If BP had followed the Environmental Protection Agency directive to switch to a less toxic dispersant, BP should've already been applying a different dispersant to the Gulf oil spill by now. Instead, over the weekend, the company told the EPA that it's going to continue to use Corexit, which as we've noted failed key toxicity tests and was banned in the U.K. for use on oil spills more than a decade ago.
From BP's refusal letter:
"COREXIT was the only dispersant that was available immediately, in sufficiently large quantities, to be useful at the time of the spill… Based on the information that is available today, BP continues to believe that COREXIT was the best and most appropriate choice at the time when the incident occurred, and that COREXIT remains the best option for subsea application."
The Corexit dispersants used by BP have been on the EPA's list of products previously approved for use on oil spills. But one of them, Corexit 9500A, contains a compound that as we've noted, is linked to headaches, vomiting and reproductive problems.
We've reached out to the EPA to ask what the agency will do about BP's refusal to comply with its directive. Where the EPA goes from here will give a window into how much the authority the federal government has—and is willing to exercise—in its oversight of the cleanup, an issue on which the Obama administration continues to receive criticism.
rest at http://www.propublica.org/ion/blog/item/bp-resists-epas-order-to-use-less-toxic-dispersant#15097
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