Gulf Oil Update: Day 154--Disturbing Developments Suggest Federal Government Coverup of Potential Danger

Dr. Vincent Wilson Department of Enviromental Sciences LSU 
LSU Toxicologist Discusses Health Risks in the Gulf of Mexico


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Oil Dispersants have made BP disaster catastrophic


Chemical Dispersants Add to Toxicity of Crude Oil


Chemcial Dispersants Select out the Most Toxic Components of Oil


2 Million Gallons of Chemical Dispersant Have Been Sprayed in Gulf:
EPA Covering-up Effects of Dispersants


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You Got To See This!!! Feds Threaten Reporter Who Is digging In Sand **VIDEO**

By admin HERE...
September 19, 2010
What are they hiding? Uh…..Oil? That’s right; you can no longer build sand castles in the sand when you go to the beach. BP is only allowed to dig down 6 inches to look for oil and anyone else including reporters who attempt to dig its “illegal”.

I understand the reason to preserve national beach areas including the wildlife that uses these beaches, but when the government is using the sand digging ordiance that restricts sand castles in National Parks to hide the oil raises major concerns. Turning your head is not a solution….

Pensacola Beach


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Government Denies Gulf Waters Are Toxic **VIDEO**

By admin HERE...
September 18, 2010

James Fox – We spoke with government officials on September 15, 2010. They maintain that Gulf waters and beaches are safe and that there is no evidence to suggest the contrary. We then met with an independent lab and locals: what we found was not consistent with the governments position.



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Professor says HOMELAND SECURITY confiscated samples and NOTES with insider information on dispersant — “IN THE INTEREST OF NATIONAL SECURITY”
Video


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Inspector: “OIL starts BUBBLING to the surface” when SAND heats up — Secreting “black and brown oil”

Floridaoilspilllaw.com
September 20th, 2010 at 10:40 AM Times-Picayune, September 19, 2010:

Excerpts

[P]atches of brown sand exposed to the heat of the noonday sun often begin secreting oil. “There’s so much oil in some of these sands that when they heat up, the oil starts bubbling to the surface,” [Wisner land field inspector Forrest] Travirca said. “That’s one reason the cleanup crews have to wear those (protective) shoes. They’re literally walking on oil sometimes.” …

[Y]ards-long… huge, sticky mats of sand and sea shells bound together by oil residue… [that] were exposed to the sun [had] black and brown oil [that] was bubbling to the surface, tracing small black lines between shorebirds and hermit crabs before dripping into the Gulf. …

“You see birds and crabs and other animals walking on it and feeding in it. You see fishermen out there casting over this stuff, and they have no idea what’s below their boats. “This can’t be safe for critters and people.” …

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Reporter: “Entire communities where they’re vomiting blood” in Louisiana — “Very, very serious situation here” VIDEO)  (Editor's NOTE: I have so far been unable to document the claims made here but am still trying to gather independent corroborative evidence--medically of course it is possible given the extremely toxic nature of the oil/dispersant combination now present in the Gulf of Mexico)




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Oil Eating Microbe Alcanivorax Borkumensis and The Ugly Truth
By Ali Schmidt
Testtherain.com HERE...
September 19, 2010

As some of you know, I was recently quoted in Dr. Riki Ott’s article ” Bio-Remediation or Bio-Hazard? Dispersants, Bacteria and Illness in the Gulf”. I wanted to take a few minutes to expand on my own personal research and what I have stated.

Let’s start with the pictures of the rashes and my first quote. “”I can say without hesitation that these skin rashes have nothing to do with scabies. Scabies is a parasite, which causes a skin infection and is extremely contagious. It spreads from person to person by direct skin contact or by wearing an article of clothing worn by an infected person.” Schmidt said, “If this were scabies you would see entire families infected and NOT just a single family member.”

In laymen's terms scabies is the medical name for body lice. A little more about scabies, It is not difficult to diagnose scabies. The parasite is identified by a simple skin scrapping and viewed under a microscope. It makes no sense for a doctor to prescribe antibiotics or steroid creams for scabies. Scabies are treated quite easily with scabicide drugs. Scabies are highly, highly contagious. In fact, you must treat every member of a family with a scabicide in order to avoid re-infestation. If these rashes in the gulf were scabies, we would be seeing this in epidemiological proportions. We would NOT just see one member of the family infected. www.medicinenet.com The rashes presenting in the gulf, look very bacterial.

