finally obtain and make public a list of the concoctions’ ingredients. One version of Corexit (“corrects it”; get it?) contains benzene and 2-butoxyethanol, linked to destruction of red blood cells and cancers in lab studies of monkeys, rats, mice, rabbits, and dogs, which can lead to kidney, spleen, or liver damage. Also it caused breathing difficulties, skin irritation, physical weakness and unsteadiness, sluggishness, convulsions, birth defects, and fewer offspring in mammals. This stuff, you don’t want to swallow. The head of the Louisiana Shrimp Association calls Corexit “the Gulf’s Agent Orange.”
Now EPA administrator Lisa Jackson orders BP to take “immediate steps to scale back the use