Clean Water Whenever

Dispersants Create Unabated Toxic Soup Everywhere, America’s Streams, Lakes and Coasts Under Stress.

Oil lifting chemicals being applied to rocks. U.S. Coast Guard photo

(LAGUNA BEACH) - America and the rest of the literate world is getting up to speed regarding the potential long-term negative impacts of oil dispersion compounds. If ignorance is bliss, we’re no longer happy-idiot, blind petroleum idolaters. In fact, ALL of our fragile watery ecosystems are going going gone, and the basic health of the people who are trying to clean up the Gulf mess is becoming a point of contention and distress. The warning signs, the known avoidable risk assessment issues were there but ignored for the sake of expediency, public relations and yes, money.

Oil dispersants and one of their two main components, surfactants, are a classic example of the “Good news, bad news” syndrome. This is another “better living through chemistry” fiasco. The emerging “Dead Zones” along all of America’s coastlines have reached critical mass, and we are beginning to get the science that points the guilty finger back towards ourselves as the culprits. These lifeless areas are not natural or cyclical for Earth.

The particular oil dispersants being used in the Gulf are combinations of petroleum distillates (solvents) and surfactants, and their effectiveness is as described, they dilute (hence disperse) the petroleum-based pollutants. That appears to be good news, but inherent is the spreading and far-reaching dissipation of the contamination. Thus BP fights to avoid a stiff upper oil slick.

Link to CNN report on oil spill health impact

The bad news is, pardon the pun, “dilutional,” that is they may lower concentration levels by thinning them in the immediate vicinity but actually broadcast the pollution much further and deeper. Claims that the oil has been removed are lies, anyone who pushes that agenda is either delusional or believes the public and scientific community to be gullible.

Moreover, corporations like BP, though sternly warned by the US Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) and the more strident and confrontational enviro-protection NGOs, use some of the worst and least effective products, ones like COREXIT®, which comes in (pun intended) DEAD LAST on any reasonable biologist’s list. In the last few days, USEPA sternly asked them to reduce the daily volume of this product's being employed, from 70,000 gallons per day (gpd) down to 15,000 gpd^[1].

ASKED? That’s what parents say when they try to cajole ornery, spoiled and probably privileged kids into cleaning up their rooms. And when USEPA exclaims they’re disappointed, well, that’s something the same parents would utter if their little genius brought home a “B” on his/her report card. C’mon, they’re the EPA for God’s sake, where’s the protection part in requesting compliance with the federally mandated Endangered Species, National Toxic Rule Substance and Clean Water Acts?

No, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure out that BP has now dumped millions of polluted gallons into formerly pristine waters. The formula I gave in a previous article basically asserts that there’s a 1:1,000,000 ratio of petroleum to clean water pollution. Translation: 1 gallon of oil contaminates 1 million gallons (mg) of water. Now you’ll need your computer: Add the admitted 1.1+ million gallons of Corexit® used to the now (through June 8^th) guess-timated total of nearly 200 mg, then multiply times 1 million? Running out of zeros, ‘cause you’re into the hundreds of trillions?

Since dispersants REACT with questionably fuzzy math/biology/chemistry interfaces, maybe scientists will end up multiplying the 1.1 million TIMES 200 mg or some such variation, so once again nobody has real case studies regarding discrete computations and projections. The manufacturer of Corexit®, the Nalco Holding Company (NHC), sold its entire inventory to BP, so unlike the oil, it has been completely gobbled up!

NHC claims an effective ration of 50:1, so maybe multiplying 50 x 1.1 million x 200 million x ??? constitutes a jumping off point, something, but what is it? It’s just not currently understood what all of the short, mid and long-term side effects and toxic by-products are that gives us this brain freeze^[2].

As there are no studies or exact mathematics to provide discrete measurements regarding dispersant negative eco-potential, we don’t really know what happens when you use them for such geysers, in such volumes over such long periods of time and large surface areas. The effects could be exponential, logarithmic, incalculable, what-ev-er. Uncertainty reigns supreme, no one really knows.

This defines LOST and CLUELESS.

This is the major reason you’re hearing so many “We don’t knows” from government, scientists and BP, this is why we hear so much about “performance metrics” (exact measurements) but don’t get any. No one seems to know how much is being discharged down there, where the now-diluted, dispersant-laden soup is or is going. So they all stand around discussing “modeling,” that is predictive or analytical software systems designed by engineers at desks. Problem is that modeling is not always accurate either. Reassuring, huh? If you’re frustrated, then you’re getting to where many of us have been for over 7 weeks. This does add a humorous note to media coverage---They haven’t any idea about what they’re really covering, it’s moving slow like in the movie “The Blob.”

And as Coach Wooden might say in dismay: “Never mistake activity for achievement.” Since there hasn’t been much of the first it’s difficult to comprehend how they want to boast of the second. No, BP, we’re not children, telling us that we’re almost there is a morally repugnant and ridiculous stance. Telling us this has been a tremendous learning experience, bowing and promising like a juvenile delinquent in open court that it’ll never happen again are absurd and refutable allegations.

