On Sunday, the U.S. Coast Guard confirmed what First Coast News viewers have been saying for weeks: the Golden Ray cargo ship, which capsized in the St. Simons Sound over two weeks ago is leaking oil and other contaminants into the water.
The Altamaha Riverkeeper is teaming up with the University of Georgia to learn just how bad the contamination might be.
The environment in rivers near the Golden Ray will soon be tested to determine if oil did, in fact, come from the Golden Ray.
“What we’re seeing is, this is fresh, we’re concerned there’s no booming around the ship trying to contain this stuff,” Fletcher Sams, executive director of the Altamaha Riverkeeper said.
Samples of marsh grass, water and sediment were collected for testing at the University of Georgia.
Dr. Mandy Joye has 24 years of experience examining the environmental impacts of oil spills. She helped in the response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.
She says a technician with her lab gathered samples from two unaffected areas along with two impacted areas to test for the presence of hydrocarbons.
She says it's easy to see when oil gets into the environment.
The tests to determine what kind of oil and where it came from will take some time.
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“We’re going to expedite it in any way we can,” Dr. Joye said.
“You can distinguish oil pretty straight forward … we can also look at it under a microscope,” Dr. Joye added.
“The tests [to determine the oil’s origin] require fingerprinting," Dr. Joye said. "We have to extract hydrocarbons, clean them, run them through a mass spectrometer to get a good reading. That could take a week or 10 days to do that.”
The Coast Guard confirmed on Saturday that command has observed sporadic discharges from the vessel.
This comes after the Unified Command Center stated there was minimal to no impact on the environment on Friday.
The latest post by the Unified Command states that strategies are being finalized to carry out effective pollution mitigation techniques to protect environmentally sensitive areas.
If you see any pollution that may be from the Golden Ray, you are asked to call the National Response Center at (800) 424-8802.