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Old 05-06-2010, 08:22 PM
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ricki ricki is offline
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Nice article, thanks for the link. It is good to look at other major spills and response or lack thereof. The Exxon Valdez was a particularly notable one. If we are unfortunate enough to have a major accumulation of oil along the shore in Florida there may be some serious impacts that may not be all that obvious in advance. The air quality may well take a major hit, both from volatile, semi-volatile organic compounds evaporating from the spill, but also from dead sea life. Those with respiratory sensitivities may need to relocate away from the shore for a while. Many years ago we excavated a very large quantity of petroleum contaminated soil from a former bulk ground storage facility (like in Port Everglades, only smaller). It was only about ten acres of impacted land! Petroleum had routinely been released there for decades through the last century. The odor during the excavation process was extremely strong. This despite the petroleum having been heavily weathered and bio-transformed to surrogate compounds. Some of the strongest I've encountered in almost 25 years of dealing with land based petroleum releases.

Also, even though the oil may float, a fraction of the components of the crude are water soluble. These shorter chain hydrocarbons are usually present in lesser quantities than the longer, less evaporation prone components in crude. Still there well may be enough to impact air quality and contaminate surface water. So even though the oil is on top, it can sometimes do plenty of harm beneath the surface.

Some of the nuggets from the Valdez article are noted below:

"I was not at all surprised when officials reported zero spillage, then projected modest spillage, and then reported spill amounts five times higher than their earlier estimates.

As the spill continues, I imagine that even the newly reported amounts will continue to vastly underestimate the actual spillage.

Underreporting of spill volumes is common, even though lying about self-reported spill volume is illegal – and a breach of public trust."

"Still, penalties are based on spill volume: Exxon likely saved itself several billion dollars by sticking with its low-end estimate of 11 million gallons and scuttling its high-end estimate of 38 million gallons, later validated by independent surveyors."

"BP will likely leverage the billions of dollars it will spend on the cleanup to reduce its fines and lawsuit expenses, despite later recouping a large portion of the cleanup cost from insurers or writing it off as a business expense as Exxon did."

There is still a lot more worth reading and considering in the article;
http://blogs.reuters.com/environment...-valdez-spill/

Good luck to us.
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Last edited by ricki; 05-06-2010 at 09:14 PM.
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