Another Maine-Bayou link in BP oil spill

For those keeping score at home, there's another major Maine-Bayou link for the BP oil spill disaster.
There have of course been plenty, ranging from sending boom from the state's supply bin to local experts offering advice. Congresswoman Chellie Pingree has, somewhat famously, at least in these pages, demanded that BP pay royalties on the oil it leased from us and dumped into the gulf.
She argues that it's not our fault that they didn't contain the substance. She's also mounted a "ticker" on her website to track how much BP owes.
Rep. Pingree is among those arguing that Maine has a special connection to the culture of the gulf, in part because we are also a region of fisherfolks and small villages. We've also noted in the past that the Cajun culture was created when the British kicked the French-loving Acadians out of this region, sending them to deal with those tiny lobsters called "crawfish."
Now, in the post-gusher phase of the disaster, a Maine voice is fast becoming one of the leading critics of an oil dispersant called Corexit. About 2 million gallons of the stuff was used, BP says, to break up the oil and thus save beaches and wetlands and such.
Straight out of Blue Hill, Maine comes Dr. Susan Shaw, very likely the only marine toxicologist to actually scuba-dive into the oil slicks on the Gulf of Mexico. In recent presentations, including a "TEDx" talk in Washington D.C., she explains that her dive into "the web of death" let her observe first-hand the oil being broken into tiny drops.
"We have not begun to see the impacts" of the spill, she predicts.
Dr. Shaw is director of the Marine Environmental Research Institute and one of the nation's leading researchers into toxins, especially stuff like Corexit. Her research indicates that "crude oil and dispersants are more toxic when they are combined than either oil or dispersants alone."
She has issued a statement and is asking other scientists to sign on. She is damanding,

• Full public disclosure of all the chemical ingredients in the Corexit formulations and full toxicity data on these chemicals in combination with oil.
• Full public disclosure of information about adverse health effects and all monitoring and testing data collected by government agencies.
• Immediate funding for independent research to fully assess toxic impacts on the ecosystem and human health.

If any of that sounds easy, then you've not been paying attention. The Corexit manufacturer refuses to actually disclose its ingredients, protecting the compounds in a way usually reserved for the secret sauce at a mall hamburger stand.
And on the other two points, there's no way we'll ever get full public disclosure of the information. The same EPA career whistle-blower who outed the agency for fibbing about air quality in the wake of 911 is calling this "deja vu all over again." He contends that the whole BP plan was to pump enough dispersants into the spill, and doing it deep underwater, that they could hide the extent of the oil.
Remember when BP didn't let anyone see that video, and then the HD video, for so long? Well, they knew that would be a real clue.
It's easy to see where the Marine Environmental Research Institute would feel a pull toward gulf oil spill involvement ... although, still, going diving into the stuff seems a bit extreme. But when it comes to things like little kids collecting pennies to help the birds of the gulf (like my kid wants to do), you realize it's really a national connection.
That will come in handy in the coming months. Even Anderson Cooper, the Ted Koppel of the oil spill, did an entire broadcast without dwelling on the spill. As the media moves on, it will be up to Dr. Shaw and her colleagues to remind us that the worst, as hard as that is to see, may well be yet to come.

(Curtis Robinson is editor of The Portland Daily Sun. Contact him at curtis@portlanddailysun.me.)