Gulf of Cuyahoga

Via Crooks and Liars, here’s a story about a TV news station that collected samples of water and sand from beaches along the Alabama-Florida panhandle coastline. Not only did the samples register disastrously high concentrations of petroleum, but one of the samples actually exploded during laboratory testing.

Thanks to the negligence of British Petroleum — and the magic of those marketplace fairies that supposedly make strict regulations unnecessary — we may see the Gulf of Mexico become a larger sibling to the Cuyahoga River, that heavily polluted Ohio waterway that actually caught fire in 1969. Image above.

It may be time for Randy Newman to update “Burn On,” his 1972 ode to the Cuyahoga.

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