BP’s Improper Gulf Oil Spill Cleanup Practices Are Spreading Toxic Contamination Everywhere

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Mother Jone’s reporter Mac McClelland arrived on the scene of the Pensacola Beach to expose the lies from officials that Pensacola Beach is safe.

In an excellent article Mac McClelland reports she was accompanied by Rip Kirby, a grad student in the University of South Florida’s geology department, who works with USF’s Coastal Research Lab.

While the report focused mainly on officials misleading the public about the safety of the waters affected by the BP Gulf Oil Spill which recently caused over 400 swimmers to get sick another alarming story was revealed in the details of Mac McClelland’s story.

Kirby inspecting the beach with a UV light reveals finding that the toxic contanimation from the cleanup efforts has not just left remnants of the oil on the beach but instead the contamination has spread everywhere, in places way beyond the beach front.

Kirby goes on to explain that improper clean up procedures being used by BP to cleanup the toxic materials from Gulf beaches are to blame for spreading the toxic contamination.

Rip Kirby’s got the 365-nanometer UV flashlight and I’ve got the shovel. He’s a grad student in the University of South Florida’s geology department, and we’re standing on Pensacola Beach in the middle of the night digging a hole so he can show me the layers of tar buried beneath new sand the tide has washed up. Some of the tar mat is so thick that it’s visible to the naked eye. Other traces of contamination are so subtle that they can only be seen with Kirby’s ultraviolet light, which makes crude fluoresce an unnaturally bright orange.

We trek around Pensacola Beach with the oversize light, illuminating oil everywhere: on decks, driveways, boardwalks, handrails. Blobs of it, smears of it, perfect imprints of footprints glowing neon, far beyond the waves washing oil from the Deepwater Horizon leak ashore. “The problem,” says Kirby, who works with USF’s Coastal Research Lab, “is that they’re not using proper decontamination practices in the cleanup. What they should be doing is stopping the workers at the edge of the contamination area”—the shore within the reach of the waves—”and having them get totally cleaned up or stripped down before they walk away.”

He complains about the machines that drive around collecting sand in giant sifters that are supposed to collect the tar balls while redepositing the pretty white sand. “But the sifters are breaking up the tar balls and spreading them all over the place,” Kirby says. “This operation and the traffic are spreading the contamination everywhere.”

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