The oil eating microbe Alcanivorax Borkumensis, has been flourishing in the gulf since the BP disaster. Alcanivorax Borkumensis is a gram negative bacteria meaning it has a very thin cell wall vs.gram positive bacteria which has a very thick cell wall. All gram negative bacteria are considered very harmful to the host. They can cause severe immune responses.

Alcanivorax Borkumensis is classified as a proteobacteria. Some other proteobacteria that are gram negative include but are not limited to E-coli, Salmonella, Pseudomonas,and Legionella, to name a few. E.Coli and Salmonella typically cause infections of the Gastrointestinal System. Pseudomonas and Legionella cause Respiratory illness. It has also been known to cause METHICIllIn RESISTANT STAPHLYCOCCUS AUREUS infections, otherwise known as MRSA. MRSA is a gram positive bacteria. HERE... is the relationship between MRSA and biofilms.

Alcanivorax Borkumensis genome was first sequenced in 2003 at the German Research Center for Biotechnology. In 2004 it was discovered that a specific gene of the genome AB was defective. In 2006, using isoelectrophoresis the gene was stripped and an artificial gene was inserted into the genome...

Oil eating microbes secrete biofilms which studies have shown to be rapidly colonized by other gram negative bacteria and can indeed cause human infection. In other words gram negative bacteria causes Alcanivorax Borkumensis to grow and multiply at a very quick rate. See report at original article with link above.

The result is NOT pretty: Oil+ Dispersants+Genetically modified bacteria + Some of the most dangerous bacteria known to man = Unprecedented disaster in the gulf. We also know it has been found in the air, which means it will be evaporated and all that you see here will come raining down on us. Remember, the more knowledge you have the better prepared you will be to deal with this situation when it does occur.

I would like to share a comment from Dr. Ott’s article that should cause everyone who reads this to sit up and take notice.

Calvin Ryan says: “This is NOT JUST HAPPENING , IN THE GULF AREA… I’m in Columbus ,OHIO and I have the same problem on my legs. Started this summer. I worked outdoors, doing underground locating of Utility Lines. Mainly Electric, Phone, and Cable T.V. Walking through a lot of grasses and weeds. Due to our work load we worked in the rain, and just after the rains. These sores are very painful. At first I thought it was some sort of Poison Ivy, but after fighting with it for several months, I finally went to the doctor. THEY ALSO DID NOT KNOW WHAT IT WAS, BUT THOUGHT I MAY HAVE A STAPH INFECTION……IS THIS STUFF BEING CARRIED NORTH BY RAIN STORMS?”

Unfortunately, I do believe it is. We are here to learn the truth, no matter how ugly that truth may be.

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Rick Steiner Got BP Disaster Right From The Beginning, Warns Crisis Is Far From Over

Dan Froomkin
Huffington Post
Updated: 08-25-10 12:04 PM

I first spoke to Rick Steiner more than three months ago -- about two weeks into the Deepwater Horizon disaster -- after a source recommended I talk to him for a story I was writing about the spill as a teachable moment. Steiner is a marine conservationist and activist in Alaska who started studying oil spills when the Exxon Valdez ran aground in 1989, and never stopped.

What Steiner said to me during that first interview was blunt, depressing -- and struck me as having the ring of truth. Little did I know how true.

"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," he told me at the time. "There's no such thing as an effective response. There's never been an effective response -- ever -- where more than 10 or 20 percent of the oil is ever recovered from the water.

"Most of the oil that goes into the water in a major spill stays there," he said. "And once the oil is in the water, the damage is done."

Steiner was also one of the first scientists to warn that much if not most of BP's oil was remaining underwater, forming giant and potentially deadly toxic plumes.I thought of Steiner last week, as I sat in a congressional hearing room listening to Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Ed Markey question Bill Lehr, a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Lehr was one of the authors of an increasingly controversial federal report about the fate of BP's spilled oil that Obama administration officials misleadingly cited as evidence that the "vast majority" of the oil was essentially gone.

Markey's persistent questioning eventually got Lehr to acknowledge that, contrary to the administration spin, most of the spill -- including the oil that has been dispersed or dissolved into the water, or evaporated into the atmosphere -- is still in the Gulf ecosystem. Then Markey got Lehr to recalculate what percentage of the spill BP had actually recovered, through skimming and burning.

That amount: About 10 percent.

