LAC-MEGANTIC ENVIRONMENTAL DISASTER

Today's Waterloo Region Record carrys this story "Lac-Megantic highly polluted: study". No kidding eh? Quoting Greenpeace in the article "This is one of the largest spills in Canadian history. It will take considerable effort to clean up.". A professor at Montreal's Ecole Polytechnique stated that "...the weight of the chemicals should have sent them sinking to the bottom of the Chaudiere River, so he's perplexed that they would have been detected in the surface waters in such a high volume.". This last comment is in line with my posting here in the Advocate back on July 29/13. I had suggested that crude oil was a DNAPL (dense non-aqueous phase liquid) and would sink to the bottom of the water body. It's interesting that the Quebec Environment Department are indeed attempting to minimize the perceived damage simply with their choice of words. In this article they refer to "light crude oil". Well why would I suppose they also haven't been captured by polluting industries a long time ago exactly as they have in Ontario?