ABSTRACT
On the night of April 27, 2003, a barge carrying oil toward the Cape Cod Canal electric power plant veered off course and struck a ledge that sliced its single hull. Almost 100,000 gallons of Number 6 oil escaped into ocean currents and spread over ninety miles of sandy shoreline at Buzzards Bay just west of Cape Cod. “Number 6 oil” refers to the dregs left over in a refi nery after everything else has boiled off. The residual carbon, although too viscous and thick to use as is, still contains energy. Refi neries sell it to power plants where these remains are then cut with something more volatile, such as gasoline, in order to make them viable again. The composition of Number 6 oil can vary dramatically from mostly benign to dangerously toxic. The oil that washed up on the shores of Buzzards Bay in 2003 was the latter, killing a variety of endangered animals, ruining shellfi sh beds, and making the beaches unusable for months.1