In other words, Steiner was right.
The other part of Steiner's prediction -- that the government and BP would low-ball the volume of the spill -- had already played out very publicly. BP and NOAA both opened with a 5,000 barrel a day estimate. NOAA officials stuck to that estimate for weeks, despite the fact that they had access to video feeds from the wellhead clearly showing how far off they were. More than two weeks after some of that video was made public, the government finally, grudgingly, upped its estimates to 12,000 to 19,000 barrels daily; then 20,000 to 40,000 barrels, then 35,000 to 60,000 barrels, before finalizing its estimate in early August at 62,000 barrels a day at the beginning of the spill, declining to 53,000 barrels a day toward the end.

So it wasn't until early August, two weeks after the well was capped, that the public was officially clued in that BP's blowout had -- by the end of June -- become the largest accidental offshore oil spill in history; totaling almost 16 times the Exxon Valdez.

I talked to Steiner again this week about where things stand now, what he expects will happen next, and what he hopes will come of it all.

The first thing we talked about was that NOAA report. Steiner said it was obviously full of guesswork -- and bad guesswork at that. "They shouldn't have even tried to issue these numbers right now," he said. "I smell politics all over it. The only plausible explanation is they were in a rush to hang the 'Mission Accomplished' banner."

And Steiner suspects the 10 percent recovery rate for BP is actually overstated. The report based its conclusions on operational reports showing that 11.1 million gallons of oil were burned and 34.7 million gallons of oily water were recovered through skimming.

But Steiner said the actual amount of oil recovered could be about half what the report claims. The oil-water mix, which officials evidently assumed was 20 percent oil, could well have been closer to 10 percent, he said. As for the burned oil figures, "they are simply coming from the BP contractors out there and then put into the Incident Command reports as gospel. As far as I know, there was no independent observation or estimation of those numbers."

And there's something else the government seems to have forgotten about when it comes to burning crude oil: "That's not technically removing it from the environment." Steiner said. "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."

Steiner had even more critiques of the report -- and the response -- but his central point was one of the same he made when I first spoke with him, back in May: Once the oil is in the water, the damage is done. "You just can't fix most of the damage caused in marine oil spills. You just can't do it."

That doesn't mean there isn't a lot that BP should do. Just as the company has set up a $20 billion fund to compensate people and businesses hurt by the spill, Steiner has asked BP to set up a $20 billion restoration fund as well. The government's Natural Resources Damage Assessment process will eventually result in a bill to BP to recover damages.

That money can do a lot of good. Say it turns out that this year's bluefin tuna larvae have been wiped out. You can't bring a year's worth of tuna back to life, but you can take other steps to help the species -- say, by paying fishermen not to kill them. Similarly, for the Gulf as a whole, you can't take the oil out, but you can take some of the steps to heal it that were needed even before the spill. Those include reducing the massive amounts of fertilizer that flow out of the Mississippi River, forming a massive low-oxygen "Dead Zone" each year, or letting the river's sediment and sand rebuild the marshes and barrier islands of the Delta .

"If you can't fix directly the damage caused, do something positive for the net environmental benefit of the ecosystem that was ravaged by this event," Steiner said.

What's next? Some of the damage caused by BP will persist for a long, long time, Steiner said. "We'll see injury from this for decades, in one form or another." And the sea life that was killed outright is just the beginning. The question to ask is: "What is the immediate, sub-lethal, chronic injury that will manifest itself two, three, four years in the future?"

After the Exxon Valdez, for instance, scientists thought the Prince William Sound's population of Pacific herring -- crucial to both the food web and local fishermen -- had survived the spill. But four years later, apparently due to compromised immune systems, the population crashed, never to return.

"I'm worried about the same sort of thing in the Gulf," Steiner said.

Seabirds are also at long term risk, both because of possible nesting failures in the future, and because the oil has killed the vegetation that keeps some seabird islands from falling apart. "There's certainly going to be some accelerated erosion on those islands," he said.

And the plumes of underwater oil that some scientists now fear will not biodegrade rapidly may be around for some time, he said. That could have catastrophic effects on everything from plankton to sperm whales.

But ultimately, Steiner said, no one can predict what will happen with any certainty, because there are simply too many variables in complex ecosystems. The spill's effects could reverberate up and down the food chain, if any given predator is removed, or if any given food source vanishes. "I think there's going to be injuries that crop up in the next couple of years that are entirely unanticipated right now," he said.

All of which leads to the same conclusion: "Our singular policy objective should be that we have to do everything possible to prevent this sort of thing ever happening again."

Before the Obama administration lifts its deepwater-drilling moratorium -- currently set to expire on Nov. 30 -- Steiner said the government should do four things:

1. Complete a comprehensive risk assessment that establishes the "101 other ways" that deepwater blowouts can occur

2. Develop a much more effective risk mitigation system, i.e. better blowout preventers.

3. Develop better blowout response plans, such as the marine well containment system being developed by Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil and Shell.

