Speaking Wednesday at the Coastal Development Strategies Conference, Mississippi Lt. Gov. Phil Bryant flatly denied that anyone can detect the odor of crude oil wafting over the waves to the Mississippi Gulf coastline. "No, you can't" he said, according to a report by The Sun Herald. Bryant said the smells might be coming from lawnmowers.

Yesterday, Bryant attempted to recant his statement.

"I'm not going to argue at all that someone could detect a petroleum-like, oil-based odor," Bryant said Thursday. "I hope I did not imply that. What I said was that it's not gasoline. I don't want to be misunderstood. If a southerly wind begins to blow, certainly that would help move the odor of the product inward. ... But what I had heard was people saying it smells like gasoline. You can't smell gasoline, because this is not a refined product."

In a related story, The Sun Herald reports that tar balls have begun washing up on the state's barrier islands and beaches.

"They found some small tar balls (Wednesday) that were widely dispersed on West Ship Island, Horn Island and on the beach near Pass Christian," Dan Turner, spokesman for Gov. Haley Barbour told the paper. "(Thursday) in the Long Beach area there were some very small tar balls."

Tar balls have also been reported in Plaquemines Parish, La., on Alabama's Dauphin Island and Gulf Shores, and Perdido Key in Florida.

Previous Comments

ID

157843

Comment

Yeah idiots, it wouldn't smell like gasoline, it would smell like crude oil, since everyone's sense of smell is refined enough to detect the difference; since everyone in America has years of experience in the oil refinement industry and is able to detect the vast differences in the substances' carbon-hydrogen bonds! Since everybody in America has a Ph.D. in organic chemistry! Gah, flippin' idiots!!

Author

DrumminD21311

Date

2010-05-14T12:02:59-06:00