Meanwhile, whoopee, they’re adding 4 mgd or more while these inept bozos literally fumble for the switch to stop this from continuing. No one seems to even know how much is coming out of the ocean floor, but we DO know how contaminating every gallon is.

There are home grown idiots, mostly the “drill baby drill” crowd or big corporate resource biz buddies (also “dilutional”) that diminish the impacts by murmuring “Hey, it’s a big ocean, it’ll take the abuse.”

You don’t hear the fishermen or tourist industry saying that. The ecosystems remain as relatively stationary targets, and as always, mute and with few advocates. Only litigation will bring rapid response---Our own government is still sitting on its collective hands, BP passed the signposts reading “useless and unworthy, now entering the Twilight Zone” weeks ago.

We’re being bombarded with obvious photos of coated birds, everyone wipes back a tear, but the major decimation is below the surface where only brave men like the Cousteaus venture. They’ve shown sharks and other species swimming around completely disoriented, dazed and confused, unable to forage. Anything ingesting the carcasses will die more rapidly as well.

Corexit® has become the go-to dispersant for numerous reasons. Foremost, it gives a quick visual effect that appears to cosmetically equate to a cleanup or remediation, naïve observers believing that the problems have been solved. They have not, using this dispersant becomes more controversial as the adverse impacts become more widely understood by scientists. There are no long-term studies because we’re basically experimenting with these toxic cocktails and their removal from our watery resources. The Center for Biological Diversity filed a 60-day Notice of Intent to litigate on June 2, naming US EPA and the US Coast Guard for not stopping BP from using Corexit®---Ironically it’s made in the good old USA by NHC, and there’s info indicating it has an incestuous relationship with EXXON and BP, might even be a subsidiary, now where’s the surprise there?

Further irony is that (funny ha ha) it is manufactured in Illinois, President Obama’s home state^[3].

To bend the minds of Salem-News readers even more, the two main dispersants being used (Corexit® 9500 and 9527) have been cited and specifically banned in the United Kingdom due to concerns over their impacts on the marine environment! So even BP’s own namesake homeland has outlawed it, adding further confusion to already overwhelmingly complex ecological conundrums (plural)^[4].

Surfactants, as I pointed out previously, break down the barriers between substances on a molecular level, allow and encourage the bizarre mixtures we call urban runoff. Surfactants have a longer history or database, yet they too are now understood to be mixing with petroleum distillates in that insidious crap known as urban runoff.

Our nation’s watercourses, lakes and coastal zones, due to this increasing surfactant and distillate presence ARE in fact by water quality sampling monitoring stats identical and indistinguishable in chemical composition from oil dispersants. So these witches' brews are pretty much ubiquitous, you need not drive to Louisiana, inhale and pass out or swim through and go to the ER fast. Dispersants have already come to your neighborhood and are running amok. That hasn’t become a headline nor commonly known.

Even CNN finally decided to do a series, “Toxic America,” but I’m unsure who will integrate the disturbing information into behavioral modification and better business oversight by government. There’s a backlash, populist movements are focused on less or smaller government, less regulation to stimulate the recovery of the economy. America seems more concerned about money than its environmental future. What is trickling down: Endemic contamination of our nation’s water, toxic constituents run amok. All of our water now has traces and markers of vast arrays of known carcinogens, whether above or below ground^[5].

You have anti-freeze, oil, and transmission fluids dripping or boiling over from vehicles. Common household pesticides and herbicides use petroleum distillates as media for broadcasting them about your garden and open spaces. The petroleum helps them to stick or stay in place longer during watering or rain, thus they are more effective. This peskiness works against us in our environment as they’re more difficult to separate and/or filter out. Entire cottage industries are devoted to attempts, but technology hasn’t found any one answer. Usually a series or technological treatment train is required, all of the present choices expensive and with flaws that leave them only partially capable of 100% success.

This is why we call urban runoff “Toxic Soup,” a descriptive term I personally embraced over a decade ago. Urban runoff is not only laden with a disgusting gamut of carcinogenic contaminants, 99% already banned from being discharged into our nation’s water: The reduction, let alone removal, of toxic soup constituents from our environs is infinitely more complicated because of the mixing, the net or cumulative effect. Simply put, we don’t have the ability to divert, siphon, filter, treat, reduce and/or remove this much “stuff.” Our receiving waters, even the larger and more readily navigable ones with outlets, are basically just mixing bowls, and they have become experimental labs for the chemical industry^[6].

When it rains significantly, the sloughing off of the surfactants (cleansers) used for washing cars and other items by homeowners and commercial-strength contributors, combines with the already existent chlorine or chloramine in our potable water. These create EPA-acknowledged carcinogenic substances called “nitrosamines” as I mentioned in my May 26^th column: Clean Water Now In The Gulf? I Don't Think So!

