Monitering the Gulf Oil Spill: Worst Case Scenarios

[ggullet]

Worst Case Scenario: The Gulf Oil Spill May Be Permanent

Sit down. Get ready. Your life has begun to change. It will never be the same again.

in reference to time no ones life is ever the same. if no one knows the secret of life then no one knows what occurences are neccessary for it's preservation.

[labelwench]

That I have never been one to eat much seafood makes it relatively easy for me to avoid eating fish and shellfish that may have been harvested in the Gulf of Mexico. My thoughts do lie with the people whose livelihoods and habitats have been affected by the spill and the toxins used in the clean-up and dispersal, as for them, avoidance is not such an easy matter.

Where they reside has been contaminated, to varying degrees, and it is no small matter to decide to relocate, and what is now the market value of one's home?

People who earn a living from the sea, also largely subsist on the harvest they take, and there are questions being raised whether the toxins being tested for are the appropriate ones to be examining, as the most dangerous ones are not being tested for, according to this report.

The long term effects of this event can only be speculated upon, yet the history from the Exxon Valdez event demonstrates that there shall be impacts forthcoming for a considerable number of years.

Both the long-term and short-term effects of the oil spill have been studied.[25] Immediate effects included the deaths of, at the best estimates, 100,000 to as many as 250,000 seabirds, at least 2,800 sea otters, approximately 12 river otters, 300 harbor seals, 247 Bald Eagles, and 22 orcas, as well as the destruction of billions of salmon and herring eggs.[8][26] The effects of the spill continued to be felt for many years[quantify] afterwards. Overall reductions in population were seen in various ocean animals, including stunted growth in pink salmon populations.[27] The effect on salmon and other prey populations in turn adversely affected killer whales in Prince William Sound and Alaska's Kenai Fjords region. Eleven members (about half) of one resident pod disappeared in the following year. By 2009, scientists[who?] estimated the AT1 transient population (considered part of a larger population of 346 transients), numbered only 7 individuals and had not reproduced since the spill, this population is expected to die out. Sea otters and ducks also showed higher[quantify] death rates in following years,[quantify] partially because they ingested prey from contaminated soil and from ingestion of oil residues on hair due to grooming.[28]

Some twenty years after the spill, a team from the University of North Carolina found that the effects were lasting far longer than expected.[27] The team estimates some shoreline Arctic habitats may take up to thirty years to recover. Exxon Mobil denies any concerns over this, stating that they anticipated a remaining fraction that they assert will not cause any long-term ecological impacts, according to the conclusions of 350 peer-reviewed studies.[28] However, a NOAA study concluded that this contamination can produce chronic low-level exposure, discourage subsistence where the contamination is heavy, and decrease the "wilderness character" of the area.[23]
From Wikipedia

Hugh Kaufman is a senior policy analyst at the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) office of solid waste and emergency response. Kaufman, a leading critic of the US government's decision to use Corexit, told Al Jazeera this about the press release: "They say it perfectly clear: the purpose of the test they developed is to make the public confident, not whether the seafood was safe or not.

"They selected the one compound that doesn’t bio-accumulate, as opposed to testing for the toxic ingredients that have a low safety threshold and do build up in tissue. They are not looking for those."

Kaufman, who has been the EPA's chief investigator on several contamination cases, including Love Canal and Times Beach, said: "They want to be able to tell the public the seafood is safe. But if you are going to test seafood to see if it’s safe or not, you want to test for the ingredients of Corexit that have a low safety threshold and do bio-accumulate in tissue."

"However, if you want the public to think everything is fine, then you do what they said in their press release they are doing, which is to look for an ingredient with a high safety threshold that doesn’t build up in tissue."

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth...847225269.html