The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Friday released two peer reviewed reports concerning dioxins emitted during the controlled burns of oil during the Deepwater Horizon BP spill. The reports found that while small amounts of dioxins were created by the burns, the levels that workers and residents would have been exposed to were below EPA’s levels of concern.
Meanwhile, the British paper the Guardian is reporting that the Interior Department's Inspector General's report says that the White House rewrote an interior department report suggesting that independent experts had endorsed a six-month ban on deepwater drilling after the Gulf of Mexico disaster, when they had not.
The paper reports:
Between 2am and 3am on 27 May, aides to Browner produced two different edits of the executive summary to a report on recommendations for drilling safety. Both versions altered the text significantly to make it appear as if a seven-member panel of scientists and engineers supported the drilling ban.
The inspector general's report said: "The White House edit of the original DoI draft executive summary led to the implication that the moratorium recommendation had been peer-reviewed by the experts." But the experts had not been consulted on the wisdom of a drilling ban, and were instead asked for technical advice on a separate list of safety recommendations.
The report makes no judgment on why the White House would have made changes that significantly altered the meaning of the executive summary.
Meanwhile, next Tuesday night, November 16, the next discussion on the latest findings from some of the professors at USF St. Pete's College of Marine Science will take place.
This article appears in Nov 11-17, 2010.