Scientists Discover the Agent Used in Gulf Spill Cleanup Is Destroying Marine Life

www.takepart.com...

Three years ago, when BP’s Deepwater Horizon began leaking some 210 million gallons of Louisiana Crude into the Gulf of Mexico, the U.S. government allowed the company to apply chemical “dispersants” to the blossoming oil slick to prevent toxic gunk from reaching the fragile bays, beaches, and mangroves of the coast, where so much marine life originates. But a number of recent studies show that BP and the feds may have made a huge mistake, for which everything from microscopic organisms to bottlenose dolphins are now paying the highest price.

When BP began spraying the Gulf, critics cried foul. They said Corexit is not only toxic to marine life on its own, but when combined with crude oil, the mixture becomes several times more toxic than oil or dispersant alone.

Sawyer tested edible fish and shellfish from the Gulf for absorption of petroleum hydrocarbon (PHC), believed to have been facilitated by Corexit. Tissue samples taken prior to the accident had no measurable PHC. But after the oil spill, Sawyer found tissue concentrations up to 10,000 parts per million, or 1 percent of the total. The study, he said, “shows that the absorption [of the oil] was enhanced by the Corexit.”

Where are the people who have the scientific background to make a judgement call when something bad happens? Are they consulted (if they exist) or is it always a knee jerk reaction that sets up a cascade of events that play out over months and years. The B.P. oil spill has not gone away but has just become hidden from everyone except those creatures who live in the Gulf and those who make their living fishing there.

Kolian’s team has done studies of their own to alarming results. “We recently submitted a paper showing levels of hydrocarbons in seafood were up to 3,000 times higher than safety thresholds for human consumption,” he said. “Concentrations in biota [i.e. all marine life] samples were even greater.”

Well, we knew at the time that the OS sure wouldn't have passed the sniff test the government was using to test the marine life with to see if it was safe to eat...

At the time they said it smelled fine and they were selling it to the army to feed the troops...
cause they care so much about them and they wanted them to have nice things to eat.
I think it was sold to the troops to reduce the pension obligations

thats how they roll in DC

reply to post by 727Sky


No surprise here, they dumped that chemical in without any knowledge to what it could do... When you scramble to solve a major problem, you're prone to overlooking things and thats when mistakes happen... I feel horrible for the marine life down there...

Gosh, it only took them 3 years to announce what's been known and seen by everyone else all along.

Gold star for their academic accomplishment post-haste.

The funny part is people laugh at me when i say i won't eating anything caught in the Gulf of Mexico or the Pacific Ocean. It's reports like this that reinforce my stance. Gulf Coast marine life isn't safe for human consumption yet, one of those things that going to have to be cycled through if it can.

In 4-5 years the Gulf Coast may just wind up being a marine dead zone, with little signs of life beyond the microscopic. No telling the long lasting implications of this, you know that it's going to take a tool on reproduction.

In April 2012, Louisiana State University’s Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences was finding lesions and grotesque deformities in sea life—including millions of shrimp with no eyes and crabs without eyes or claws—possibly linked to oil and dispersants.

Just wow. If I was Obama i would just about now be getting out of BP's behind after a 3 year mud hole stomping.

Atlantic Ocean all day... until it gets fouled up to.

I guess I should don my surprised face.


I always felt like throwing things at the TV when I'd see those commercials with the BP guys saying it was safe to eat the food and always wanted to vomit when I'd see the collective commercials for Louisiana, Florida, and Texas saying it was a great place to vacation. "Come swim in the Gulf and enjoy the seafood!"

BP Should be dissolved right now. The CEO that was in charge when all of this happened should be serving a life sentence for all the lives that he ruined.

reply to post by cenpuppie

Just wow. If I was Obama i would just about now be getting out of BP's behind after a 3 year mud hole stomping.

Back in the day i can across the public disclosure of the managers of the president's blind trust "Vangaurd"

Vangard sold off Obama's BP positions in the two month window between when BP know the thing was going to blow and when it did blow, killing a bunch of hands in the process...
also just prior to the big bang BP bought the company that makes the stuff

I think it would be on an "apacheman" thread re BP from 3 years ago

Would all surprised folks raise your hands? No one? Yeah, thought so.

