What impact is the spill having on the environment?
There are several areas around the spill site where levels of the aromatic carcinogen Benzene were metering at unsafe levels. Respirators were required for passage to these areas, but are now relatively safe. The extent of the impact is not yet known. The only consensus among experts at this time is that the direct impacts should be limited to the Kalamazoo River watershed. But as with any environmental concern, significant events such as this can have an unpredictable impact across large ecosystems. We do know that a good portion of the oil will never be collected as part of the remediation efforts. It will evaporate and eventually return to the water table in the form of precipitation, perhaps far from the Kalamazoo River area. This makes the impact incredibly hard to quantify, particularly without knowledge of specific chemicals were involved. In more than a hydrological sense, the entire ecosystem is connected. If the chemicals released from the spill have a negative impact on only
