Fri May 18, 2012
Charlie Riedel AP Images
A cry for help in East Grand Terre Island Louisiana
Toxic Cover-up: Dispersant Disaster
“In America today you can murder land [insert ocean] for private profit. You can leave the corpse for all to see, and nobody calls the cops.” ~Paul Brooks, The Pursuit of Wilderness, 1971
“They [BP] want to hide the body”~ Ian McDonald, FSU oceanographer
By Sayer Ji, Florida – June 2010
It has become increasingly clear that BP used dispersants in the Gulf in order to prevent the full magnitude of its crime against the region from surfacing – literally. In fact, since the April 20th Deepwater Horizon explosion in the Gulf which killed 11 workers, BP and the U.S. Coast Guard claimed that a potential problem of leaking oil was under control. As we now know BP slowly “boiled the frog” of our expectations so as to lessen the shock of reality when the inevitable facts came to light.
But what is not widely known is the fact that behind the scenes BP, with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) blessing, was creating an even more toxic mess – contaminating the crime scene with Corexit 9500, a dispersant that had been banned in the UK 10 years ago because of its proven toxicity. Indeed, even the EPA’s own toxicological assessments of Corexit 9500 as being the most harmful and least effective dispersant of the 18 on the market that it evaluated should have prohibited its use.
The problem is, when Corexit 9500 comes in contact with crude oil it produces a third substance called “dispersed oil,” which the EPA demonstrated is 3.5 times more deadly to aquatic life than the oil alone.3 Further, data published in the Nov. 2004 Journal of Ecotoxicology & Environmental Safety indicated that Corexit 9500 may increase the absorption of toxic hydrocarbons into marine creatures up from 6 to 1100 times more readily than when exposed to the crude oil alone.
But here’s the rub. Many BP executives and board members have financial ties with Nalco, the manufacturer of Corexit, which explains why over 1.3 million gallons of this poison has been dumped into the Gulf – even after the EPA directed BP to stop using it on May 26. Despite this directive, BP continues to administer the Corexit 9500 dispersant above and below the surface of the Gulf, threatening not only the life in the ocean, but the health of residents in the region.
As of the writing of this article, the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals has reported over 70 hospitalizations suspected to be due to exposure to the dispersants and/or the crude oil-dispersant mixture.
What do the dispersants actually do? Despite misinformation perpetrated by BP, government and media, dispersants will not “mitigate” the disaster. To the contrary, by breaking down and dispersing the oil throughout the water column and increasing the speed by which the naturally occurring ocean bacteria break down hydrocarbons as a food source, they exacerbate oxygen depletion creating dead-zones within which the already poisoned animal life can not survive.
Although the primary justification for using Corexit 9500 is to “save the beach” at the expense of life in the ocean, I wonder who would visit a beach where it is unsafe to swim in the water or breath the air? Moreover, without healthy oceans that produce 50% of the world’s oxygen, life on the land would not be possible.
BP and the EPA know from available marine toxicological data that dispersants accomplish one thing only: they mitigate political fallout by dispersing the oil. Dispersants hide the exposure of truth from public scrutiny. Like chemotherapy applied to a tumor, dispersants attack the target AND the patient.
Further, dispersants and their by-product, dispersed oil, are deadly to coral reefs, which are already threatened with mass extinction in the Gulf as they are being smothered by high nutrient run off from the Mississippi, and globally through the increased acidification of the oceans from increasingly higher rates of dissolved carbon dioxide exposure from fossil fuels.
Once the coral reefs are gone – sometimes called the “rainforests of the sea” – so too will life on land perish. The “mother of all extinctions,” or Perminan extinction, which occured 250 million years ago followed this same sort of etiology. As the ocean became oxygen depleted coral died, ultimately leading to the extinction of 90% of the world’s species at that time.
All is not lost if we act as a global community to reverse this deadly direction. Please join me in the fight to end the further use of dispersants in the Gulf. Please sign our petition and learn more about what you can do at our environmental action website: http://oilspilltruth.wordpress.com.
Sayer Ji is the founder of the internet’s only solar-powered 100% clinical alternative medical database GreenMedInfo.com (http://www.greenmedinfo.com)
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First of all, this is an injustice that I hope the country will not stand for and that other nations will look to in evaluating their own stances towards our one world.
Secondly, I have a question regarding your mention of extinction. How will the destruction of coral reefs (inarguably tragic) lead to such extreme losses in terrestrial life? I would imagine that, in gross terms, many species dependent on that marine ecosystem for food would suffer heavy population losses, but how does that translate to such a terrible decline in terrestrial species abundance?
I would like to help, but have no money to donate.
Bad as it is this is one of so many abuses of the environment, the (BP) reaction so typical of the mentality that is destroying us, that we are forced to conclude that reason and good sense alone are an inadequate means of survival.The world must shift to a new consciousness embracing a spiritual awareness or it is doomed (if this is not already the case).
Words are not adequate to express how I feel about this ongoing man made disaster.