What are the chances that British Petroleum and Transocean will pay us back for the staggering costs of cleaning up the mess from their exploded oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico? The Washington Post reports that the oil is already washing ashore:
An oil spill that threatened to eclipse even the Exxon Valdez disaster spread out of control with a faint sheen washing ashore along the Gulf Coast Thursday night as fishermen rushed to scoop up shrimp and crews spread floating barriers around marshes.
The spill was bigger than imagined – five times more than first estimated – and closer. Faint fingers of oily sheen were reaching the Mississippi River delta, lapping the Louisiana shoreline in long, thin lines.
You are going to love this next part (emphasis mine):
Government officials said the blown-out well 40 miles offshore is spewing five times as much oil into the water as originally estimated – about 5,000 barrels, or 200,000 gallons, a day.
At that rate, the spill could eclipse the worst oil spill in U.S. history – the 11 million gallons that leaked from the grounded tanker Exxon Valdez in Alaska’s Prince William Sound in 1989 – in the three months it could take to drill a relief well and plug the gushing well 5,000 feet underwater on the sea floor.
Ultimately, the spill could grow much larger than the Valdez because Gulf of Mexico wells tap deposits that hold many times more oil than a single tanker.
Okay, so it is gushing 200,000 gallons of crude oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico and it will take three months to plug it up. And it’s already washing up onto the Louisiana coast. I think it’s safe to say that this is an ecological apocalypse and it’s going to destroy the fishing industry on the Gulf Coast and cost billions (perhaps a trillion) to clean up as best we can. It can’t be completely cleaned up, and you can’t fix species extinction.
I hope the American taxpayer isn’t left holding the bill.