Top White House officials manipulated the scientific findings of independent experts to “seriously lowball the amount of oil leaking from the BP Deepwater Horizon,” according to a group of federal, state, and municipal employees.
BP’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was successfully capped a year ago, but hundreds of miles of Gulf coast beaches and marshlands are still contaminated by oil from the blown-out Macondo well. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), oil ranging in form from sticky crude to a light sheen covers about 491 miles of Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi coastline. Approximately 1,100 miles of coast have been covered with oil since BP’s Deepwater Horizon platform exploded April 20, 2010.
Oceanographers and scientists have been warning that only time will reveal how much damage BP’s massive oil spill and its use of chemical oil dispersants in the Gulf of Mexico have done to the environment and marine ecology. This week a troubling sign has emerged in the form of an astonishingly large mass of floating dead fish just west of the Mississippi River in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s newly released fisheries report finds New Bedford, Massachusetts, and Dutch Harbor-Unalaska, Alaska, remaining at the top in 2009 for value and amount of fish landed, but the inclusion of several Gulf fisheries among last year’s top ten underscores just how much was lost in 2010 – for both the Gulf Coast and the national economy as a whole — in the wake of BP’s oil spill.
New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu told an audience at the National Press Club in Washington D.C. on Thursday that he lacks faith in BP and doesn’t trust the company to do the right thing in the aftermath of the oil spill.
Researchers have discovered that oil from BP’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico extends further east than previously thought. The extent of the spill isn’t visible from the surface because as much as 80 percent of the oil is on the sea floor, stretching from the blown-out well site south of New Orleans to 40 miles south of Panama City, Florida.
Now that BP has temporarily plugged the oil spill and remains confident that a successful permanent plug is within reach, federal scientists estimate 4.9 million barrels of oil have gushed into the Gulf since April 22. The calculation makes BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill the largest in history, far surpassing Mexico’s 1979 Ixtoc spill, which released 3.3 million barrels into the Gulf.
With all eyes fixated on the oil crisis in the Gulf of Mexico, BP is stealthily moving toward what could easily be this country’s (and the world’s) next environmental catastrophe: Deep-sea drilling in remote reaches of the Arctic. But will the Minerals Management Service (MMS) stop it? According to a report that appeared in Rolling Stones magazine, no.
Several hours after it was forced to remove the cap that had been containing some of the oil pouring from its broken oil well, BP has managed to fix its latest problem at the site and put the cap back on. The cap was removed around 10 a.m. Wednesday, after a robot on the site nearly a mile below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico bumped into it. The cap had contained at least a portion of the oil pouring from the damaged well, to the tune of about 700,000 gallons a day, so its hasty replacement was essential.
BP isn’t the only oil company currently spilling crude oil into the Gulf from defective wells and broken riser pipes, satellite images reveal. An offshore rig named the Ocean Saratoga has been spewing oil into the water since at least April 30, according to federal documents.
