As BP reaps billions in profits from rising gasoline prices, the Gulf of Mexico is dying from its uncleaned pollution. "After months of laboratory work, scientists say they can definitively finger oil from BP's blown-out well as the culprit for the slow death of a once brightly colored deep-sea coral community in the Gulf of Mexico that is now brown and dull," the AP reports. Tarballs that washed up on the beaches were "teeming with bacteria." Oil from the killer Deepwater Horizon blowout "has contaminated zooplankton, one of the first links in the oceanic food chain," scientists found. And Louisiana state officials have found their coastline soaked in toxic oil, where the Coast Guard and BP have declared victory and abandoned monitoring:
Wetland areas in north Barataria Bay and the Pass a Loutre Wildlife Management Area at the mouth of the Mississippi River continue to show signs of oil that state officials say is from the BP oil spill, according to photos posted on Flickr by the state Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority.
In February, the oil giant BP reported reported $7.7 billion in profit for the fourth quarter of 2011, a 38 percent increase from a year earlier.
Twigs clump in oily, murky water.
Photos by Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority of LA (Creative Commons License by-nc-nd).
Original Page: http://thinkprogress.org/green/2012/03/30/455614/two-years-after-spill-disgusting-bp-oil-contaminates-cleaned-marshes/
But the US government and BP say that the coast has been cleaned up. Would they lie?
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