According to Wikipedia, hundreds of thousands of gallons of various kinds of Corexit have been pumped into the ocean. Every day there is more. Corexit comes in various forms, and the EPA has had an evolving view of which versions are safe. Also, some toxicologists are suggesting that Corexit 9500 is massively more harmful to human health than already discussed.
Dr. Susan Shaw, a marine toxicologist and director of the Marine Environmental Research Institute wrote in the New York Times on May 28:
“Though all dispersants are potentially dangerous when applied in such volumes, Corexit is particularly toxic. It contains petroleum solvents and a chemical that, when ingested, ruptures red blood cells and causes internal bleeding. It is also bioaccumulative, meaning its concentration intensifies as it moves up the food chain.”
In a later interview with CNN, Dr. Shaw explained:
“It's the dispersed oil that still contains this stuff. It's very, very toxic and goes right through skin.”
Dr. Chris Pincetich warns that EPA toxicity testing only uses a 96-hour timeframe. What this means, he explains, is that if something takes two weeks to die, the chemical that caused the death is still classified as “non-lethal” for the purposes of EPA testing.
Pinchetich's point seems to be that the EPA is saying “Relax, Corexit won't kill you within the first 96 hours.” Beyond that, he suggests, they're really not saying.
But he goes on to underscore a point to similar to that made by Dr. Shaw:
[Corexit] basically disrupts the natural ability of oil to bond with itself. Oil bilipid layers, next to each other, are the very basis of life. Each of us is made out of cells. Those cells are nothing more than an oil layer, surrounding our DNA, surrounding our protiens and RNA and all the other molecules talking to each other. You put in a chemical that directly disrupts that basic biological structure and you are putting yourself at risk from umpteen effects.
According to Dr. Sanjay Gupta on CNN on Friday, July 9, seafood being caught now is being tested only for hydrocarbons and not for Corexit. That means that if it turns out the effects of Corexit are in fact as bad as these toxicologists claim, there is no safeguard in place at present to assure that food contaminated in this way is not slipping through.
Kent’s Analysis
Some Caveats
One absolutely critical detail that I can't quite sort out is that there have been several different versions of Corexit, each with different numbers and different histories of use. Alas, they seem to have very different properties. Even the Corexit 9500 seems to have a version 9500A which is maybe quite different. And I'm just not sure to which “versions” these videos apply.
I don't know to what degree the EPA has thoroughly explored and addressed the problems and to what degree it has ignored them. BP makes statements about risks of what the general public will be exposed to, but they have conspicuously cut corners before and there's no reason to suppose they won't again. So there is some risk that these videos are off track. But my intuitions say not. And I see no way to tell. To be on the safe side, I'm treating them as a real threat.
As I've complained about before, the process is not adequately transparent. Even now, BP seems to be running the show in areas I would not expect them to be. And the oversight process is hard to trust. For example, issues like “trade secret” have, for reasons I can't understand, been allowed to stand in the way of finding out what might kill us all. I imagine the government has the power to waive trade secret in cases like this but I can't see that it has exercised such power. (Certainly, had this been a terrorist situation I expect they would have found a way to do this. Somehow because BP is “friendly,” we don't exercise such power.)
So there are a lot of unknowns here. Consider that I am as much asking questions as offering you fact. You'll have to engage your brain here and do some digging. I've offered starting points for you. These things matter.
Personal Concerns and Suggestions
The justification for dispersants at all seems to be based on cosmetics—how ugly the oil will look otherwise. But the risks are far from cosmetic. In retrospect, not being able to see this problem seems far worse than being able to see it. We need to stop using dispersants at all. Better to just let the oil accumulate and to be able to see it.
Going forward, for things that affect the food supply or environment on a mass scale, I'd like to propose that anyone wanting to use reassuring words like “non-toxic” or “non-lethal” must be asked to eat from that food supply in substantial portions for an extended time as part of a good faith demonstration of that. In fact, I think they should bring their family to the table on this since often I think family members as an additional show of good faith. It's going to be affecting all of our families, so why not theirs?
Otherwise this just seems like it's yet another instance of privatizing profits and socializing losses. In this case, the socialized “losses” will probably be lives, not money. But it's the same principle. If BP's execs are going to be putting chemicals into the water that are alleged to break down cell tissue just by touching it, let's keep those execs' skin in the game—literally. After all, those execs are still getting rich off of all this. They'll be able buy uncontaminated food later on even if the rest of us are stuck with food too dangerous even to touch, much less to eat. This is a way of keeping them in touch with the seriousness of their decisions and the unacceptability of semantic spin over issues like this.
