Oil from a giant slick washed ashore in Louisiana yesterday, threatening a catastrophe for the US Gulf Coast as the government mulled sending in the military to combat what officials called a national disaster.
With up to 757,000 liters (4,762 barrels) of oil a day spewing into the Gulf of Mexico from a leaking well, the accident stemming from a sunken offshore rig may soon rival the Exxon Valdez disaster as the worst oil spill in US history.
A top adviser to US President Barack Obama said yesterday that no new oil drilling would be authorized until authorities learn what caused the explosion of the rig Deepwater Horizon.
David Axelrod told ABC television that “no additional drilling has been authorized and none will until we find out what has happened here.”
Obama recently lifted a drilling moratorium for many offshore areas, including the Atlantic and Gulf areas.
Strong southeast winds blew the first oily strands of the 1,550km-circumference slick directly onto the coastal wetlands of South Pass near the mouth of the Mississippi river late on Thursday, said Billy Nungesser, president of Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana.
Hundreds of miles of coastline were under imminent threat in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, a region that amounts to more than 40 percent of the US’ ecologically fragile wetlands.
And with British energy giant BP, which leases the wrecked rig, no closer to capping the ruptured well, the White House went into emergency response mode to try and avoid the kind of disaster that Hurricane Katrina brought to the region in 2005.
Despite frantic efforts to stave off an environmental calamity, many of those dependent on the region’s vital fisheries and nature reserves had already given up hope due to strong onshore squalls forecast for several days to come.
Brent Roy, who charters fishing boats off the coast, said that rough seas until today would make it nearly impossible for rescue teams to contain the spill off shore.
“It’s the worst-case scenario for shrimpers, oyster harvesters, crabbers — all the commercial fishermen,” Roy said, referring to Louisiana’s US$2.4-billion-a-year fisheries industry.
Two lawsuits have been brought against BP so far for negligence, a hint of what is expected to be a flood of litigation from the disaster.
Oil is now gushing unabated from near the Deepwater Horizon platform that sank on April 22, two days after a huge explosion that killed 11 workers, despite BP efforts to cap the leaks.
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