But The Oil’s Gone… Right?

A WWL report carried on CBS: Massive La. Fishkill Prompts Oil Spill Questions

It’s been a rough summer in some of the waters around Plaquemines Parish in Lousiana – first, hit by the oil spill, and now, hit with fish kills .

“This is an extremely large fish kill, and there are many species in there,” said Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser. “It’s not just one group of fish– it’s redfish and trout and flounder. All species have been identified in this fish kill.”

Plaquemines Parish officials spotted a massive fish kill on Friday. Hundreds of thousands of dead fish were floating west of the Mississippi River, in Bayou Chaland. It came several days after the discovery of starfish kill in nearby Barataria Bay. Then, on Monday, came the discovery of a dead baby whale near Venice.

The death of the starfish eliminates them as culprit in the empty oyster shells, and the death of the baby whale sheds doubt on the low oxygen level hypothesis, so you are sort of left with toxicity as a cause of these kills.

CNN looks at the issue in their report: Where did the oil go? Researchers point to sea floor

(CNN) — A team of researchers in the Gulf of Mexico say they found an oily layer as thick as two inches coating the sea floor in some places, and they believe it may be from the BP spill.

“I think what we’re seeing is oil that was on the surface, that has sedimented down to the bottom,” said Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia.
…

An analyst from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration cautioned against jumping to conclusions before the samples are chemically analyzed.

“To find oil in the Gulf of Mexico, either in the sediments or in the water column, is not an unusual thing,” said Samuel Walker, technical data manger with the agency. “There’s spillage from other vessels, there’s leakage from pipelines… there are a lot of natural seeps.”

Of course, Mr. Walker apparently didn’t know that Dr. Joye was taking the latest samples from the same area she had sampled four months ago. There was no oil four months ago, but now it’s all over. Gee, I wonder what could have happened during that time frame that would produce all of the oil she found?