Local Oil Spill Warning!!

LOCAL OIL SPILL happened today at 8 am in my entire local neighborhood.

It's oozing smelly, sticky and slimey oil.

Basically there is a sticky, black and highly viscous liquid or semi-solid that is present in most crude petroleums and in some natural deposits sometimes termed asphaltum.

How can total petroleum hydrocarbons (TPH) affect my health? (That will be the black sludge on my street)

Some of the TPH compounds can affect your central nervous system. One compound can cause headaches and dizziness at high levels in the air. Another compound can cause a nerve disorder called "peripheral neuropathy," consisting of numbness in the feet and legs. Other TPH compounds can cause effects on the blood, immune system, lungs, skin, and eyes. How about this for a night time horror story, only it's true: Petroleum based chemicals are being found to cause significant attritional effects to the nervous system and immune system after prolonged exposure. Illnesses identified in the medical research include adult and child cancers, numerous neurological disorders, immune system weakening, autoimmune disorders, asthma, allergies, infertility, miscarriage, and child behavior disorders including learning disabilities, mental retardation, hyperactivity and ADD (attention deficit disorders). Petroleum based chemicals are believed to cause these problems by a variety of routes including - impairing proper DNA (Gene) expression, weakening DNA Repair, accelerating gene loss, degeneration of the body's detoxification defenses (liver and kidneys) as well as gradual weakening of the brain's primary defense - (the Blood Brain Barrier). Identifying a specific chemical as the "original cause" of these health disorders is difficult and often overlooked as it typically requires years of exposure for the body's inherent defenses to weaken sufficiently to result in observable health problems. Also, many petroleum chemicals appear work in tandem to combine their harmful effects making specific identification even more difficult. However, once a chemically induced illness presents itself, a decline in health status appears to continue rapidly as long as exposure continues. Of significant concern, while petroleum based chemicals are required by the U.S. Government (EPA) to be tested for a variety of health effects, they are currently not required to be tested for causing subtle neurological damage (memory, personality, behavior etc), effects upon the developing brain during pregnancy, immune system effects, autoimmunity and effects upon the brain's primary defense - the blood brain barrier.

It's true.

I looked outside this morning and saw it.

WTH??!!

wth?

what the heck?

actually I meant the other word...no, not really, just wanted to make dramatic impact on the severity on the local environmental poisoning.

The entire neighborhood is saddened to know that our children will be trudging through the oil after school and bring poison into their homes.

On a side note the the state government has been abusing and misspending the financial budget.

Then the state threatened us with a using a Prop 100 saying that our schools will fail. (false threat!) How about getting rid of petty cash, expensive lunches and useless state congress cushy jobs. All the state government officials want to do is to close some of the local city pools so they could swim in millions of dollars seeing how the Prop 100 just passed.

Then they have enough money to willingly pour black poison on my street??? No one asked my permission if it was okay to put that sludge practically at my front door.

Seriously, there are no cracks or potholes in my neighborhood. WTH? Whatever are they re-sludging the streets for?

And here is the horror of it all: today was only day 1. There will be 6 more days of black poison on the streets.

There are oil tire tracks everywhere on our driveway. Pretty soon the sludge will cover the entire walking surface of our homes.

Goodbye bike rides and dog walks. Thank you very very very very much for pouring black crude petroleum poison oil on my street just when summer is starting to be 100 degrees soon for several weeks. I can't wait for the monsoons to wash it away.

Depressing to think that I will be spending my summer break mopping floors, steam cleaning the carpets, and shouting at the visitors to take their shoes off at the front door.

Oh yeah, the pic below? This is just from walking around my driveway and sidewalk AFTER I washed the bottom of my shoes off. This is just the residual sludge slowly creeping up all over the place from the streets:

I am thinking of a neighborhood intervention. Everyone: get a huge bottle of Dawn. Pour it on your "section" of the street. And at the same time everyone hoses off for 15 minutes straight. Then we might have a chance.

Yeah, and let's poison our landscape with the runoff. See? Evil just begats more evil. No one wins.