Engineering lab finds dispersant in Biloxi water

[nalnn]

Source: Sun Herald - Hattiesburg, MS

BILOXI — A Boston-based engineering company, hired by a New Orleans law firm to take samplings in Gulf waters, recently found high concentrations of dispersant near an oil patch between Horn Island and Biloxi.

Boston Chemical Data Corp. President Marco Kaltofen said his group was collecting samples Aug. 9 at Horn Island when they came across a brown, foamy material near an iridescent sheen of oil. The team a detected chemical odor, he said.

“We certainly didn’t expect to find dispersant in that area,” Kaltofen said.


Read more: http://www.sunherald.com/2010/09/01/2446875/engineering-lab-finds-dispersant.html#storylink=omni_popular

[Roland99]

1. "nobody expects the Spanish Inquistion"

or tainted drinking water.

[nolabear]

2. Beat me to it.

[ladywnch]

10. me too! n/t

[nolabear]

3. Damn. I knew I should have stuck to bottled when I was there a couple of weeks ago.

But that clean, lemony fresh taste just kept drawing me like a dog to anti-freeze.

[nalnn]

7. KCl

I hope you weren't drinking from Biloxi Bay! That water hasn't been clean since the 1920's :)

[Recursion]

15. I was about to say, I used to go to summer camp in Biloxi

And dispersants, while bad, would not be my biggest worry there.

Edit: is Keesler still around or did it get BRAC'ed?

[nalnn]

20. Yes

Yes, in fact. Keesler is still around. It is a great place to visit.

[JoeyT]

21. Yep, it's still around.

I was there last week with my parents. I grew up there, and I remember a sewage pipe tall enough that a grown man could walk down it without stooping over steadily spewing raw sewage into the Gulf. That was in the mid-late 80s, so it's not like it's ancient history.

The Air Force made a point of telling the military that transferred in or trained there "Do not go in the water and do not let your families go in the water.".

[xchrom]

4. Everyone is caught 'off guard', 'surprised', was 'not expecting'

The most predictable things any more.

[robinlynne]

6. Yes, Condaleeza Rice over and over and over......

NObody could have predicted". That is what they said here in LA, when 48,000 votes went uncounted. NObody could have imagined. We all knew. We all warned them. but we are "the left".

[OhioChick]

9. Isn't it getting annoying?

Do they really think we're going to keep falling for this "unexpected" shit forever?

I guess some will.

[HCE SuiGeneris]

5. It's Windex. Don't worry about it.

:popcorn:

[Dr.Phool]

13. Where is that guy?

Corexit!

It slices! It dices! It.....nevermind, wrong commercial!

[IndianaGreen]

8. Why did Mr. Kaltofen expect to find no dispersants in that area?

And what does it mean that he did?

[nalnn]

11. Lawyers?

I think the answer to that lies in whether he was hired to do his research by the defense or plaintiff in whatever proceeding that may be coming.

[jobycom]

25. Probably because there was no oil in that area, inside the barrier islands.

There's a line of barrier islands a couple miles off the Coast. Horn is one of those. There was some oil on the other side of those islands, but I never heard of anything other than tar balls getting past the islands, and not much oil even reached the other side of those islands. So since Corexit supposedly would have broken up the oil and sunk somewhat quickly, it's odd that there was a patch that large inside the islands. At least, I think that's his point.

Honestly, I suspect this is a hoax. Last week someone found an empty Corexit container in a bayou in Bay St. Louis, just a few miles from Biloxi, and now they find this patch, which should have already dispersed. I suspect someone is trying to create a panic or play a joke for some reason, if it's even actually Corexit. It says they found three chemicals used in Corexit, not that they actually were able to identify the product. That area of the Gulf is extremely polluted from runoff and from the constant boat traffic in the Sound. The barrier islands act as a barricade, so everything that winds up in the Sound tends to linger. In the 70s it was so polluted with fertilizers and pesticides and oil and marine fuel and even natural pollutants like silt and mud and peat that people rarely swam in it. The whole think is a dull, almost opaque brown. I'd be surprised if there were chemicals they didn't find in there.

But that's just a guess.

[femrap]

12. Corexit is going to

be everywhere....reports of it in Missouri after heavy rains...leaving holes in plants and eventually turn to brown.

Over a million gallons of this toxic spew is flown/injected into the GOM and people are 'surprised' it is there.

:mad: :wtf: :argh:

[Dr.Phool]

14. Awww, everybody knows you spray your garden with Windex.

And clean your broccoli with Dawn.

Why, just this morning, I dumped 50 gallons of Windex in my pool, just to give it that "Gulf Feeling".

[nc4bo]

16. Humph and we always used Clorox. :idea:

You dump your Windex, I'll come by and air drop some Clorox and we can hold a huge neighborhood toxic cloud watch?

