There's an old saying in legal circles that the cover-up is always much worse than the initial crime. It's hard to say if that is exactly true with the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 -- after all, the initial explosion killed 11 workers and caused roughly 5 million barrels of oil to spew into the rich marine environment. But the core of the ensuing cover-up carried out by BP with the blessing of the federal government -- the massive, unprecedented spraying of a toxic chemical called Corexit in the hope that pushing the oil out of sight would also put it out of mind -- was a catastrophe in and of itself. Never before had so much dispersant -- some 1.8 million gallons -- been deployed, and never was so much sprayed at the bottom of the sea floor, where its impact has never been studied. Immediately, clean-up and recovery workers blamed the dispersant for an array of illnesses, while researchers speculated that so much Corexit in the food chain could have major impact on marine life -- and the seafood that you eat. Recently, scientists in Alabama came up with a new protocol for studying how ...
↧