Dwarfing the Exxon Valdez: the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is ‘the worst environmental disaster the US has faced‘. As numerous attempts to stop the oil spill fail, the hurricane season in the Gulf looms large. What happens next is anyone’s guess:
A predicted busy hurricane season this summer is on a collision course with an unprecedented oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and the results are anyone’s guess, weather experts say.
“The problem is that this is a man-made experiment we wish we hadn’t made,” said Jenni Evans, a professor of meteorology at Penn State University.
Scientists on Thursday said as much as 19,000 barrels of oil have been spewing every day from the BP well in the Gulf, making it the largest oil spill in U.S. history. Most of the oily water lies off the coast of Louisiana, where marshes and wildlife have been coated and the state’s fishing and tourism industries have taken direct hits.
Not only is it hard to track how contaminants would be redistributed by a hurricane, but it’s also hard to predict how the slick would affect the storm, NOAA Public Affairs Officer Dennis Feltgen and Evans agreed. (Read More @ CNN)
If Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline project is approved it would carry half a million barrels of crude oil a day from the Alberta tar sands to the port of Kitimat, B.C. The oil would then be loaded into tankers that would sail through the narrow inlets of the Great Bear Rainforest before heading out to sea. At least 225 oil tankers a year would traverse this fragile coastal route, delivering tar sands oil to Asian markets.
Stop the Enbridge Pipeline. E-mail the Prime Minister and urge him to permanently ban super tankers so that B.C.’s North and Central Coast is not the site of the world’s next disastrous oil spill.
Action alert link in video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDxT6rSxq2k
This is such a catastrophe! The clean up process is definitely on all time high. Experts have probably foreseen this situation.
The question is, have they done enough? Have they acted on this situation fast enough? If not, have they thought of plans to avert even greater destruction? If hurricanes sweep across the area of Louisiana and the oil sludge is still not cleaned up, then it will devastate even more areas. This should not be the case.