Wednesday, July 28, 2010

BP / Gulf Oil Spill - Curb Your Enthusiasm

We're as relieved as anybody to see that the massive months-long oil slick from the BP / Deepwater Horizon blowout is finally breaking up, but it's way too early to declare victory:
As NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenko says in today's New York Times,
Less oil on the surface does not mean that there isn’t oil beneath the surface, however, or that our beaches and marshes are not still at risk. We are extremely concerned about the short-term and long-term impacts to the gulf ecosystem.
At SkyTruth, we'll keep looking at the Gulf. If funding allows, we'll use satellite imagery and other remote-sensing techniques to track the future health of marsh grasses and coastal ecosystems where oil made landfall.
Posted by John at 3:18 PM
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1 comments:

  1. Thanks for your "curb your enthusiasm" commentary. We here Gulf Region know that the rest of the country is tired of hearing about this disaster, and the truth is that no one knows the environmental impact we will face for the coming years. It's by no means over. Our wetlands are fragile - and they're little hatcheries for hundreds of species. We all learned about the ecosystem and food chain in elementary school. If we lose a part of it, it can all come crashing down. Just because we don't see oil washing up on beaches and sheen on the water doesn't mean the oil (and the chemicals BP used that the EPA told them not to use) has somehow dissappeared, won't coninue to have a negative impact, or that the sealife in the gulf won't suffocate from lack of oxygen.
    I took my children to the beach in Mississippi last week and the water was an unusual merky reddish-brown. Now, it's not Florida, it's the sound - a sort of huge lagoon between the barrier islands and the mainland. But I'm from here, and I know that it just doesn't look right. And I didn't see one mullet jump out of the water, not a single blue crab in the shallow surf, not a single ghost crab skimming across the sugar-white sand. I did, however, see some mop material and a green latex glove lying on the sand, left by some BP cleanup workers. I don't know what's going on. All I know is that something's not right. So put the cork back in that champagne bottle, America. The fat lady hasn't even shown up yet.
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