Wathen has produced perhaps the most compelling evidence of damage from the BP spill in the form of aerial videos that can be seen here and here. His latest video was shot on July 19, and after a five-hour trip to the spill's Ground Zero and back, the airplane was largely covered with an orange, oil sheen.
Wathen discusses e-mails from several residents of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, which is about 300 miles from the coast, who say they recently were caught in a rainstorm and wound up with burning skin, vomiting, headaches, diarrhea, and other symptoms. One correspondent tested the rain water and found it to have high levels of acidity.
What do these reports mean? Wathen is quick to say that he is not a scientist and is not qualified to make a determination. But he does raise alarming questions about the BP spill and its possible effects on air quality:
It seems to me that if it's thick enough to accumulate on an aircraft, it's thick enough to be evaporated into the clouds and rain back down in other parts of the country. We need scientific exploration into this. We need to know if, in fact, the acid rain that was measured in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, came from the Gulf of Mexico and what we can expect from long-term implications to our health.
You can check out the latest Wathen video below:
It's probably the illegal-everywhere-but-here dispersant rather than the actual oil.
ReplyDeletehere is a link to some research done for bird ally x on the question of toxic rain as result of the oil disaster in the gulf of mexico.
ReplyDeletehttp://birdallyx.blogspot.com/2010/07/black-rain-toxic-rain.html
while the current situation has very little available data, plenty of other oil burning events have given a fairly clear picture of what might be expected downwind, so to speak.
thanks to john wathen for his work!
Its not illegal everywhere. It has been the main response tool for many years in the UK and in the right place with the right oil has been scientifically proven NOT to produce long term damage to the environment, despite what the opponents propaganda keeps saying
ReplyDeleteWhy is this blamed on the oil spill, when much simpler, and more feasible explanations exist, such as smog from Birmingham, or the coal mines and steel industries all within 50 miles of Tuscaloosa?
ReplyDelete