out in the Gulf. That stuff is going to be coming ashore for
months in volume --and for years in smaller amounts.
Only 2% of the oil makes it to the surface initially.
See here.
As to the "clean-up," this video is quite telling:
Here's a new article on the Tampa Tribune:<embed src="http://d.yimg.com/static.video.yahoo.co ... ver=2.2.46" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="512" height="322" allowFullScreen="true" AllowScriptAccess="always" bgcolor="#000000" flashVars="id=21211370&vid=8001294&lang=en-us&intl=us&thumbUrl=http%3A//l.yimg.com/a/p/i/bcst/videosearch/15877/112069593.jpeg&embed=1"></embed>
On a Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana barrier island “oil oozes from a foot or two underground,” according a report by Fox 8 New Orleans.
P.J. Hahn, the Plaquemines Parish Coastal Zone Director the compared it to “Jed Clampet’s oil — All we need is the theme song to ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’… Oil just started bubbling out.”
When revisiting the island with the news crew, Hahn dug into the ground “turning up thick, black oil that had not been heavily weathered and did not appear to have been dispersed.”
Beach beauty is skin-deep
by ROB SHAW tampatrib.com - Published: August 6, 2010
Just because the oil was cleaned up from the beaches doesn't mean it's gone.
The opposite is true, a University of South Florida professor says. In fact, he estimates cleanup work along Panhandle beaches and elsewhere across the Gulf Coast has removed only about 25 percent of the oil that has stained the shorelines.
"Twenty-five percent is pretty generous,'' said Ping Wang, an associate professor of geology at USF. "I stand behind my numbers.''
The oil came up in so many different forms – tar balls, tar patties, tar cakes, oil sheets and oil stains – that it was difficult, if not impossible, for workers to get up all of it either by hand or with machines, Wang said.
Much oil remains on or in those formerly pristine sands, he said. Some is buried beneath the sand; other remains in the form of stains; still other remains in the form of tiny tar balls that have been scattered about when larger areas of oil were cleaned up.
And it all needs to be taken care of, Wang believes.
"They should clean up the buried oil, they should clean up the tar balls,'' the associate professor said of BP, the oil company responsible for fighting the nation's worst environmental disaster which began April 20 with the explosion of a rig off the Louisiana coastline. "They need to show they are committed to return the beach back where it was.''
Officials with BP say that is exactly what they will do.
"We definitely do see the same things that he is seeing,'' Lucia Bustamante, a company spokesman, said of Wang. "That is being addressed as we speak. We are working on different solutions.''
Perhaps as soon as next week in Escambia County, an experimental machine called the "sand shark'' will be tested, she said. It's akin to a modified beach-cleaning machine that trucks the sand in on a conveyor belt, cleans it and returns it. It can go 18 inches deep, according to Bustamante.
"This is not an exact science,'' she said. "I don't think there is one silver bullet.''
Wang and other researchers have made five trips to the oil-tainted beaches. His report talks of buried oil being found up to 6 inches thick.
"Buried oil is much more difficult to clean because it is not directly visible, and buried to various depths,'' the report says. "In addition, buried oil will have a much longer-lasting effect because it will not be weathered by the sunlight as easily as the surface oil.''
Not everyone is noticing problems, however, with buried gunk under the surface of the sugar-white sands.
"We don't think we have any buried oil,'' said Gordon Goodin, a county commissioner in Santa Rosa, one county to the west of Escambia County, where the brunt of the oil invasion has occurred. "We have dug as deeply as we can and haven't found anything.''
What officials in those two counties are noticing, however, is what looks like "a congealed glob of Vaseline'' that is hovering just offshore, Goodin said. The worst of it is near Pensacola Pass, he added.
Wang said when workers do return to the sand, it will not be easy. But he says it is something that has to be done for the safety of those who like to play in the white sands.
"I wouldn't take my 7-year-old to go dig and build a sandcastle," he said.
http://www2.tbo.com/content/2010/aug/06 ... skin-deep/
