"Corexit was a good idea" NOT
Below from C3 list. No time to fuck with the color scheme. It's ugly but readable.
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Response to EPA’s Paul Anastas that the spraying of Corexit was a good idea.
February 20, 2012
What the Times Picayune does so aptly is well displayed in Jonathan Tilove’s article on Sunday, Feb. 21st. The article is about Paul Anastas, now leaving the EPA, and apparently the man that made the decision to allow BP to apply millions of gallons of Corexit on the oil spewing from the destroyed Macondo well. The dots aren’t connected, no mention made of the thousands made ill from the oil and dispersant mixture, no mention of the fishermen who signed up to work for BP and were made ill, some seriously ill, from chemical poisoning. No mention of the unlucky residents who happen to live close enough to the water to suffer from chronic exposure to the Corexit and oil; these residents once thought they lived in a sportsman’s paradise. No mention made of Dr. Robichaux or the other doctors that have devoted their time and energy to documenting the illnesses, and creating a detox program for those who have been all but ignored by their state and federal government.
Paul Anastas is leaving the EPA, and the position he held as theagency's science adviser and assistant administrator for research and development. Apparently, this is an important position, according to the Times Picayune, second only to the Administrator, a position that Lisa Jackson now holds. Yet, as much information as Mr. Anastas must have access to, he couldn’t stop himself from crowing about the success of the decision to allow massive dumping of Corexit, a decision that has left thousands of lives in ruin, and oil coating the bottom of the Gulf, according to more than one scientist. Apparently, there are some pieces of information that Mr. Anastas chooses to ignore.
He ignores the fact that there have been very mixed reports on the white and brown shrimp catches this past year. He ignores the fact that dolphins are washing up in record numbers on the Gulf coast, yet residents are not privy to test results as NOAA has put a clamp on that information. Here is what Mr. Anastas has said about his own decision, from that Times Picayune article:
"Does the Gulf today look like 11 Exxon Valdezes crashed into the Gulf? I would suggest the answer is no -- and there's a reason why that answer's no," he said. "Some things were done right."
"All of the tremendous suffering that people went through, the Gulf today is far, far better than it would have been without an effective response -- EPA, Coast Guard, all the many agencies with people on the ground, the cities, the states, the groups that mobilized," said Anastas. "The EPA was only one piece of a really important mobilization. I must say, I think EPA was a very, very important piece…
…And, while testing will go on for some time, he said, so far, "what the science is telling us, what the data is telling us is that we don't see a long-term persistence of the dispersants. The analysis is, just as was projected, that it would be degraded and broken down into harmless pieces over time."
Harmless pieces, Mr. Anastas? Not according to Dr. Samantha Joye, a marine scientist with the University of Georgia. Having explored the bottom of the Gulf one year after the BP oil disaster, her take on the results are quite different:
There are few people who can claim direct knowledge of the ocean floor, at least before the invention of the spill-cam, last year’s strangely compulsive live feed of the oil
billowing out of BP
‘s blown-out well in the Gulf of Mexico. But for Samantha Joye it was familiar terrain. The intersection of oil, gas and marine life
in the Mississippi Canyon has preoccupied the University of Georgia scientist for years. So one year after an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig, about 40 miles off the coast of Louisiana
, killed 11 men and disgorged more than 4m barrels of crude, Joye could be forgiven for denying the official version of the BP oil disaster that life is returning to normal in the Gulf.
The view from her submarine is different, and her attachment is almost personal. On her descent to a location 10 miles from BP’s well in December, Joye landed on an ocean floor coated with dark brown muck about 4cm deep. Thick ropes of slime draped across coral like cobwebs in a haunted house. The few creatures that remained alive, such as the crabs, were too listless to flee. “Most of the time when you go at them with a submarine, they just run,” she says. “They weren’t running, they were just sitting there, dazed and stupefied. They certainly weren’t behaving as normal.” Her conclusion? “I think it is not beyond the imagination that 50% of the oil is still floating around out there.”
One should question why Mr. Anastas’s account of the results of the oil disaster should be so remarkably similar to BP’s account. Everyone in this country has seen the million of dollar ads that BP has on television and in print media, claiming all is well with the Gulf coast. Things are “back to normal”. Nothing could be further from the truth; however, you wouldn’t know this reading the Times Picayune.
An article, written by Edward Flattau and posted in Huffington Post on February 6, 2012, paints a different picture of supposed Gulf coast “recovery”:
But there is another dimension to the BP spill's aftermath. Cherri Foytlin, founder of a southern Louisiana grassroots group called "Bridge the Gulf," told a recent Washington rally that "dead animals wash up on our coast every day; oil washes up on land every day. People are getting sick every day."
And from the same article:
Record dolphin mortality and fish deformities
, including damage to the gills, continue to be documented in the Gulf. Researchers at Louisiana State University have detected long term adverse impacts on marine life's reproductive capacity.
Since the spill, many once perfectly healthy individuals -- especially kids -- in coastal areas have been reported
pulmonary issues, respiratory problems, seizures, skin and eye ailments, and a host of other maladies linked to prolonged exposure to BP oil residues' toxic chemicals. One southern Louisiana school has had to keep a closet full of nebulizers at the ready to help pupils in respiratory distress breathe.
It is true that so far, there has not been the kind of research needed to determine the long term effects of the Corexit on marine and human life. Short term effects though are already well in evidence, with the thousands of folks on the Gulf coast falling ill and showing symptoms of acute exposure to Corexit and oil mixed with Corexit. Perhaps Mr. Tilove didn’t catch Dr. Robichaux’s presentation to the Baton Rouge Press Club.
Gulf coast residents live in a surreal landscape of truth and lies, with our government sounding more like the corporation they were supposed to protect us from. Mr. Anastas is a prime example of that, and Mr. Tilove provided a propaganda avenue for the dissemination of these lies.
The people themselves will have to learn to defend the land and water. We already occupy the land.
Elizabeth Cook
Native and resident of south Louisiana
References:
http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill/index.ssf/2012/02/epa_official_leaves_eye_of_pol.html
http://gulfofmexicooilspillblog.com/2011/02/20/gulf-of-mexico-oil-spill-blog-samantha-joye-oil-choked-bottom-dwelling-creatures/