BP’s Ongoing Deepwater Horizon Disaster: Studies Disagree, but Photos are Revealing
By now, on the anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, most of us have quit thinking about that disaster. But judging from the photos above, we’re making a mistake.
Less than six months after the spill, the FDA declared seafood from the Gulf safe for consumption, and the agency continues to hold this stance: In January of 2012, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) deputy commissioner, Michael Taylor, declared that “Gulf seafood is as safe to eat now as it was before the spill.”
On his agency’s blog, Taylor describes how Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs) — a group of potentially cancer-causing chemicals that are found in coal tar, crude oil and even chargrilled or "blackened" food — were measured and used as the safety marker for the FDA’s conclusion. The FDA tested over 10,000 seafood specimens and reported that, “in most cases, no PAHs were found, and, when they were, the PAH levels in the seafood were 100 to 1,000 times below the levels which would raise a health concern.”
So that was that. Right?
Well, no. Not exactly. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) unleashed a critique of the FDA’s risk assessment, stating that the FDA’s research is based upon outdated science and that the agency’s “safe levels” are especially dangerous for young children and pregnant women or anyone who eats a lot of seafood, allowing 10,000 times too much cancer-causing PAHs contamination in Gulf seafood.
These incongruences remain up for debate. Meanwhile, the Surfrider Foundation released a “State of the Beach” oil trend study a few days ago. Granted, Surfrider did not address marine life nor the consumption of seafood in its work — instead focusing on “human health and safety risks for recreational water activities at beaches.” So this blog, admittedly, compares apples to oranges.
Nonetheless, Surfrider collected tar samples (albeit only 71 sample sets) and tested for PAHs, and 90 percent of the tests found PAH concentrations in excess of “Immediately Dangerous to Life or Health” (as defined by the NIOSH/OSHA Occupational Health Guidelines for Chemical Hazards).
Let’s cut to the chase: Surfrider found that Corexit — a product BP used to “disperse” the oil during clean-up efforts — appears to be making it tough for microbes to digest the oil, and it also appears to act as an absorption accelerant on wet skin.
Check out the photos above. On the left are legs that were exposed to the ocean waters; on the right are the same legs under ultraviolet (UV) light. The tar that’s been treated with Corexit creates a “discernible fluorescent signature” when Illuminated with the proper UV light. This tar has permeated into the skin and cannot be washed off.
There is far more to this study (and the others) than this meager summary, and we at Mountainfilm in Telluride are not scientists, but we wonder if the FDA needs a UV light.
