Tests confirm oil on La. shores is from BP spill

Laboratory tests show that globs of oil found on two Louisiana beaches after Hurricane Isaac came from the 2010 BP spill. Tests run by LSU for state wildlife officials have confirmed that oil found on Elmer’s Island and Grand Isle matched the biological fingerprint of the hundreds of millions of gallons of oil that spewed from BP’s Macondo well. On Wednesday, BP acknowledged oil from its spill had been exposed by Isaac’s waves and that the company would work to clean it up. Ed Overton, the LSU chemist who did the state tests, says the oil found on Elmer’s Island had not degraded much, while oil at Grand Isle had. “Both were good solid matches on Macondo oil,” Overton says. Two other samples collected from another barrier island did not match the signature of oil from the BP well. Reports of tar balls washing up on beaches after Isaac made landfall on Aug. 28 were reported in Louisiana and Alabama. Overton says the discovery of the buried oil does not mean that the Gulf is seeing a repeat of the summer of 2010, when oil was spewing from an out-of-control well about 55 miles off the Louisiana coast. “This is not oil everywhere,” he says, describing the difference between the amounts of oil being exposed now by Isaac and what the Gulf saw in 2010 as “night and day.” Read more here.