EPA Approves Emergency Fuel Waiver for Florida

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt on Thursday approved a request from Florida Governor Rick Scott for an emergency fuel waiver to ensure enough diesel fuel across the state for ongoing response efforts to Hurricane Irma, EPA announced in a release.

The Agency has waived the highway diesel fuel red dye requirements to allow the use of 15 parts per million sulfur non-road diesel fuel for on-highway vehicles in Florida, effective through October 6, 2017. Diesel fuel distributed under this waiver may not be introduced into terminal storage tanks from which diesel is dispensed into trucks for distribution to retail outlets after that date.

In the U.S., the EPA mandates use of a red dye to identify high-sulfur fuels for off-road use. Detection of red-dyed fuel in the fuel system of cars and other vehicles brings significant penalties.

The waiver authority was exercised under the Clean Air Act and granted by Pruitt, along with the U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry.

EPA said in its release that they and the Department of Energy "evaluated the situation and determined that granting a short-term waiver was consistent with the public interest."

The EPA and the DOE are "actively" monitoring the fuel supply situation as a result of Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria.

More information: www.epa.gov/enforcement/fuel-waivers.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons Images

Pregnant bottlenose dolphins give birth to premies, high mortality post BP spill

A new study published today shows that in the years following the April, 2010 through July 15, 2010, an unusually high number of pregnant dolphins gave birth to too small offspring. Many of these premies who were less than 115 cm in size had died by the time their bodies washed up along the shores of the Northern Gulf of Mexico.

Scientists wrote in Inter-Research Diseases of Aquatic Organisms that when comparing 69 bottlenose perinatal dolphin strandings to 26 reference strandings from another period at Florida and South Carolina, far more were found to have died shorty after birth (88 versus 15 percent), have pneumonia not linked to lungworm infection (65 versus 19 percent), and have fetal distress (87 percent versus 27 percent).

"These results support that from 2011 to 2013, during the northern Gulf of Mexico UME (Unusual Mortality Event), bottlenose dolphins were particularly susceptible to late-term pregnancy failures and development of in utero infections."

The news comes almost six years after the BP oil spill began in the Gulf, an event lasting 87 days before the Macondo well was capped. Copious amounts of controversial and highly toxic dispersant Corexit, banned in the UK, were airdropped in affected areas following the spill. Many studies are being conducted on effects of the dispersants, which have been worse on mammalian health, many say, than the oil alone.

The study's lead author was Kathleen M. Colegrove from the Zoological Pathology Program, College of Veterinary Medicine, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This article was originally published on Examiner.com, Apr. 12, 2016Photo: courtesy of Wikimedia Commons Images. A bottlenose dolphin, http://www.public-domain-image.com/public-domain-images-pictures-free-stock-photos/fauna-animals-public-domain-images-pictures/dolphins-public-domain-images-pictures/bottlenose-dolphin.jpg, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service