Photo taken July 28, 2010, just off the Gulf coast of Grand Bayou near Barataria Bay. They were taken shortly after cleanup authorities announced major surface oil had been cleaned up.

BP announced that the well had reached a static condition, a ‘significant milestone’, and it was able to stop pumping mud into the well.

Yesterday we got that great news. They continue to cement it shut today, and we can only hope it holds and doesn’t leak from below as they finish the relief wells.  We have also gotten news that most of the oil is gone, the dispersants aren’t really very toxic, and dispersants mixed with oil are no more toxic than oil.  That would be good news too, if only it were true.   Crude oil is horribly toxic and causes cancer, so it’s not saying much about dispersants to say that mixing them with oil makes them no more toxic than something that is extremely toxic. We have also gotten the improbable news that about 75% of the oil has magically disappeared.

Many reports from regular people and trained scientists, not government or media people, are coming in saying that the oil has not disappeared. The dispersants and the oil have killed hundreds if not thousands of animals, and dead wildlife carcasses are being destroyed, and we are far from being out of the woods yet with fish safety.

Read this excellent article at NRDC:

“Several fishermen involved in BP’s cleanup operation have told me that crews who’ve spotted oil on the water and have tried to skim it up but were waived off by BP and told to evacuate the area. They say BP then flew in dispersant planes to spray it so it sank.

“They’re just trying to hide it,” said one cleanup worker. “Then they’ll  leave us with nothing to fish.”’

Dispersants just sink the oil. Photo from NRDC.

Read the interviews after the break.

DemocracyNow interviewed Environmental activist Jerry Cope.

Cope has spent the last few weeks traveling along the Gulf Coast and experiencing firsthand the contamination in the air and water. In an article being published onHuffington Post, Cope argues that instead of celebrating the allegedly vanishing oil, we should be concerned about the disappearance of marine life in the Gulf. He describes the Gulf as a “kill zone” and looks into where the marine animals have gone, given that BP has reported a relatively low number of dead animals from the spill.

Also interviewed was Antonia Juhasz, an oil industry expert, says that  BP’s “Missing Oil” has actually turned up in  St. Mary’s Parish, LA.   That the animal carcasses are disappearing is absolutely not normal.  Rikki Ott, marine toxicologist from the Exxon Valdez spill, said that all the animal carcasses from that spill were kept under lock and key until the lawsuits were completely.  In this case, BP, (or the government), is destroying the evidence.  The interview is below, in abbreviated form, so [...]