If any of the more than 50 people who attended Friday’s forum in Fairhope expected definitive answers about environmental impacts resulting from the BP oil spill, they probably left disappointed.

But if they wanted reassurance that the pollution problems were not as great as the media had portrayed them, they may have gone home happy.

“I don’t have answers,” said George Crozier, executive director of the Dauphin Island Sea Lab, referring to many questions regarding environmental impacts of the oil spill. “We still have questions.”

Crozier and Dr. Robert Shipp, chairman of the University of South Alabama Marine Sciences Department, spoke and took questions from the audience for almost two hours at the University of South Alabama, Baldwin County. It was the seventh and final forum sponsored by the university regarding the oil spill.

During his presentation, Crozier said one of the largest problems was dealing with the perceptions of environmental problems created by the media.

“The first thing that contributed to the problem was the media,” Crozier said. “They exaggerated because that’s what they do.”

The media’s impact on the overall issue could be felt longer than the ecological problems, he said, especially regarding seafood safety.

“How are we going to restore the image of the Gulf's seafood?” he asked.

Human health concerns have also been overblown, he said.

‘There’s been this hyper-reaction to exposure,” he said. “It’s the perception we’re dealing with. There’s this emotional reaction. So much of this is due to lunacy. Everybody sees oil everywhere.”

Although threats from the oil spill to the environment and human health may have been exaggerated, according to Crozier, he also said there has been a misunderstanding about the status of how much oil remains in the Gulf.

He said reports claiming that much of the oil is no longer present are incorrect.

“They’ve bought into this lunacy that it’s gone,” he said of people who believed those reports. “The majority of oil is still in the Gulf.”

BP’s decision in early May to use dispersants at where the oil came out of the pipe has created problems of its own, he said, no matter how toxic the dispersant itself might be.

“We’ve traded one threat for another,” he said.

That decision to use dispersants underwater kept the oil from reaching the surface but may have created massive mile-long plumes several hundred feet beneath the surface.

Crozier said Federal Drug Administration testing has shown that dispersants are no more toxic than dishwashing liquid or some cosmetics, but he also said there are no definitive answers yet on impacts of dispersants on marshes, grass beds and oyster reefs.

“The problem is pretty massive,” he said generally about the possible, and as yet unknown, impacts from the existence of plumes of oil under water in the Gulf.

Both Crozier and Shipp said the oil spill could have the greatest impacts on fish eggs and larvae.

Research is being conducted now to study such impacts, they said. The samples being collected will be analyzed by the DISL and by the FDA which is establishing its own lab at the DISL.

Crozier said results from the research will probably be released by November or December and presented before a panel of the research team in either Dauphin Island or Mobile.

“We feel pretty confident we will know what happened as a result of the spill,” Crozier said.

While Shipp and Crozier disagreed at times about the extent of the problem or possible long-term threats from the oil spill, they both said seafood was now safe to eat.

Crozier said there had never been as much testing of Gulf seafood as was occurring now, and that if it were being sold in stores it was safe.

“Any crab I catch this week, I’m going to eat,” Shipp said.