re: #94 Walter L. Newton

You should be optimistic… you have science on your side. Information about how the environment could mitigate a good percentage of this spill has been available from the start, but it has not received the same coverage in the media.

Instead we saw news report after news report, picture after picture, of massive fowling of the costs marshlands, wildlife, beaches, industry and tourism. Remember those videos of thousand of workers lining the beaches, dump trucks queued up, hauling sand off, pictures of rows of hotels and resorts with “for sale” signs and the day after day protests up and down the gulf coast by concerned environmental groups.

Oh… you didn’t that?

The news “OMG we’re all gonna dieeeee” news reports (not the actual oil) contributed a lot to the loss of income for Ala and Fla summer rentals; and they had minimal problems on their beaches. Most beaches were perfectly OK to visit, the whole time. The activity level was low in those areas because there wasn’t that much to do.

I did post some things about how the environment itself can take care of itself - I posted about natural seepages, I posted about the evaporation rate of this oil and about how conditions here are good for rapid evaporation (different from Alaska).

I also posted about how activity going on matched, pretty much, what was needed. I posted about the skimmers not being used because either they were not needed, or were not effective for this spill.

I was also very careful to post what I knew to be accurate. One of the biggest problems has been BP itself - getting BP to pay up on their claims.

Anyhow - all of that has a history in the Pages. I’m just not sure how much attention anyone was paying to it.