4. Develop better oil spill response plan for worst-case scenarios -- with equipment ready to go, precontracted responders trained and drilled, protocols established for dispersants and burning, and regional citizens advisory councils.

The first three are crucial, because they are about prevention. But the fourth is still important, Steiner said. "We need to disabuse ourselves of the notion that effective oil spill response is possible, because it isn't. Yet they still need to prepare."

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One of the strangest things about our national discourse is that it doesn't sufficiently respect people who get things right. Indeed, particularly inside the Washington Beltway, it sometimes seems like the wronger you are about things, the more seriously you get taken.
And Steiner is used to getting punished, rather than rewarded, for his warnings -- even the ones that come true. He resigned from his tenured professorship at the Unversity of Alaska last year, to protest the university's decision to strip him of a NOAA grant because of his outspoken opposition to oil drilling in Alaska's Bristol Bay. (Editor's bold emphasis throughout)
"I feel sick that people don't want to hear the truth about risk," he told me.

The risk Steiner talks about the most these days is the one posed by our continued use of carbon -- to the grave detriment of the planet. As Steiner told me for that first story I called him about, all that carbon spewed into the Gulf was headed into the planetary ecosystem anyway, through our tailpipes.

"Our lives have been one enormous, century-long oil spill, globally," Steiner said.

The U.S. alone uses some 20 million barrels of oil a day. Simply adopting tougher efficiency standards for power plants, cars and trucks, and electricity transmission could cut that amount in half, Steiner said. "We're wasting twice the amount of the entire Deepwater Horizon spill ever day."

Indeed, Steiner's biggest fear is not what will happen to the Gulf -- or even that drilling will begin again without sufficient safeguards. It's that this spill will fade into history without fundamentally changing the way people think about oil, and without accelerating the drive toward sustainable, low-carbon energy sources.

"We're not getting anywhere with that. That's the thing that really worries me," he said.

"The transcendent, take-home lesson from all of this is that we need to hasten our transition to sustainable energy. Some of the costs of oil become very clear in oil spills, but the real costs also include climate change, wars to secure oil supplies, health impacts from breathing atmospheric emissions, and supporting petro-dictators.

"We know we need to transition to sustainable, clean, low-carbon energy, and we know how. We know that the chronic, day-to-day degradation of our biosphere caused by our oil addiction -- global warming, ocean acidification, coral reef death, sea level rise, floods and droughts, crop failure, forest fires, ice melt, biodiversity loss -- is cumulatively more devastating than all the oil spills we can throw at ourselves."

The oil spill wasn't the only warning sign this summer. Thousands of people have died from the record heat, forest fires have raged across Russia, floods have ravaged Asia.

"The only real way to atone for the Deepwater Horizon disaster is to kick our disastrous oil habit, and become better stewards of our endangered home planet," Steiner said. "We'll see if we learn that lesson this time around."

A much smaller oil spill in Santa Barbara 40 years ago helped mobilize the Earth Day movement, which in turn led to most of the major environmental legislation of the 20th century. By contrast, Steiner said, "the only thing we got out of Exxon Valdez was safer tankers."

So what will be the legacy of a spill of this immensity?

"The real tragedy of Deepwater Horizon would be if we look back on this in 10 years and say: all we got out of that was better response plans," Steiner said. "That would be the real tragedy. Then all of the lives would have been lost for nothing -- and that includes human and non-human lives."

The Economy Is A Lie, Too

by Paul Craig Roberts .
Global Research,
September 22, 2009


Americans cannot get any truth out of their government about anything, the economy included. Americans are being driven into the ground economically, with one million school children now homeless, while Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke announces that the recession is over.

The spin that masquerades as news is becoming more delusional. Consumer spending is 70% of the US economy. It is the driving force, and it has been shut down. Except for the super rich, there has been no growth in consumer incomes in the 21st century. Statistician John Williams of shadowstats.com reports that real household income has never recovered its pre-2001 peak.

The US economy has been kept going by substituting growth in consumer debt for growth in consumer income. Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan encouraged consumer debt with low interest rates. The low interest rates pushed up home prices, enabling Americans to refinance their homes and spend the equity. Credit cards were maxed out in expectations of rising real estate and equity values to pay the accumulated debt. The binge was halted when the real estate and equity bubbles burst.

As consumers no longer can expand their indebtedness and their incomes are not rising, there is no basis for a growing consumer economy. Indeed, statistics indicate that consumers are paying down debt in their efforts to survive financially. In an economy in which the consumer is the driving force, that is bad news.

