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Three Years After the Gulf Spill, Oil Is Still Washing Up in Louisiana

In the Gulf, it's three years later, and the oil is still coming. So is the sickness, the dead sea life, and the bad news for the economy.
NASA image of the spill in 2010.

Last Saturday marked the third anniversary of the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, and the subsequent unfolding of one of the greatest environmental disasters in U.S. history. And unfortunately, the disaster is still unfolding to this day.

You see, all is not well in the Gulf of Mexico, despite BP's aggressive PR campaigning and years of litigation and compensatory payouts. Billy Nungresser, the president of Plaquemines Parish, which covers the part of Louisiana most heavily hit by oil after the initial spill, says that the oily fallout continues to this day. Just yesterday, Nungresser told a local TV news station that "oil is still washing ashore in places like Bay Jimmy."

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Meanwhile, fishermen say their catch is still drastically lower than it was before the spill—and the onslaught of chemical dispersants BP used to try to contain it.

“The damage is still ongoing right now. My shrimp is down 40 percent and my oysters are down 93 percent,” George Barisich, president of the United Commercial Fisherman's Association, recently told Eyewitness News. He believes that the dispersant—a proprietary cocktail called Corexit that is believed to be comprised of butoxyethanol, organic sulfonates, and a small concentration of propylene glycol—interrupted the reproductive cycle of the shellfish in the region.

And the science may indeed back up his theory. One study published in the journal Environmental Pollution found that Corexit made the oil loosed during the spill up to 52% more toxic than it would have been alone.

So, three years later oil is still washing up. Aquatic wildlife is still suffering. So are the livelihoods of those who depend on it. Is there anything else the BP spill royally screwed up? Yes, actually.

A new report from the Government Accountability Project reveals that there's been an uptick in health problems among people who live in the impacted Gulf coastal areas. The New Orleans Times-Picayune reports that "Cleanup workers, doctors, divers and Gulf Coast residents interviewed by a Washington watchdog group have reported health problems from the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, including blood in the urine, heart palpitations, kidney and liver damage, migraines, memory loss and reduced IQ."

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GAP also determined that the blame for the health woes lies with Corexit. Their report confirms all kinds of terrible things that many already suspected about events surrounding the spill: every single spill responder and Gulf citizen they interviewed reported health problems, for instance. BP never gave most cleanup workers documents explaining the health risks of exposure to Corexit, even though they were required by law to do so. Half the cleanup workers reported being threatened with termination if they wore protective gear like respirators—BP but its fear of bad publicity ahead of worker safety.

But the biggest disaster out of a whole unholy mess of them is that nobody really seems to care all that much about any of it, outside of those directly effected in the region. The public still supports drilling by wide margins, even though doing it offshore will inevitably give rise to an equally grisly sequel. And, abetted by our relative apathy, Washington has for the first time responded to a truly epic environmental disaster by doing nothing. At all.

Image: Photopedia

After the Exxon Valdez spill, Congress passed a law that set up an Oil Spill Fund that required petroleum companies to pay a small tax to cover future cleanup costs. After the Santa Barbara oil spill and the Cuyahoga river fires in the late 1960s, Congress was prompted to instate the powerful Clean Water Act. After the Gulf Spill, which continues to wreak havoc today, zilch.

D.C. did little but prod BP into paying out settlements to the people who's lives it had ruined. Not a single legislative measure has been enacted to prevent a future deep water disaster from occurring, which, with oil companies headed to the exponentially more perilous Arctic with drill bits bared, is all but guaranteed. On second thought, strike the "all but" from that last sentence. If we drill in the Arctic a spill is guaranteed, period. And most Americans still want to build a pipeline that will carry unusually toxic crude from Canada to the Gulf, of all places, even though a similar pipeline just exploded all over a small Arkansas town.

This is frustrating. We have the technological capacity to transition away from an oil-reliant economy; we have cleaner fuels and safer, more sustainable energy sources. But we seem to be dead set on disaster, and one look at BP's still-surging quarterly earnings is a glimpse at the root of our enthusiasm.

So the most notable fallout from this multi-faceted catastrophe might not merely be that three years later, the oil is still washing ashore. But that sad little fact probably provides the most useful metaphor—three years later, the disaster is still quietly arriving in waves. And we don't have much of an idea as to when it will stop.