Reply #7: Will the cleanup make the BP oil spill worse?

[Octafish]

You know how screenwriters keep making the protagonist go through more and more and more? Well...

Special report: Will the cleanup make the BP oil spill worse?

(Reuters) - More than half an inch of oil covered the sea when Dennis Kelso's boat, piled with a few newly dead birds, nudged up against the side of the Exxon Valdez on Friday, March 24, 1989.

A rope ladder hung down the side of one of the biggest vessels on earth, which had run aground near midnight on a reef in pristine Prince William Sound, a haven for birds, whales and otters, brimming with fish that supplied a multimillion dollar industry.

It is also next to the end of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, and the Exxon Valdez had picked up millions of gallons of crude piped from the top of the frosty state to bring to gas-thirsty consumers in Long Beach, California.

Spring was breaking, migrations were starting -- and Kelso was gagging at the rush of chemicals from the liberated oil.

"At the beginning oil was literally boiling out of the tanker," said Kelso, the head of Alaska's Department of Environmental Conservation at the time. The crude began changing as it hit the water, releasing benzene and other pungent chemicals into the air, the start of a months-long process of transforming from a light liquid to a tarry gunk that would cling to more than a thousand miles of beaches in southern Alaska.

CONTINUED...

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6465O320100507?type=domesticNews

...then it gets worse.

One thing I know: Echo In Light, like all good DUers, works to make things better.