For residents of the battered Gulf Coast, Hurricane Isaac didn't just bring sheets of rain, pummeling winds, and a powerful storm surge. The slow moving, deceptively destructive Category 1 hurricane stirred up tragic memories of Hurricane Katrina, which arrived seven years earlier to the very day, and it stirred up something else. Oil. As much as a 1 million barrels, the remnants of a man-made disaster, the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion and spill. At approximately 6 a.m. today, my consultant Marco Kaltofen from Boston Chemical Data Corp. -- who has been invaluable in documenting pollution and other fallout since the BP catastrophe -- reported that he spotted a large BP crew and a fleet of payloaders and other heavy equipment ready to move out at Orange Beach, Ala. That is a community that has suffered tarballs and other toxic pollution after earlier -- and lesser -- tropical storms in the Gulf. Later today, Kaltofen sent me pictures of a positive test for oil residue in sand from Destin, Fla., a nearby restaurant that had been polluted with oil from the storm surge, and oily material in the sand at Destin's Calhoun public beach -- all a good distance east of where Isaac made landfall. Although our ...
↧