At this point, no one seems to know what to expect or when. They have been soliciting ideas and outside help but the thing is pumping out oil like crazy and they have not been able to touch it. It is front page on NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and includes a daily tracking map.
there is a protected reef in that area, im not sure exactly where the spill is but if its approaching the Louisiana coast it cant be too far from the reef. once school ends i might try and find a clean up crew to join
I have the time but can't afford to go for a couple of weeks. From the little I could find, they have had good resonse locally but this won't be a short term project and the number of people available will likely fall off quickly.
This is so bad for everyone I cant even begin. First the poor animals, second the oil companys raise in gas prices excuse is now built in, and lets not start with the fishing industry. This is just horrible all the way around.
Sometimes i have a question when i look all disaster our specie did , do and could do : Is the human race really viable ?
I am almost sure that money saving made on the safety are at the origin of this kind of accidents ... all this , just to provide to someone good Accounting report Graphs on a power point.
im worried about the chemicals they're using to break the oil up. it said on yahoo this morning they were no concoctions of toxins that hadn't been tested. I was like what a lovely place to test them the middle of the lovely hood of the southern states =\. I saw on another article that said at the exxon-valdez spill some of the chemicals used were more harmful than the oil...hopefully we arn't repeating that mistake.
I also worry that if all the oil is forced to the bottom, what it will do to everything that lives there and how far it will spread over time. It would seem that it would be better to deal with the visible than the invisible.
Well BP has stopped most of the oil with a mile long underwater siphon. The problem now is that the oil is in the gulf stream, and now heading to florida and the east coast. Its progress.... I think?
A friend was telling me yesterday of a tanker spill in the Caribbean several years ago (he's been going every year for the past 25 or so years). That year there were foot size tar blobs washed up all over the beach. Over the course of 10 or 11 years, the tar blobs condensed into walnut sized sand coated hard nuggets. He took some home and dug one out for me to see yesterday. We went outside where he lit one with a lighter. A few beers later it was still burning.
There have apparently been about 60 tar balls found with this one (saw one report that said they were about 8-inch), but the unique thing with this accident is that the "spill" is not at the surface but is streaming from the sea floor. I read that there is no real precedence for this kind of dispersion (when it's at the surface, the oil is more condensed and contained - here, it plumes throughout the water column and covers a broader area).
It is interesting that our government last year apparently gave that rig a "safety award". In the interests of safety, it seems like no one ever contemplated what to do if there was damage where the oil comes from the sea floor. In terms of containment, it seems like they're making it up as they go along... Feels like a slow, lumbering response.
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