Correspondence Comment on “The West Falmouth Oil Spill after Thirty Years: The Persistence of Petroleum Hydrocarbons in Marsh Sediments” This recent paper by Reddy et al. (1) has received considerable attention from the media as an example of the long-term persistence of spilled oil. This is unfortunate as the paper discusses only one core that is 15 cm in diameter and 36 cm in length from a spill that was spread over about 95 000 m2 (2). The title implies that this one core represents the persistence of the oil after 30 years, when in fact it represents the persistence of one single patch of oil. This point is not recognized nor placed into any pespective by the authors or the media who relate the analytical results to the fate of the entire spill. This misrepresentation is very unfortunate when many previous studies have attempted to down play the sensationalism associated with the reporting of oil spills. An excellent paper by Baker et al. (3) provides a perspective on long-term issues associated with oil spills. These contributions attempt to provide a balanced view of the long-term effects, fate, and persistence of spilled oil. Other field studies have focused on the broad view rather than on the laboratory analysis of one single core (e.g., the “Arrow” spill) (4). The
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authors, and I must also assume that these comments relate also to the reviewers, have (i) misrepresented the results of the title of the paper, which implies that this laboratory data refers to the entire spill area, and (ii) not attempted to place the laboratory results from this single core in the context of the natural attenuation and recovery that has occurred at this and all other marine oil spills, as documented by numerous field studies.
Literature Cited (1) Reddy, C. M.; Eglinton, T. I.; Hounshell, A.; White, H. K.; Xu, L.; Gaines, R. B.; Frysinger, G. S. Environ. Sci. Technol. 2002, 36, 4754-4760. (2) Deslauriers; Martin. Proceedings of the 10th OTC Conference; 1978; pp 267-276. (3) Baker; et al. Proc. Bull. 1993, 7 (1-2), 53-61. (4) Spill Sci. Technol. Bull. 1994, 1 (1), 37-52.
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2003 American Chemical Society Published on Web 03/29/2003
