Gulf of Mexico clean-up makes 2010 spill 52-times more toxic

From Phys.org courtesy of BuzzFlash:

If the 4.9 million barrels of oil that spilled into the Gulf of Mexico during the 2010 Deep Water Horizon spill was a ecological disaster, the two million gallons of dispersant used to clean it up apparently made it even worse – 52-times more toxic. That's according to new research from the Georgia Institute of Technology and Universidad Autonoma de Aguascalientes (UAA), Mexico.

More here.

I had a bad feeling about this at the time:

When I first heard a BP spokesman on NPR a couple of weeks ago talking about how they were using dispersants in an attempt to break up the now massive oil patches in the Gulf of Mexico, I was very disturbed by how he used the phrase "just like the dish detergent you use at home" multiple times over the span of about a minute or so. It's like he was trying a bit too hard. Really, it brought to mind the kind of odd corporate propaganda that The Simpsons has satirized repeatedly over years. And now, it seems, the notion of weird-chemical-as-dish-soap has been picked up by lots of journalists. If this kind of language is, in fact, a sort of PR damage control thing, it appears to be having some success.

And it now turns out I was absolutely right to have a bad feeling about this.  

As far as I can tell, the toxicity is simply collateral damage from a furious BP PR effort: remove all visible evidence of the disaster ASA fucking P because this can only get worse.  "Worse," of course, in terms of stock prices and consumer freak out, which is not to be confused with "worse" in terms of the environmental health of the Gulf of Mexico.  That is, BP made the disaster fifty two times more damaging in order to create the appearance that it wasn't so bad.

It's like killing fifty witnesses to cover up a single murder.

And, as far as I can tell, again, it looks like the gigantic oil corporation succeeded with this gambit for the most part.  The spill hasn't been in the headlines for many months.  And I got the report linked above only because I cruise the lefty websites.  Most Americans simply don't know about this, and a substantial percentage of those in the dark don't even believe that a company would double down on a disaster it caused simply to save face.  They got away with it.

I really can't think of any other word to describe this than evil.

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