From Huffington Post by way of Florida Oil Spill Law comes this datum that, at this late date, shouldn't come as too much of a surprise:
The Federal government has now reopened 2,927 square miles of the Gulf - specifically, an area just South of the Mississippi Delta - to fishing and shrimping boats. But in order to check whether it was safe to do, all they did was perform chemical tests on three samples of shrimp taken from that huge area! (They also did the ridiculous "sniff test" for petroleum odors on five shrimp samples.)
Neither the sniff test nor the chemical test are intended to detect the deadly dispersant Corexit that BP dumped into the ocean in staggering quantities, and the miniscule sampling the government has used to give the okay to such a vast portion of the Gulf is statistically meaningless.
The government's falsely cheerful assessment of the situation coincides with the revelation that University of Georgia scientists took 78 core samples of the Gulf seafloor, and only 5 contained live worms. Traditionally, live worms should have been found in every one of those samples.
