According to figures released by the Deepwater Horizon Unified Command, nearly 2 million gallons of the solvent have been sprayed over the Gulf of Mexico and introduced underwater, to disperse the leaking oil. The dispersant not only breaks up the oil on the surface, but causes the resulting droplets to sink underwater, out of sight.
In May, Susan Shaw, a marine toxicologist and director of the Marine Environmental Research Institute, wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times. In it, she described a dive off the coast of Louisiana as “a surreal, sickening scene beyond anything I could have imagined.”
She also describes strong fumes emanating from the dispersed surface oil patches, and that Corexit “is also bioaccumulative, meaning its concentration intensifies as it moves up the food chain.”
In a CNN interview earlier this month, Shaw added: “This stuff is so toxic—combined, it’s not the oil alone, it’s not the dispersant—the dispersed oil that still contains this stuff, it’s very, very toxic and it goes right through skin.”
She said that shrimpers exposed to dispersed oil had reported heart palpitations, muscle spasms, and rectal bleeding.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s testing on water samples collected along the Gulf Coast “found no compounds exceeding chronic water benchmarks. These results include data for compounds found in dispersants,”according to results posted on EPA’s website www.epa.gov.
Furthermore, the EPA stated that samples collected along the coast of Louisiana in late June and early July were measured for compounds associated with dispersants: 2-Butoxyethanol, 2-Ethylhexyl Alcohol, Propylene Glycol, and Dioctyl sulfosuccinate, “but did not detect them.”
One concerned local citizen gathered his own samples off Grand Isle, La., and sent them off to an independent lab for testing, recording the process on video and posting it on the Internet.
link is here: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=6be_1278548467
In the video, a conversation with the lab reveals 430 parts-per-million (ppm) of propane-diol (another name for Propylene Glycol), a lesser component of Corexit. The lab tech states that “the Corexit itself has to be a much bigger number.” He also states that the 25 ppm of Corexit is enough to kill most fish; the lethal dose drops to 2.6 ppm when mixed with dispersed oil.
In Alabama, a reporter for WKRG News 5 gathered her own samples from various locations near the Gulf Shores area and had them tested in a local lab for the presence of oil and petroleum (Corexit is a petroleum-based solvent). One of the samples, collected near Dauphin Island, exploded during the test.
“We think that it most likely happened due to the presence of either methanol, or methane gas, or the presence of the dispersant, Corexit” said local analytical chemist Bob Naman, in the News 5 interview. “It’s just weird,” Naman said.