According to a White House press release, Obama's meeting with the BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg on June 16 was “an important step towards making the people of the Gulf Coast whole again.” But in retrospect, that remark may have a certain sad Humpty Dumpty quality to it. If Corexit really does disintegrate cellular tissue, “all the king's horses and all the king's men” won't be putting victims of the toxicity together again.
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For detailed information on the various forms of Corexit,
try the Corexit page at Wikipedia.
Updates
I've been really apprehensive about this piece because I want to talk about this issue, but I don't want to be spreading misinformation or needless worry.
There's interesting follow-up discussion in the comments below that I encourage people to read as part of this discussion. Hatchetface has kindly joined the discussion with some off-the-cuff analysis that I think adds really useful texture to the discussion and tries to answer some of my questions fairly directly. It's for discussion like this that I write occasional pieces that ask strange questions “out loud.” One never knows who will join, but it can be very nice when they do. I hope others with expert knowledge will feel free to join as well.
On the whole, I would say the discussion has reassured me a bit. But the stakes are very high, and I do think one has to sometimes risk asking questions that can seem over the top or uninformed, just to make sure things are being covered. It would be nice to think that the “experts” are handling things just fine and that questions from us out here in the bleachers were not needed, but if things were being handled just fine there would never have been a spill. It's our job as citizens to oversee our government's oversight, and no, it's not a job requirement that we be experts to participate. For better or worse, citizen participation doesn't require a credential. So we non-experts will ask some odd questions, and both the government and the coporations need to be prepared for that.
The reason people are leaping to lots of strange conclusions is that the present process has not bred trust between the people and the government. (And before the Republicans get too smug about it, the Republicans did no better, and anyway I would characterize their overall trend direction as toward less trust, not more. Obama's mistake is to offer too much continuity with prior administrations in that regard.) There is not enough transparency, and in spite of recent rhetoric about repairing the too-cozy relationship between government regulators and oil companies, the bias is still way too far toward the corporations, leaving the rest of us just wondering what's going on.
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Comments
This is some of the worst news thus far, but I thank you for bringing it to our attention.
All I can say to people questioning the viability of our food supply is, READ everything you can on the subject. This might include every label on those fresh foods coming up for sale in your local market.
The farther away from the Gulf, including any Mexican sources, the safer we may say those fruits and vegetables will be.
But no guarantees, here. Keep it local, take steps to limit uses of pesticidal chemicals in your own yard or garden, and watch the news for further developments.
Especially that to be found outside the norms for business with a profit margin to uphold.
Keep keeping the faith!
R for rational, real news of our Gulf
The Best of OS Environmentally Savvy Reporting.
You've got top billing, my friend. At least, over at my place. :)
This word “bioaccumulative” is also pretty troubling, since it means it's something that can pass from one animal to its predator in the food chain. So if this is a problem, the notion that it can be kept a local problem seems open to question. That dispersant will spread to begin with, but it doesn't help that animals will carry it due to the food they necessarily eat.
Singer/songwriter Richard Thompson wrote a song called, "Pharaoh." His lyrics include a phrase I like to think on frequently: "We're all working for the Pharaoh."
All of these dispersants contain the same basic stuff: detergent, petroleum solvents, and propylene glycol. The detergent is a proprietary sodium salt of a sulfonated alkane. something like sodium laurel sulfate, the main surfactant in shampoo. It probably has a longer alkyl chain than that but not much longer or it wouldn’t function as a detergent in water. Propylene glycol is, among other things, a food additive and a deicing agent for airplanes. It is completely biodegradable but takes a lot of oxygen to be degraded. My guess is that it is being used to help the detergent dissolve in the water (??) The petroleum based solvents are to keep the long alkyl chain detergent in solution with the propylene glycol in such high concentrations. Without it it would separate into two phases or make an emulsion. This is probably a mixture of light hydrocarbons similar to mineral spirits or mixed hexanes. they are volatile and almost totally insoluble in water. They are essentially gone within days if not hours after dumping this stuff into the water. All of these things are harmful in their pure forms as are sodium laurel sulfate, mineral spirits, and antifreeze. They will all kill you if you eat them and they will all kill marine invertebrates in high enough concentration. If you’re worried about it disrupting your red blood cell membranes then don’t inject it intravenously. The dilution factor of tossing this into the ocean is dynamic and ultimately huge. It really only works in high concentration anyway so it has to be dumped right on the oil. Once the oil has been dispersed I bet you would have a hard time finding any of the dispersant components in high enough concentration to do anything. I’m writing this without having looked at any literature on bioaccumulation studies. So I’ll just say that it is very surprising to hear that any component of this is accumulated in the food chain. Unless it contains some exotic polyaromatic compounds, as does crude oil, I really don’t know what is accumulated. ( I’ll do some research) I always thought that the point of using this was to break up the oil to make it more accessible to biodegradation. If it is to keep globs from washing up on beaches then I don’t see that the risks outweigh the benefit. In case this sounds like I’m trying to defend the use of dispersant I’m just saying that dropping soap on bugs until they die in your lab is not the same as dumping barrels of this stuff into the ocean. If it doesn’t actually do anything useful in terms of ultimately cleaning up the oil then it should not be used.
