Message to the EPA: To Insist That Certain Areas Along the Gulf are Safe for Children is Unconscionable.

JACQUELINE MARCUS FOR BUZZFLASH

It’s important for the public to review what was reported yesterday (7-20-10) on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! Ask yourself if you can count on the Government and mainstream media to tell you the truth about the deadly toxic dispersants in the Gulf.  According to the corporate networks, BP is doing a splendid job down in the Gulf.  Last night, Katie Couric CBS reported that there’s green grass sprouting up in the marshes now.  By contrast, here are the awful facts: These are excerpts from this critical report: 

With BP having poured nearly two million gallons of the dispersant known as Corexit into the Gulf of Mexico, many lawmakers and advocacy groups say the Obama administration is not being candid about the lethal effects of dispersants… 

 HUGH KAUFMAN: …Consequently, we have people, wildlife—we have dolphins that are hemorrhaging. People who work near it are hemorrhaging internally. And that’s what dispersants are supposed to do. EPA now is taking the position that they really don’t know how dangerous it is, even though if you read the label, it tells you how dangerous it is. And, for example, in the Exxon Valdez case, people who worked with dispersants, most of them are dead now. The average death age is around fifty. It’s very dangerous, and it’s an economic—it’s an economic protector of BP, not an environmental protector of the public. 

…Well, not only do you have airplanes flying and dropping them on the Gulf region, like Agent Orange in Vietnam, but a large amount of it is being shot into the water column at 5,000 feet to disperse the oil as it gushers out. And so, you have spread, according to the Associated Press, over perhaps over 44,000 square miles, an oil and dispersant mix. And what’s happened is, that makes it impossible to skim the oil out of the water. One of the things that happened is they brought this big boat, Whale, in from Japan to get rid of the oil, and it didn’t work because the majority of the oil is spread throughout the water column over thousands of square miles in the Gulf. And so—and there’s been a lot of work to show the dispersants, which is true, make it more difficult to clean up the mess than if you didn’t use them. The sole purpose in the Gulf for dispersants is to keep a cover-up going for BP to try to hide the volume of oil that has been released and save them hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars of fines. That’s the purpose of using the dispersants, not to protect the public health or environment. Quite the opposite.

SHARIF ADBEL KOUDDOUS: Let’s go to a clip that’s been circulating on the internet. It’s from an investigation from WKRG News 5 into the toxicity levels of water and sand on public beaches around Mobile, Alabamba. One of the water samples collected near a boom at Dauphin Island Marina just exploded when mixed with an organic solvent separating the oil from the water. This is Bob Naman, the chemist who analyzed the sample, explaining why it might have exploded.

BOB NAMAN: We think that it most likely happened due to the presence of either methanol or methane gas or the presence of the dispersant Corexit. 

HUGH KAUFMAN: Well, yes. I saw that when it first came out, I think on Sunday. And what they documented was that the water—you know, when you’re on the sand with your children and they dig, and there’s a little water?—they documented there was over 200 parts per million of oil waste in the water, and it’s not noticeable to the human eye, that the children were playing with on the beach. On top of it, the contamination in one of the samples was so high that when they put the solvent in, as a first step in identifying how much oil may be in the water, the thing blew up, just as he said, probably because there was too much Corexit in that particular sample. 

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Message to the EPA: To insist that certain areas along the Gulf are safe for children is unconscionable. It’s horrible enough that the fish and birds are exposed to Coexit—they didn’t have a choice, but for the EPA to say to the public that the water has been tested and that it’s safe for children is a lawsuit of negligence and irresponsibility.  

Read the full transcript:  http://www.democracynow.org/2010/7/20/epa_whistleblower_accuses_agency_of_covering