HAVE BP AND THE US GOVERNMENT KILLED THE GULF OF MEXICO?

At protecttheocean.com, there is an article that discusses the dispersal agent BP is using, Corexit 9500.  Many now are coming around to the belief that the dispersants alone will spell big trouble for a long time because this chemical kills life forms in the early stages.  It will continue to do so for many years to come and worse, in places we cannot know:

It may not be pretty, but if the oil makes it to the shore, it can be soaked up, cleaned up.  To “disperse” it means it will NEVER be cleaned up.  It will just stay out there, polluting and poisoning the ocean, her inhabitants, and all the food we take from it.  It’s unwise to be using Corexit 9500 at all, but introducing it to the oil as it leaves the broken pipe is approaching madness. Mr. Gebhardt agrees that the oil should be contained, and what has been leaked should be allowed to come to shore where it can be removed from the ocean by less toxic means. [protecttecttheocean.com]

Last night on Anderson Cooper 360, a guest made it clear:

We don’t have just one oil spill.  Every day that leak occurs, we have a new spill daily.

The spill has produced a large “dead zone.”  But a dead zone already exists at the mouth of the Mississippi at New Orleans.  It’s size varies.  Recently is was the size of the state of Massachusetts:

The dead zone is technically an area of hypoxia, or low oxygen content, first detected in the early 1970s. A decade later scientists realized it was caused largely by agricultural nitrogen — and some urban effluent — washed downstream from farms throughout the Mississippi watershed. That feeds algae, which consume the oxygen in the water as they decompose and lower oxygen levels to a point where life cannot be sustained.

The mechanisms that create the dead zone are entirely natural — algae feeding and dying — but there is nothing natural about the zone itself. It is almost entirely an artifact of modern agriculture, accompanied by treated and untreated sewage and industrial runoff. Most years the hypoxic zone dissipates in winter and re-forms in spring. At depth, the water is simply vacant of life and has the characteristic rotten-egg smell of hydrogen sulfide. The size of the zone depends on many different conditions. But this spring was extraordinary. There were widespread floods across the Midwest, mostly after the fields had already been fertilized. The result is a plume of fertility washing out into the Gulf of Mexico, where it fertilizes only death.

The dead zone at the mouth of the Mississippi is not the only one. There are dozens of smaller hypoxic zones around the American coastline where rivers spill into the sea. [NY Times]

With 162 cases of illness linked to oil, the dead zone may extend to land animals as well.

There is also a rising mental health problem that needs to be addressed early on to be effective:

There exists anger, anxiety and uncertainty among the families and communities affected by the spill, which will easily manifest into addiction and various forms of mental health crisis if not confronted. [CNN.com]

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Tagged: Dead Zone, Gulf of Mexico, Oil Spill - Cleanup, Oil Spill - Health Issues

Posted in: WRITINGS