If this sounds like it’s pessimistic, well, sorry folks but the reality of Mr. Rogers' neighborhood, the one your own water quality regulators are doing little to subside. Once in a blue moon, either federal EPA or your state’s version hits some chronic violator with a fine. Whatever the sanction, it’s usually a hand slap, minimal in amount and much too late anyway, the damage already done. The toxic horse got out of the barn a long, long time ago.

One of my closest buddies is a former USMC pilot, now a retired commercial pilot. He’s very worldly, a pretty savvy guy.

We slammed down a few beers today (June 8^th), cynically commiserating over this disaster off the Gulf coast. His conclusion is that BP will file BK, pulling a corporate version of a Pontius Pilate and take an accountability hike.

They’ll metaphorically wash themselves of potential calamitous debt, no doubt using metaphorical dispersant mechanisms and towels via courtrooms. Leaving “US,” as in the US taxpayer, holding the proverbial oil-stained bag of debt and destruction. That will be their cowardly corporate exit strategy. On the other hand, maybe they’ve left the world with no other option. The public WILL have its pound of flesh, but it might be a pound of legal paper.

Let’s face it, they’ll just resurface as another abstract entity, that how it works.

It will take a mature mindset to finally realize that we’re not only swimming around in this toxic soup, these chemistry set nightmares along with other aquatic species, we’re absorbing them through our skin and swallowing them, either in our drinking water or inadvertently through normal bathing and washing. Humans scrub themselves and their clothes constantly in surfactants because we know how effective they are---Now we need to integrate how threatening they are. We equate cleanliness and Godliness----The blush is off that rosy picture too until we awaken and demand as consumers non-carcinogenic alternatives.

This is an “Apocalypse Now,” an enormous cluster of criminality in progress, and by the time attenuation (lowering or elimination of contaminant levels) has been achieved your local watery eco-systems wherever you live will have already been degraded for years, dying or dead.

Drilling onshore or in shallow offshore won’t change anything, neither will reduce our use of petroleum or remove its adverse by-product impacts.

Historically, before our heavy-handed presence and dense population increases near water, our watersheds, wetlands, estuaries, streams and lakes had tremendous inherent healing powers. Now they are under assault by coupled inorganic and organic armies that they have no natural defenses for. Not all species of plants and animals can mutate fast enough to survive this. Not even us.

There will be no summer of love in the Gulf, but there will be many winters of discontent ahead. I’d suggest lynching but then BP would probably sue me. Unless USEPA drops the hammer big time and fast on all of these chemical corporations, makes it a fist and sledgehammer at that, it seems likely that we’re headed in the wrong direction yet where we’re inexorably going: Clean Water Never.

References:

^[1] WATER POLLUTION: Less toxic dispersants lose out in BP spill cleanup - Greenwire

^[2] BP oil spill puts Nalco Holdings, oil dispersants in spotlight - By Larry Dignan Smartwire

^[2b] Attack of the killer blob from the deep - Wingham Advanced-Times

^[3] Lawsuit Seeks Full Disclosure of Dispersant Impacts on Gulf's Endangered Wildlife - Center for Biological Diversity

^[4] UC Davis experts discuss role of dispersants in gulf clean-up Share By Matt Kawahara - Sacramento Bee

^[5] Contaminants in Groundwater Used for Public Supply - USGS

^[6] Too much pavement, too little oversight: EPA to tackle stormwater runoff - Environmental Health News

FYI: If a project near you has some interesting enviro-aspect(s) that you think is/are worthy of Salem-News.com coverage and our readers attention, feel free to contact me with a very brief synopsis. Water-related “Blue Interventions” are my specialty!

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Launched in 2010, Odd Man Out is the creation of Roger von Bütow and his OMO columns are written exclusively for Salem-News-com. Born and raised in the LA Harbor area, son of a German immigrant father, he's been in Orange County for 45 years and is a 38-year resident of Laguna Beach, Ca. In 1998, he began his professional career in environmental review processes (CEQA, NEPA, MND, MND and EIR/EIS). He's a rare mix of cross-trained builder, writer and consultant as he brings his extensive construction experiences dating back to 1972 into his eco-endeavors. He has tremendous field and technical expertise in successful watershed restorations, plus wastewater, urban runoff, water quality monitoring/improvements and hydrologic mechanisms. He's built everything from commercial spas to award-winning private residences, and provided peer review and consultant analyses for single homes, subdivisions and upscale resorts.

View articles written by Roger Butow Read Roger's full biography on the Salem-News.com Staff Page

His resumé is extensive, try an online GOOGLE search of his personal journey and historical accomplishments. His consultation fees are reasonable and if you've got a major project that alarms you, that needs creative intervention, then he's your man. His credentials and "CV" can be provided upon request.

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