AP August 4, 2010
Fred McCallister, a whistleblower who claims BP is using dispersants to sink oil and hide it from the pesky media’s cameras, will testify before a Senate investigative panel this week.
For quite some time, many bloggers and journalists following the BP-Corexit story, including me, have made the allegation that BP may have been experimenting by dumping over a million gallons of toxic dispersants into the ocean because they were desperately trying to prevent the oil from hitting the beaches.
(The amount of dispersants used by BP has been contested. Rep. Ed Markey has questioned the validity of BPs numbers, saying on July 31 that a new congressional report shows “BP carpet-bombed the ocean with these chemicals, and the Coast Guard allowed them to do it.”)
Everyone remembers what happened to Exxon’s public image the moment all of those adorable birds became coated in thick crude. And while BP has not been able to prevent oil from hitting all coastal birds, they have greatly diminished their PR liability by using dispersants like Corexit to coagulate the oil and sink it beneath the ocean’s surface where the media cannot photograph it, and BP won’t be fined for beach cleanup.
There, buried in the sea, the dispersants will likely alter the ecosystem – perhaps poisoning and killing ocean life – but by then BP will have fled the area, leaving future coastal generations to clean up their mess.