Rachel Maddow went to Grand Isle, Louisiana, where the oil was washing up and she had someone showing her the land erosion. As I understood the summary, the oil arriving at the beach did a very different thing than it used to. Instead of piling up on the surface, where it would certainly pile up and cause trouble, it was immediately cutting into the soil and breaking up the soil's ability to hang together as a coast line edge, effectively giving it the staying power of sand, which was then washed away exposing the next layer of newly found “coast” to the same effect. To me, that seemed a very bad effect, much worse than the oil problem for various reasons because of the degree to which it was possible for it to iterate, especially on a coast that was built largely of sand and silt rather than rock, as must be the case in the Mississippi basin. And it also seems bad because of the rapidity with which it could enter and poison the soil and the groundwater.
I assumed at the time of the report, though, that the Corexit was still riding along as part of this system, and contributing to this effect on an ongoing basis. What you say suggests not (though I realize you're just speculating and in any case one would want to confirm that, etc).
Also, though, if I read you correctly when the Corexit has done its thing, there is a residual new product material that is neither really petroleum nor Corexit, is that right? If so, it seems like at minimum it needs a separate name for the public to discuss it, and probably needs to explained in its own right in terms of its propagation, chemical effects, and safety. I don't think I've heard a name for this in the news (other than “toxic soup” which may prejudice the discussion some).
You mention biodegradation. I presume that can't even happen if a dead zone is created from the unrelated effect of increased dissolved methane, so it's probably good for a while but may ultimately fail.
I was going to say it could still happen at the fringes, being gradually reduced in size, but that isn't necessarily so. It depends on whether the methane dead zone is larger or smaller than the mass of mayo. Stuff probably has to first drift out of that zone in order to even get to the place where that can happen.
I don't know what the currents are doing but if they're not strong enough to break up the mass, it could be trading a surface heap-o-oil that isn't going anywhere for a huge three-dimensional volume of oil that isn't as thick but isn't going anywhere.
As for accumulations of polyaromatics in fish, these sound like the things the EPA is testing for already, so that at least sounds positive. Although one would hope they were checking for Corexit anyway as a double-check that the theory that it's going away is really true.
Great post
Anna, as with all of life, people imitate what they see, so I try to think in what I do about how to set a good example. People don't question themselves or carefully qualify their thoughts because they don't see others do it. And yet that leaves us talking about the things we're unsure of offline and only the things we're sure of online, or else it leaves us lying about how sure we are online and getting ourselves entrenched. Cognitive dissonance is a powerful force that tries to lock one into a particular mode of thinking, lest they be accused of inconsistency. It's why it's very bad that there is some of this tea party speech because it forces a lot of people to stand by things they said and develop strange rationalizations, and then minds are hard to change. So saying something and still allowing yourself to change your mind or be open is terribly difficult. I had a lot of trouble with it here, but I came at it knowing that I would and had somewhat prepared the text to permit me to change my mind. I had thought about actually removing the text, not out of embarrassment, but out of a desire not to misinform. And yet I wanted to keep the historical record. For this kind of thing, a wiki is sometimes a better format since you can see the result but you can examine the editing history to find out what changes were made and (if the person making the changes recorded their reasons) why. But this forum is what it is and I tried to work within its constraints. I don't think it's likely to catch on as a general practice without better tools and without people having more training... and the trend is not in the right direction. But one can always hope. Anyway, it was a lot of effort trying to figure out how to retain the balanced look, so I'm heartened that the issues I wanted to keep in frame were noticed and appreciated.
I will add this comment though.
My understanding of why this dispersant was used from the get go was so the oil will sink out of sight from the ocean's surface. The idea that it would disperse(out of sight, out of mind) was not bright as far as I can see.
I pondered at the time if it was simply to make it disappear from the surface and the over flying planes would not see it on the waters surface.
I will come back in a few for further reading and discussion asap.
Stacey, yes, it's good to have smart friends.
Unfortunately, all of this has been a part of the consistent Republican attack on science in this country. Remember the National Academy of Sciences? Remember the scientific abstract delivery service that the US Government used to have but discarded because of concerns about "the budget deficit?"
And remember the Bush political appointees that were sheepdipped, turned into career Federal bureaucrats so that they could live like cockroaches in the bureaucracy? There's more than just one agency capture, boobie!
Clearly Obama needs to spend big money in this area. Hope people get on Washington's case. Email the Prez. Write your Congo. call some people up.