Effects Of Oil Spill Not Finished

PRLog (Press Release) - Sep. 2, 2010 - "Most of the oil that goes into the water in a major spill stays there, and once the oil is in the water, the damage is done," said Rick Steiner, marine conservationist and activist in Alaska. He was one of the first scientists to caution that most of BP’s oil spill would remain underwater, developing giant and potentially deadly toxic fumes.

After the Exxron Valdez ran aground in 1989, Steiner started studying the effect of oil spills.

Steiner warned, over three months ago, "Government and industry will habitually understate the volume of the spill and the impact and they will overstate the effectiveness of the cleanup and their response".

It is possibly only ten percent of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill has been recovered through burning and skimming, a congressional hearing was told.

BP initially declared that only 5000 barrels a day were leaking from the damaged Deepwater Horizon oil well. Following the revelation of a video of the leaking oil being made publicly, BP and the government finally admitted that there were probably between 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day leaking into the Gulf of Mexico.

This estimation was eventually increased to 20,000 to 40,000 barrels a day, then 35,000 to 60,000 barrels a day, before finally being leveled at 62,000 barrels a day. It was only two weeks following the well being finally capped, that the public learned that the spill was about 16 times that of the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

“As far as I know there was no independent observation or estimation of the numbers.” Steiner says the actual amount of oil retrieved could be roughly half of what the report claims. He says that based on the conclusions of the operational reports, 11.1 million gallons of oil were burned and 34.7 million gallons of oily water were retrieved through skimming.

Steiner remarks on the burning of crude oil, "That's not technically removing it from the environment. It either went into the air as atmospheric emissions, and some of that is pretty toxic stuff, or there's a residue from burning crude that sinks to the ocean floor, sometimes in big thick mats."

Following the Exxon Valdez, scientists firmly believed the Prince William Sound's population of Pacific herring-- crucial to equally the food web and local fishermen -- had survived the spill. However, due to compromised immune systems, four years later, the population appears to have crashed, never to return.

Steiner said, no one can presume what will happen with any certainty, because there are simply too many variables in complex ecosystems. From seabirds to sperm whales, he believes, could all be affected for years to come.

For more information about "Effects Of Oil Spill Not Finished", visit website http://www.tropicpost.com/bp-oil-spill-grossly-underestim...

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