Oil as Thick as Chocolate Syrup on the Coast of Louisiana
May 20th, 2010What, no U.S. Coast Guard threatening the news crew with arrest on behalf of BP?
Via: Technofascism Blog:
According to a recent NPR article, Steve Wereley, engineering professor at Purdue University, estimates the oil spill as “now approaching 100,000 barrels a day. And, there’s another leak he has yet to analyze.” That’s 4.2 million gallons per day. By his estimate, 124 million gallons have spilled so far.
If Prof Wereley is correct, it’s only been a month and the amount of oil spilled has already topped the second largest oil spill in history: the Ixtoc 1 Mexico Oil Spill of 1980. By coincidence, that spill was also in the Gulf of Mexico. Like the BP oil spill, the Ixtoc spill was due to an explosion in an offshore oil rig that caused a leak that couldn’t be capped for a entire year despite attempts to shoot material into the well pipe and drilling nearby relief wells.
During that year, the Ixtoc spill continuously leaked 30,000 gallons per day. If it also takes a year to cap the BP spill, by that time, over a billion gallons of oil will have spilled into US coastal waters making it the worst oil spill in history. With that much oil carried by the currents of the Gulf Stream, the entire Eastern seaboard of the US and even Europe could be affected.
