. . . n'er a drop to drink.At least not in the Gulf, if you don't want to risk a mouth full of Corexit, the main dispersantchemical BP dumped by the midnight planeload into the oil-infested waters in an attempt to minimize the"bad optics" of their disaster.
As BP prepares a final "static kill shot" to finally --really, we mean it this time, once and for all, rah-rah-sis-boo- bah --"plug the damned hole" permanently, the good news from the region is that there is not as much oil visible in the water than expected, given the magnitude of the underground rupture and subsequent geyser. Key word is visible.Edward Overton, an environmental chemist and professor emeritus at Louisiana State University (LSU), explained the hidden danger of dispersants to the Christian Science Monitor:
"Oil spills and blowouts are horrible. There is carnage everywhere during the event. Because so much of the oil, methane, and dispersants has remained deep in the ocean during the Gulf blowout, there is damage that you and I can't see, and it won't be obvious for several years, maybe a decade or two."
And yet, according to the most recent EPAexperiment on juvenile marine organisms, water containing a Corexit/oil mix was no more toxic to the delicate developing animals than water contaminated by oil alone. Uh . . . pardon me, but . . . so what? Slurping down a slew of raw Apalachicola oysters that have been contaminated with Corexit and oil isn't any worse than guzzling the same dozen drenched solely in crude. This is supposed to be the good news?
One thing is certain, BP lied about the amount of chemicals they dumped into the Gulf, just like they lied about their safety measures, disaster preparedness, and early estimates of the magnitude of this latest deadly BP disaster. Over the course of a few weeks earlier this year, BPdumped what Rep. Ed Markey calleda "carpet bombing" of chemical dispersants into the Gulf,far more than the already astonishing1.8-million gallons BP grudgingly acknowledges.
For more on this story, read what marine toxicologist Riki Ott has written for The Huffington Post.
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