USA: Deepwater Horizon Disaster - Everything’s well out of hand
It’s been close to a month since the Deepwater Horizon Oil Rig exploded and sank into the Gulf of Mexico, just 45 miles south of the already beleaguered gulf coasts of Louisiana and Mississippi. The ensuing oil spill may well surpass that which followed the wreck of the Exxon Valdez, which poured over 11 million gallons of oil into Alaska’s Prince William Sound in the spring of 1989. British Petroleum, which was the operator of the oil platform, had been leasing the rig from the deep seas drilling conglomerate TransOcean. BP initially estimated the daily oil spillage to be 1,000 barrels. Within a week of the disaster, that figure was ratcheted upwards by the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to be 5,000 barrels daily. This works out to 220,000 gallons of oil a day or a loss of better than a million gallons weekly.