|
For PR purposes, the Gazans are. But war reporting and political reporting make for pretty bad science reporting.
The WP mostly stops being WP fairly quick; in fact, most WP isn't pure WP--it's hard to keep it pure. In any case, once a WP shell explodes the WP falls to land on the surface of the ground or buildings; as long as it's in contact with air, it'll react--cover it with water or another solvent, it stops reacting. Cover it with dirt that doesn't allow oxygen to get through, it stops reacting--but the shells exploded above ground, so the falling WP didn't burrow in very deeply. Moreover, soils in Gaza are dry and there's not just a lot of water about. This is important--if the WP lands in mud, you can have it protected and it'll stay WP for a while, waiting to combust upon exposure to air. The reaction products can produce a bit of pollution if a lot's used, but most winds up being dispersed by the air. The small particles may settle in the ground and alter the soil pH a bit, or be washed out of the air by rain, but eventually it'll be converted phosphoric acid, and from there to phosphates. By "eventually" I mean, of course, early last week.
Too much phosphate can be a bad thing for plants. But it doesn't render the soil toxic for humans, and it's unlikely that the streets and building that it fell on have a very high crop yield. The soils it fell on are mostly, at least in the photos I've seen, unproductive. In any event, over the course of a year (or less) most of it would wash out. If it makes it to the aquifers, I think I'd be more concerned with what metals it picked up along the way. If it is removed as runoff, that's probably not a problem. I read recently that the nitrate and phosphate pollution in the Nile has actually increased fisheries off the coast of Egypt (since there's the little matter of the Mediterranean being so nutrient poor that nutrients, not oxygen, is the limiting factor in growth); I figure this means some dumping of sewage off the Gaza coast might not be an entirely bad thing, to be honest. Unpleasant, to be sure.
Nobody's actually proven that DU's used in Gaza. It seems only plausible that it was used. The one person who went on record saying he identified it didn't say exactly how he identified it and made sure that it wasn't, as was the case in the only sample of "DU-contaminated" soil from Lebanon a couple of years ago, a naturally occurring concentration of radioisotopes. If they can't do quantitative tests for phosphorus (which require state-of-the-art c. 1880 equipment and knowledge), they almost certainly couldn't test for DU in an emergency room during the conflict.
In both cases the article is intended to make us say, "Oh my God, their soils have been poisoned and salted for a generation, how horrible," i.e., to make us indignant so that we assume the conclusion is true and therefore the proof is provided. It asks us to preclude questioning whether there are facts behind the assertions, and if the conclusions are warranted. This is nice rhetoric, bad logic, what I call "critical feeling" to highlight that it emphatically fails the "critical thinking" test. I'd test a few of the more promising sites for DU; esp. down along the Egyptian border where the extra mass might help penetrate the soil, but wouldn't be overly concerned until the test results came back.
|