The banks, now investment banks thanks to greed-driven deregulation that repealed the learned lessons of the past, were even more reckless than consumers and took speculative leverage to new heights. At the urging of Larry Summers and Goldman Sachs’ CEO Henry Paulson, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Bush administration went along with removing restrictions on debt leverage.

When the bubble burst, the extraordinary leverage threatened the financial system with collapse. The US Treasury and the Federal Reserve stepped forward with no one knows how many trillions of dollars to “save the financial system,” which, of course, meant to save the greed-driven financial institutions that had caused the economic crisis that dispossessed ordinary Americans of half of their life savings.

The consumer has been chastened, but not the banks. Refreshed with the TARP $700 billion and the Federal Reserve’s expanded balance sheet, banks are again behaving like hedge funds. Leveraged speculation is producing another bubble with the current stock market rally, which is not a sign of economic recovery but is the final savaging of Americans’ wealth by a few investment banks and their Washington friends. Goldman Sachs, rolling in profits, announced six figure bonuses to employees.

The rest of America is suffering terribly.

The unemployment rate, as reported, is a fiction and has been since the Clinton administration. The unemployment rate does not include jobless Americans who have been unemployed for more than a year and have given up on finding work. The reported 10% unemployment rate is understated by the millions of Americans who are suffering long-term unemployment and are no longer counted as unemployed. As each month passes, unemployed Americans drop off the unemployment role due to nothing except the passing of time.

The inflation rate, especially “core inflation,” is another fiction. “Core inflation” does not include food and energy, two of Americans’ biggest budget items. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) assumes, ever since the Boskin Commission during the Clinton administration, that if prices of items go up consumers substitute cheaper items. This is certainly the case, but this way of measuring inflation means that the CPI is no longer comparable to past years, because the basket of goods in the index is variable.

The Boskin Commission’s CPI, by lowering the measured rate of inflation, raises the real GDP growth rate. The result of the statistical manipulation is an understated inflation rate, thus eroding the real value of Social Security income, and an overstated growth rate. Statistical manipulation cloaks a declining standard of living.

In bygone days of American prosperity, American incomes rose with productivity. It was the real growth in American incomes that propelled the US economy.

In today’s America, the only incomes that rise are in the financial sector that risks the country’s future on excessive leverage and in the corporate world that substitutes foreign for American labor. Under the compensation rules and emphasis on shareholder earnings that hold sway in the US today, corporate executives maximize earnings and their compensation by minimizing the employment of Americans.

Try to find some acknowledgement of this in the “mainstream media,” or among economists, who suck up to the offshoring corporations for grants.

The worst part of the decline is yet to come. Bank failures and home foreclosures are yet to peak. The commercial real estate bust is yet to hit. The dollar crisis is building.

When it hits, interest rates will rise dramatically as the US struggles to finance its massive budget and trade deficits while the rest of the world tries to escape a depreciating dollar.

Since the spring of this year, the value of the US dollar has collapsed against every currency except those pegged to it. The Swiss franc has risen 14% against the dollar. Every hard currency from the Canadian dollar to the Euro and UK pound has risen at least 13 % against the US dollar since April 2009. The Japanese yen is not far behind, and the Brazilian real has risen 25% against the almighty US dollar. Even the Russian ruble has risen 13% against the US dollar.

What sort of recovery is it when the safest investment is to bet against the US dollar?

The American household of my day, in which the husband worked and the wife provided household services and raised the children, scarcely exists today. Most, if not all, members of a household have to work in order to pay the bills. However, the jobs are disappearing, even the part-time ones.

If measured according to the methodology used when I was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, the unemployment rate today in the US is above 20%. Moreover, there is no obvious way of reducing it. There are no factories, with work forces temporarily laid off by high interest rates, waiting for a lower interest rate policy to call their workforces back into production.

The work has been moved abroad. In the bygone days of American prosperity, CEOs were inculcated with the view that they had equal responsibilities to customers, employees, and shareholders. This view has been exterminated. Pushed by Wall Street and the threat of takeovers promising “enhanced shareholder value,” and incentivized by “performance pay,” CEOs use every means to substitute cheaper foreign employees for Americans .

Despite 20% unemployment and cum laude engineering graduates who cannot find jobs or even job interviews, Congress continues to support 65,000 annual H-1B work visas for foreigners.

In the midst of the highest unemployment since the Great Depression what kind of a fool do you need to be to think that there is a shortage of qualified US workers?