Must be Something in the Water: Aqueous Toxicity

ENERGY CONSERVATION, HEALTH & ENVIRONMENT

- Jeremie Edwards

Factor: E1P

Anybody who has worked anywhere that deals in larger volumes of oil (I'm talking anything over five gallons) knows that you never spill more than five gallons at a time. I'm not really sure where this number came from, but it generally holds true. The actual volumes can vary from state to state, country to country, where the oil is spilled (ground spill, water spill, concrete, etc.) or the actual type of lubricant. So, the five-gallon mark is a pretty conservative way of looking at this. If our biggest spill is five gallons, we likely won't need to report the spill to any alphabet organization and cause a whole lot of headache.

Why do we even need to worry about spills?

Well, it turns out that almost everything on earth needs water to live, and when we start introducing random stuff to the water supply, we start making that water unfit for consumption. In fact, there's a pretty good chance that the water will have stuff in it that will lead to major health concerns - ever heard of Flint, Michigan? Yeah yeah, I know; Flint's issues were caused by a number of things: lead pipes, contaminated water, organic and inorganic contaminants, trihalomethanes, etc., but the comparison still holds true with groundwater and oil spills. Have you ever read the SDS/MSDS for a lubricant? There is a whole bunch of stuff in there that isn't good for living things to consume.

What can we do about any of this?