is this even possible? "It is raining oil in Florida"

http://fourwinds10.com/siterun_data/environment/pollution/news.php?q=1274767889


Making this quick, don't feel well. About 4:15pm or so eastern, coming back from Tampa, Florida north on Veteran's Expressway...about 7 miles perhaps from SR 54...it sprinkled some gray watery and solid black oil on my car. Thought it was bugs, but so fast did not make sense and windshield wipers just smeared it. Got out of car at store and looked on the paint and solid black dots on my car...I touch? huh? it's wet? it's OIL!!!!!

I had several folks verify it before I sprayed it off and it came off easier than the few love bugs. Two hours later still wet like OIL! nope, not water, smell it, OIL!!!

Anyone on Gulf try not to smear touch it as it is harder to wash off if it happens to you. Bands of storm clouds coming this way from Gulf of Mexico...has not actually rained at least where I have been, just ran through the sprinkle. I smell it now I am inside the house...it's just hard for me to believe also. One can think of a other things...oh maybe it was a vehicle in front of you...there was no vehicles near me at the time. So coincidence oil spill in the gulf and it rains oil on my car? okay believe what you will...but I know my gut and what happened to me, what I saw, others witnessed, I took pics of (sorry don't know how to post them, and it photos could be debatable anyway, take my word or not whichever...but we are in deep hocky doo folks.
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?????

Leave some gasoline out uncovered, as an experiment. And if you can smell oil, then it has evaporated.

Also, wind could blow oil droplets off the surface of the water, and carry them miles. I don't think it'd need to be a full-blown waterspout to do this.

The oil could vaporize float up into a cloud, cool down and fall just like h2o?

but I did want to point out that oil will partly evaporate anyway. If this person did get oil droplets on their car, I'd think wind-blown spray is a more likely source.

Never had quite an experience like this before.

Condensate and precipitate comes only after the evaporate.

I could see that some oil would evaporate. That's what the experts have been saying.
So, when it does evaporate it could come down as precipitate?

I mean, if they can pick up fish the oil would be no problem.

People should be taking samples and see if Corexit is in the rain.

The days newspaper, laid out with a new sheet of plain white in the middle of it so the pattern is the same, and the date displayed, is damn near all the proof needed to prove collection.

take your own samples.

If a waterspout forms over the oil slick it can pick the oil up and shoot it high into the stratosphere only to precipitate later.

I've actually seen it "rain" frogs, fish, and crawdads before during a thunderstorm that spawned tornadoes.

Edited to add: Looking at the radar, there's nothing in the vicinity that suggests a weather pattern that could have done this. I'd say this is a hoax.

what one in the Gulf might spread into the midwest

That's more worrisome, which is why I think BP was so adamant about using the dispersant. They don't want it on their heads if a hurricane pushes their shit inland across a wide swath of the coast basically making the area a toxic wast dump for miles na miles and miles.

I take that route home myself at around 4:30 PM every day and I didn't see any oil rain. Lots of regular rain yes but no oil. It's bullshit!

So you're calling the OP a liar and the post BS.

Do you think it even remotely possible that it could have been a spot shower, and that you missed it?

I've seen it rain on my house, but the house across the street stayed perfectly dry.

You may not agree with the OP, but all you had to say was that you were in the same area but did not experience the event the OP was describing.

The personal attack was uncalled for and against DU rules.

It's a repost from another site. And no I'm not mistaken. If the person that posted this got hit with oil it was likely spray from the road or something that came from the car in front of them.

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the weatherman said it was from all the clearcutting in Mexico.

while driving home through Texas (I can't remember where - will have to ask Hubby).

We'd never seen anything like it!

breaking waves could cause small oil drops to be suspended. As another poster noted, lots of things can become aerosols and they generally end up in the rain.

(Or, it could be what happened to me one time when I was driving across Texas and noticed my windshield becoming covered with oil - it turned out I'd left the oil cap off...)

In one interview, a scientist talked about coating the entire gulf coast region in oil, 100s of miles inland.

nt

You might find this interesting:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x8421977

According to this, it's not only possible, but inevitable (if the findings are valid).

Hope you'll be feeling better soon.

thanks anyway

Have a good day, anyway!

when would the oil would get into the water cycle? I was poo-pooed and the thread sank like a stone.

Dr. EMANUEL(Professor of Meteorology, MIT): Right now, sitting out there as it is in the Gulf, you have this black surface and it's doing two things. First of all, it's absorbing sunlight. And secondly, it is curtailing evaporation from the Gulf right now.

HAMILTON: Emanuel says both of those things tend to trap heat in the water.

Dr. EMANUEL: So, theoretically, the Gulf underneath this oil slick should be getting hotter than it normally would be.

HAMILTON: And hot water is one factor that drives small hurricanes to become big ones. It's hard to know for sure if the area near this lake is getting hotter because the oil makes satellite temperature readings unreliable.

Emanuel says not only is it possible that the oil spill could make a hurricane worse, the reverse might also be true. For example, the hurricane could magnify the effects of the spill by pushing oil into coastal wetlands.

-snip

http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=127036434

hair on the stems.. When I had finished, my hands were covered with what I thought was dust/ dirt. When I went into the house, and washed vigorously with soap, it wasn't coming off.. Looked like I had been changing the oil under the car.. you know that "grease monkey" look. It lasted at least 3 days. The day before we had a day of rain.. hard pouring rain coming in from the Gulf (I live near Tampa). I thought it was stupid to suggest that oil was on my tomato plants because people would say I'm making unreasonable claims.. However, this is the 3rd year I've grown a garden, and like the 4th or 5th time I've trimmed back the tomato plants this year alone.. And before the oil spill, I had never gotten a "dirt" ingrained into my hands that appeared to be oil and wouldn't wash off before this.

And more than a little scary.

nt

more concerned its a dispersent concoction which is worse, and may actually effect our health if we eat from the garden... I purposely grow an organic garden to avoid so many chemicals from the stores.. and now, I can't really get away from this. I'm hoping I'm losing my mind and its nothing.. Just something on the plant.. I didn't feel anything on any of my other plants.. but the fine hairs on the tomato plant may have caught some of the particulate? I don't know. I haven't actually seen it raining oil or seen it on my car.

It looked like any heavy mist would look -- but as I got into it, I found it was evaporating on my glasses, leaving behind a crust of salt. There was not enough moisture in the air to rewet the lenses and wipe it off -- that only added more salt. I had to take off my glasses to ride home and clean them before I could see clearly again.

Of course, salt can't evaporate, so I assumed that strong winds had whipped up the ocean surface enough to carry some of it inland (a mile or so). There had been a storm earlier that day, no hurricane. Only seen something like that once in my life.

I would guess that if there were oil on the water and strong winds, you could get oil blown into the air the same way.

The suggestion upthread that it was due to soot from the oil burns is, however, probably more likely. Black rain is known to have fallen after many fires, and incomplete burning would give even messier precipitation, since some oil and some combustion products could be volatilized by the heat.