By any normal examination, nothing seemed off. The oil couldn’t be seen or smelled, but lab tests on the oysters and soil showed the contaminant levels were through the roof.
“We didn’t see anything unusual. That was kind of the disturbing part when we got the results back,” said Lower Mississippi River Keeper Paul Orr, from the Water Keeper Alliance.
Orr went to several sites in the Gulf of Mexico with a team of researchers to take samples of the soil, plants, and sea life. The team has results from two locations and is still waiting on the rest. “When the numbers came back, I was quite surprised they were so high,” Orr said.
What they were looking for were polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs)—carcinogenic contaminants from the BP oil spill. Since PAHs carry a kind of fingerprint, BP can be traced as the source of some of the contaminated areas.
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