Despite BP’s best (hmm…) efforts, Old Faithful in the Gulf of Mexico keeps on gushing. This is what happens when you tunnel thousands of miles into the Earth under hundreds of feet of water looking for dead dinosaurs fuel without any real idea of what you’re doing down there. A local news station down in Alabama decided to see how the spill was affecting its local neighborhood, specifically the nearby beaches.
We follow the news crew at they collect sand and water samples from area beaches, bringing the samples back to an analytical chemist.
Ideally you’re supposed to find oil/petroleum at levels of at most 5 parts per million. As the video shows, the beaches where kids are playing and adults are lounging about have more than 200 parts per million.
One sample even exploded, perhaps owing to methane or the material BP used to try to disperse the oil.
Pretty terrible. I mean, what else can you say?