Stopped buying shrimp when the Corexit went in. Stopped buying crab with the fukishima event. What's left? My son's getting really annoyed at not having seafood.

do you know how I know that we are all doomed and our earth will eventually be polluted to the point where we poison ourselves to death... BP is still in business and was not shut down due to environmental poisoning.

Lets see.. spill chemicals into the ocean, fix problem by pouring more chemicals into the ocean... doesn't make very good sense to me.

Driving your car around is not worth poisoning the entire ocean..

BP should be shutdown for crimes against humanity along with anyone else who releases poisons into our ocean, water supplies, or the ground.

Really? Goodness... Whoda thunk it?



....Now imagine if they used versions of Corexit on land based spills of large size. Scary thought huh? 'Course they wouldn't do that. Would they?

Seems to me this is old news as far as most of us are concerned, as Corexit was Huge talk during and after the Disaster. Many people became vary ill due to exposure then, what did they think the long term effects would be?

Its utter Insanity!

reply to post by Pegasus2000


I thought they wanted the gulf of mexico to be a deadzone so they could "grow algae"? You know, for the carbon offset.

How many years and how much money did they spend to get this report? We knew it the day they started dumping corexit throughout the ocean. I guess they don't have the internet - maybe just watch porn on it.

Originally posted by CranialSponge
Gosh, it only took them 3 years to announce what's been known and seen by everyone else all along.

The fact that some scientists believed that Corexit wouldn't harm the marine life is another reason why we should take what these people say with a grain of salt...

People all over have known this for years! Way to beat around the bush...

Adding the agent as quickly as they did prevented us from getting a close estimate on how much oil spilled. most of the oil sunk down into the anaerobic microbs layer of existence where it will take years to disapper as opposed to months had the oil been allowed to float. Aerobic microbs do in days what anaerobic microbs do in months. In sept. 2012 a shimering white substance was seen over the spill from space. After weeks of lab tests scientists determined the substance wasn't oil but did not tell the public what it was. My uneducated guess is death rising to the surface from the bottom of the Gulf. The shimmer has supposedly gone away.

I hate those BP commercials that try to tell you it's OK to go play in the Gulf and eat the seafood down there.

We have too many warnings on Great Lakes fish consumption to think that sea food from the Gulf is completely safe to eat.

Most people up here are aware of toxins in our fish and aren't stupid enough to believe BP when they say, "It's all good now, we did such a good job cleaning up!"

Originally posted by jhn7537
reply to post by 727Sky

 

No surprise here, they dumped that chemical in without any knowledge to what it could do... When you scramble to solve a major problem, you're prone to overlooking things and thats when mistakes happen... I feel horrible for the marine life down there...

You don't think they knew what these chemicals do? Mistake? They knew full well the effects and what it would do. The goal was to bury it out of sight, not to get rid of it or clean it up. If the chemicals they dumped kills everything around, what do they care? They still get paid.

reply to post by 727Sky


This is old news, it was well known at the time they were using the Corexit that it was highly toxic and lethal to all living things, not just marine life. Why do you think it was dispersed in the location it was dispersed in? In the Gulf stream where all the oceanic currents of the globe meet up and carry the warm waters etc.

The Corexit was spread there so as to travel all round the global waters poisoning the waters and all living things in it. It alters DNA. That's why there have been so many incidents of marine life washing up with acid-type burns on their skin and the government-paid scientists say they don't know what's causing the burns.

People were getting sick and dying after being in the clean-up teams at the beaches, do you know that? This really is old news. Corexit 9500

waronyou.com...

www.google.co.nz...=en&gs_rn=11&gs_ri=psy-ab&tok=6KrNQ0uTCs8PaSRnMgRaog&pq=corexit%209500%20killing&cp=18&gs_id=y&xhr=t&q=corexit+9500+toxici ty&es_nrs=true&pf=p&sclient=psy-ab&oq=corexit+9500+toxic&gs_l=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_cp.r_qf.&fp=3e41f0fa0fd02e16&biw=1366&bih=566

This is why the Dutch use skimmers and floating booms instead of chemicals to clean up spills.