(The well was finally capped nearly three months later. The new assessment of the Macondo spill’s extent is timely, the authors wrote, because “with a global increase in petroleum production–related activities, a careful assessment of oil spills’ full extent is necessary to maximize environmental and public safety”. Today’s Highlight in History: On April 20, 2010, an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil platform, leased by BP, killed 11 workers and caused a blow-out that began spewing an estimated 200 million gallons of crude into the Gulf of Mexico. Transocean reached a $211m settlement with businesses and individuals claiming damages, while Halliburton reached a $1bn settlement.Ī bipartisan investigatory commission appointed by the Obama administration pointed to crew and technical failures in the explosion, but cited overall safety shortcomings by regulators and the oil industry.īut safeguards in place to prevent a similar accident in future have been progressively eased by the Trump administration’s push to expand drilling off the country’s coasts. A US government investigation also identified multiple sources for the accident.īP subsequently spent or committed tens of billions of dollars to clean up the mess and compensate victims, and ultimately sold off its US arm. London-based BP, which leased the rig from Transocean, declined to comment on the study’s findings.Ī Transocean report into the disaster largely blamed BP, claiming the company failed to properly assess, manage and communicate risk, and said cement contractor Halliburton and BP did not adequately test the cement slurry used to seal the well.īP’s own internal report placed blame on a cascade of failures by multiple companies. “You can actually smell it but can’t actually see it,” Paris-Limouzy said. The discrepancy between their results and official estimates is because small concentrations of oil are often invisible to satellite imagery. “When the oil comes to the surface, it comes as a thick layer that you can easily see with a satellite,” Claire Paris-Limouzy, one of the study’s authors and a professor of ocean sciences at the University of Miami, told CNN. Using in-situ observations, oil spill transport modeling using three-dimensional computer simulations, as well as testing for oil concentration ranges in marine organisms, the paper claims that “that large areas of the GoM were exposed to invisible and toxic oil that extended beyond the boundaries of the satellite footprint and the fishery closures”. “The satellite footprint does not necessarily capture the entire oil spill extent,” the study found. ![]() The study’s authors found that the effects of the spill were 30% larger, reaching the Texas shore, the Florida Keys, the coast of Tampa and parts of the east coast of Florida. It released 206m gallons of oil from BP’s Macondo well, according to US government estimates, affecting wildlife and water-quality along hundreds of miles of Gulf coastline.Īt its height, 88,522 sq miles of sea were closed to fishing because of the spill, according to a federal report.īut a new study published on Thursday in the Science Advances journal says satellite surveillance at the time was unable to detect large areas of oil contamination. The 2010 rig explosion, which killed 11 workers and sent oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico for 87 days, triggered one of the worst environmental disasters in US history.
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