I’ll take “traces” of oil when the water goes back into gulf if it means that MOST of the oil is removed. They’re letting the perfect be the enemy of the good here.
The real tragedy here is that the dispersants, that never should have been injected in the first place, make this job more difficult, and cannot be removed by this process.
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The trouble is that Congress, in its infinite wisdom, passed a law prohibiting discharge of oily water into the ocean, and the EPA was allowed to set standards on what counts as "oily" while enforcing the law.
If Obama announced that he'd suspended enforcement of these laws and promised to immediately sack any prosecutor or EPA bureaucrat who levelled charges of violation of environmental laws during a successful cleanup and mitigation operation, then we wouldn't have this problem. But then, that would require leadership, not golf clubs.
No, they’re pushing their weight around. I’ve had to deal with these whimps when we were in the wood business. They knew little to nothing of what we were doing and didn’t know one bug from another, but wanted to make sure the powder post beetle was not passed to other states. The 2 individuals who came to our plant stood right in front of some bettles and didn’t know what they were. Doofs. I have little to no use for these people.