BP ordered by U.S. To Cut Use of Dispersants, AGAIN!

sabrina 1

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Tue May-25-10 12:55 PM
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BP ordered by U.S. To Cut Use of Dispersants, AGAIN!

Edited on Tue May-25-10 12:58 PM by sabrina 1

BP faces criticism over the chemicals it is using to disperse the oil slick. Photograph: Stephane Jourdain/AFP/Getty Images

The EPA already asked that BP stop using Corexit, a dispersant banned in Great Britain, last week. BP refused to do so, claiming Corexit was the best dispersant available. So once again, BP is being asked nicely to stop using this chemical, known to be dangerous to wild life and to humans.

White House orders BP to cut use of dispersant by half

The White House directed BP to cut its use of chemical dispersants to break up the Louisiana oil slick by as much as 50% yesterday, reflecting concerns that the clean-up of the spill could be worsening the economic disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

Lisa Jackson, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, said the Obama administration wanted the oil company to scale back its use of chemicals on the water surface.

Clearly we need someone who is willing to do more than request nicely that BP start respecting this Government. If Britain was able to stop them from using this chemical, I don't understand why they are allowed to thumb their noses at the U.S. and use it anyhow.

Lisa Jackson admits BP continued to use Corexit after the EPA asked them to find alternatives last week:

Jackson directed the EPA last week to seek out alternative chemicals within 24 hours, but admitted yesterday that BP had continued to use Corexit to break up the spill.

She and the coast guard commander, Mary Landry, defended the use of the chemical, arguing it had prevented a more devastating landfall of heavy crude.

This is so heart-breaking. That they would try to defend BP's use of the chemical in the face of all the information available of how harmful it is. According to scientists and all the experts on this dispersant, all it does is hide the oil beneath the surface of the ocean making it even harder to stop before it reaches the shore.

NOW, it seems, the pressure and sense of urgency to stop it is so great, the EPA has had to back-track on that defense.

Louisiana's governor, Bobby Jindal, said he had warned the administration for days that the booms deployed by BP would not keep back the oil. He has said some 65 miles of Louisiana's coastline is affected, contaminating oyster beds and coating pelicans and sea turtles in oil. Independent scientists and members of Congress have also been warning about BP's heavy reliance on a dispersant called Corexit which is banned in the UK because it is harmful for marine life.

BP has poured more than 650,000 gallons of the chemical on to the spill. Scientists told congressional hearings last week that Corexit was more toxic and less effective than other dispersants on the market.

But if hiding the extent of the disastrous spill was the reason for using Corexit, it won't work for long. Scientists have already discovered huge amounts of oil under the surface, possibly the result of the use of Corexit:

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar visited a wildlife treatment center in Louisiana on Saturday.

Giant Plumes of Oil Found Under Gulf of Mexico

The undersea plumes may go a long way toward explaining the discrepancy between the flow estimates, suggesting that much of the oil emerging from the well could be lingering far below the sea surface.

The scientists on the Pelican mission, which is backed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency that monitors the health of the oceans, are not certain why that would be. They say they suspect the heavy use of chemical dispersants, which BP has injected into the stream of oil emerging from the well, may have broken the oil up into droplets too small to rise rapidly.

BP said Saturday at a briefing in Robert, La., that it had resumed undersea application of dispersants, after winning Environmental Protection Agency approval the day before.

“It appears that the application of the subsea dispersant is actually working,” Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer for exploration and production, said Saturday.

It appears that BP's Doug Suttles was wrong, unless he meant it worked to hide the real amount of oil that is there. The above article was from last week. Clearly the EPA and the WH seem to have finally concluded that BP's methods are not working and are possibly only adding to the disastrous results of the spill itself.

We would know more if Scientist were allowed access to study what is going on, but BP once again is calling the shots on this also.

BP has resisted entreaties from scientists that they be allowed to use sophisticated instruments at the ocean floor that would give a far more accurate picture of how much oil is really gushing from the well.

“The answer is no to that,” a BP spokesman, Tom Mueller, said on Saturday. “We’re not going to take any extra efforts now to calculate flow there at this point. It’s not relevant to the response effort, and it might even detract from the response effort.”

What a missed opportunity, to study for future reference, how this disaster is developing. For bidden by BP.

I don't know when the U.S. government ceded its right to study a disaster as major as this to a foreign Corporation. But BP appears to be running this show, from banning reporters and scientists, to ignoring this government's orders.