Oil Is Not the Problem (Exxon Valdez cleanup worse than spill)

The American Thinker ^ | June 5, 2006 | Timothy Lennon Buckley

[Sloth]

-snip-

Robinson explains that before they left the area his team convinced Alaska state authorities to set up nine locations that were not cleaned up, so they could monitor whatever long-term improvements were observed.

“For a period of years,” John says, “those locations [that were left alone] were in much better shape than the locations that had been aggressively cleaned up.

“The very aggressive way we went about it - I have to fault myself on this, because I’m the one that directed it, turned out to be a much more serious problem than the oil was. We were killing more things - I mean we were really killing things with the steaming hot water that we were blasting on the shoreline; the oil wasn’t anywhere near that effective at causing things to be killed, so that all of our sites were much better off for not having been cleaned up for a period of years.

“After a decade, things began to level out to where you weren’t able to tell which area had been cleaned up and which hadn’t; for a period of ten years though, the places that were cleaned up were in a lot worse shape.”

-snip-

"For a while after the Exxon Valdez spill, there were more take-offs and landings at Valdez airport than there were (on a daily basis) at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, [at the time] - the nation’s busiest."

The resulting environmental degradation of such intense activity in a pristine area like Prince William Sound, he suggests, need not have occurred if they had simply allowed nature, rather than man, to heal the ocean.

-snip-

[Ostlandr]

Good post, but not news. They knew right away that the "control" areas (left oil-covered to test the effectiveness of the cleanup) recovered faster than the beaches they pressure-washed with hot detergent.

[spanalot]

oil is after all organic.

[Ghost of Philip Marlowe]

And the ocean floor oozes tremendous balls of tar, that the ocean is quite adept at disintegrating and absorbing.

[lepton]

Gasoline is rough on wildlife. Crude oil is sticky specialty-food.

[RightWhale]

Lots of good jobs for a while. Got to spend the cleanup $ billions quick.

[Species8472]

John, who attests to having been at “many, many oil spills, maybe three or four hundred of them,” observes that, “they are not the environmental problem that they are made out to be typically.” He says that in most cases, “their effects are transient and there are no great long-term consequences.”

Needs repeating. Prince William Sound is my back yard. I have boated, fished, and hunted there for more than 30 years. There were a couple of rough years after the spill, but things recovered much more quickly that the MSM press would have you believe. Today you cannot find any evidence that the spill even occurred. I have a freezer full of salmon, halibut, shrimp and crab to prove it. Any tarballs are more likely to have come from a natural seep than be leftover from the spill.

[ROTB]

>oil is after all organic.

And as many a stoner is fond of saying, "If it's orgainic, don't panic!" ... not accounting for substances like hemlock.

[lonedawg]

Why am I not surprised, I remember the MSM claims of decades before the effects would be gone.

[lonedawg]

Why am I not surprized, I remeber the MSM claims of decades before the effects would be gone.

[Jeff Chandler]

"Don't panic, go organic; get in cahoots with Gypsy Boots."

[Tinian]

All sea life in the Pacific Ocean was destroyed by 1944 because American capitalist pigs sunk thousands of Japanese ships that were peacefully engaged in establishing a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

And I have the pics to prove it:

The stuff you're eating, and think is seafood, is really a Tofu like substitute manufactured from MIDEAST OIL by BusHalliburton.

Hope that helps.

[thackney]

The National Academy of Sciences has published "Oil in the Sea" which summarizes sources of oil pollution:

Nearly 85 percent of the 29 million gallons of petroleum that enter North American ocean waters each year as a result of human activities comes from land-based runoff, polluted rivers, airplanes, and small boats and jet skis, while less than 8 percent comes from tanker or pipeline spills.

Oil in the Sea