Poor Gulf of Mexico :cry:

[femrap]

18. I'm sticking w/ Simple Green! nt

[boppers]

23. lol, well played.

:evilgrin:

(For those not following, it's the same cleaning ingredients in Corexit, Simple Green, Windex, and a whole lot of other cleaners/degreasers)

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

17. ...

"reports of it in Missouri after heavy rains...leaving holes in plants and eventually turn to brown. "

Good thing those turned out to be rather obvious hoaxes.

[gratuitous]

19. Now, there's no evidence this is from BP's use of Corexit

That could be anybody's Corexit poisoning the ecosystem.

[JoeyT]

22. He meant the people a thousand miles from the Gulf claiming Corexit was killing plants.

Meanwhile it isn't bothering any of the plants between the two places in the least. And when the pictures were tossed up on the internet it was obviously a blight of some sort.

[TalkingDog]

24. Nobody expects a kick in the 'nads either.....

but somehow that's my first impulse when I hear this kind of crap.

[jobycom]

26. Sounds like a hoax.

That area didn't get any oil, inside the barrier islands, so it would be strange for it to get any dispersants. There was a story last week about someone finding Corexit containers in Bayou Caddy in Bay St. Louis, nearby. I'm thinking someone is trying to embarrass BP or get revenge or just trying to be funny. It's even possible they just found a patch of some other spill with the right chemicals. The water there retains pollutants because of the barrier islands. We almost never went swimming out there, inside the barrier islands like that.

Just a guess. Just tossing the possibility out there, not swearing it was a hoax.

[Swamp Rat]

29. Well, I have been down to the marinas in Plaquemine and often stop at small seafood stands

I'm not the only one who thinks the shrimp smells like chemicals (the whole goddamn Parish smells like a cocktail of chemicals).

For the first time in my life I have stopped eating seafood (except for crawfish, which is out of season). :(

[jobycom]

32. True, but that's the area that got hit the hardest.

Grand Isle and the marshes were where the oil was washing up. Horn island is off Biloxi. I'm not saying they haven't poisoned the Hell out of the Gulf, I'm just saying that where they found this latest sample is an unlikely place for it to have drifted intact.

[TalkingDog]

30. Most things do.

When they are "unexpected" or, as my spousal unit is fond of saying: "That's unbelievable, but not surprising."

Nature has never been fond of linear (read human) processes. She tends to be, in our view, rather messy and chaotic. So you get waterspouts picking up fish and dumping them in the middle of a desert. Or the iron-clad assertion that "the laws of physics are immutable", which as it turns out....not so much. i.e. http://economist.com/node/16930866


So, if this stuff migrates to places we never imagined, that doesn't make it a hoax or even vandalism, it merely points out that humans often suffer from failures of imagination. In this case, catastrophic.

Now, that said, I'm all for poking around to see if it shows up in other places for a number of reasons:
If some idiot is scooping up toxic waste and dumping it on unpolluted soil, we have a right to know
-for public health and safety
-for legal stand purposes
-for scientific clarity

[jobycom]

33. All that may be true.

I'm not denying there may be giraffes walking around downtown Tokyo. I'm just saying this case sounds like a hoax, or a mistake (meaning they may have found the chemicals they claim but they may have come from someone dumping cleaning supplies or something else). People have dumping stuff in the Gulf for longer than I've been alive. There are runoff pipes from the highway straight into the Gulf. Boats sink all the time. People dump stuff off boats, on purpose or accident. Horn Island and its neighbors are popular boating destinations, for swimming or fishing or partying (the water on the outer side of the islands is clean), so there are dozens of boats or more in that area every day.

It could be Corexit, I'm not saying it can't be. I just think it sounds less likely than other explanations.

[TalkingDog]

34. I will admit to (classical, not popular) skepticism on this

I can't know what chemicals are in the mixture that was found other than the ones reported. ( honestly, I can't even really know that...but infinite regress is not the point here) And I can't know how that mixture got there.

So even if I suspected a certain scenario to be (or thought something sounded) likely or less likely, that would merely be my opinion. Which in the end, counts for very little.

Now a debunker (or someone practicing the popular form of "skepticism") may have no such compunction about making a judgment. I was simply pointing out that expecting a given outcome when it comes to the workings of the natural world can lead to unforeseen problems unless one were willing to do actual research.

[Swamp Rat]

27. It's also in most the shrimp and fish Americans are eating at this moment.

I have eaten seafood all my life, the staple of my diet, but I am now eating just beans and rice, fruits and vegetables (hopefully pesticide-free).

Go ahead America, believe the FDA, eat the poison and die, or have three-eyed children.

BP has poisoned us and will get away with it.

[Mimosa]

28. Oh, dear God.

Why were they allowed to put that crap CoRexit in the ocean?

[spin]

31. Because our government kisses BP's ass! (n/t)