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As of June 14th, almost 1.3 million gallons of untested dispersants have been used to break up the oil spewing from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico since mid April. From NewScientist.com, we learn:

The EPA commissioned a new round of tests in late May, but it remains unclear when these will be completed. The US Environmental Protection Agency and BP have locked horns over the toxicity of the dispersants being used to break up the oil spewing from the Deepwater Horizon well. Now, New Scientist has learned that huge variability in the safety test results submitted by different manufacturers makes it very difficult to judge which of the available dispersant chemicals poses the least threat to marine life.

However, a close examination of the EPA's website reveals that the agency's assumptions about dispersant toxicity are based on unreliable data.

Read on for the details, but suffice it to say that the story of this environmental catastrophe is still being written, certainly in regard to these dispersants. In particular, the EPA asked BP to find alternatives to the dispersant it was using, but BP has all but ignored them:

So far BP has used a dispersant called Corexit EC9500A made by Nalco Energy Services of Sugar Land, Texas. But on 20 May, the EPA ordered BP to find a less toxic alternative.

The company quickly responded, stating that only five dispersants met the EPA's requirements. Only one, called Sea Brat #4, made by Alabaster of Pasadena, Texas, was stockpiled by BP. This contained a chemical that would degrade into nonylphenol; this is a hormone disrupter likely to harm the reproductive systems of marine organisms. "BP continues to believe that Corexit EC9500A remains the best alternative," the company concluded.

Since then, there has been an uneasy stand-off, with the EPA telling BP on 26 May to stop surface spraying, and limit its subsea use of dispersant to a maximum of some 57,000 litres on any given day.

And now we are stuck using these toxic chemicals about which we know very little. As Terry Winckler from EarthJustice remarks:

The agency, which is all that stands between us and the toxic effects of dispersants, said the urgency of the spill situation was worth the risk. But, who is to say what the risk is unless we know what is being deliberately put into the waters, how it interacts with oil, and what its inherent toxicity is? BP certainly can't be trusted.

As for that last statement, that is the most accurate part of this story: BP cannot be trusted!

They, along with four of the other large oil-drilling companies prepared nearly identical 500-page oil-spill clean-up plans to the government:

Three of them listed the phone number for the same University of Miami marine science expert, Peter Lutz, who died in 2005. Four talked about the need to protect walruses, which, as Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) dryly noted, "have not called the Gulf of Mexico home for 3 million years." The plans also mentioned protecting sea lions and seals, which aren't found in the gulf, either.

The five oil companies submitted these plans -- each more than 500 pages long and each relying on the same reassuring language -- as part of their applications for permits to drill deepwater wells in the gulf. The firms assured the government that they could handle oil spills much larger than the one now threatening the region's environment and economy. And each time, the Minerals Management Service approved the plan and gave the go-ahead for drilling.

And finally, according to OSHA (and collected by the Center for Public Integrity),

Refinery inspection data obtained by the Center under the Freedom of Information Act for OSHA's nationwide program and for the parallel Texas City inspection show that BP received a total of 862 citations between June 2007 and February 2010 for alleged violations at its refineries in Texas City and Toledo, Ohio.

BP accounted for 829 of the 851 willful violations among all refiners cited by OSHA during the period analyzed by the Center.

These violations followed the 2005 explosion at their Texas City refinery that killed 15 workers. Which makes the following even more egregious:

Top OSHA officials told the Center in an interview that BP was cited for more egregious willful violations than other refiners because it failed to correct the types of problems that led to the 2005 Texas City accident even after OSHA pointed them out. In Toledo, problems were corrected in one part of the refinery but went unaddressed in another. Jordan Barab, deputy assistant secretary of labor for occupational safety and health, said it was clear that BP "didn't go nearly far enough" to correct deficiencies after the 2005 blast.

"The only thing you can conclude is that BP has a serious, systemic safety problem in their company," Barab said.

"Serious, systemic safety problem in their company..." has to be the understatement of the year. What a tragedy, for those lives lost Texas City in 2005, in the Deepwater Horizon blow-out on April 20th, and all those folks affected along the gulf coast.

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