UPDATE: So now they're saying those tarballs in Galveston weren't from BP's disaster after all. You'll never know.
[M]arine scientists are worried even more of the deep-sea reefs could be damaged as the thick goo [from the BP undersea gusher] creeps into two powerful Gulf currents.[...]
Marine scientists say diffusing and sinking the oil helps protect the surface species and the Gulf Coast shoreline but increases the chance of harming deep-sea reefs.
[...]
"At first we had a lot of concern about surface animals like turtles, whales and dolphins," said Paul Montagna, a marine biologist at Texas A&M University Corpus Christi who studies Gulf reefs. "Now we're concerned about everything."
[...]
The loop current could carry oil from the spill east and spread it about 450 miles to the Florida Keys, while the Louisiana coastal current could move the oil as far west as central Texas.
Maybe Jesus at the bottom of the sea off Key Largo will protect the Keys, eh?
(I got that picture from a blog posting pictures of the Giant Jesuses of the world, from Big Butter Jesus – who, as you know, was recently struck by lightning and burned to the ground – to a gigantic Lego Jesus in Sweden.)
Tar balls found on [Texas] Bolivar Peninsula and Galveston’s East Beach during the holiday weekend were reliably traced to the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the U.S. Coast Guard and state officials said Monday.[...]
Officials are looking into the possibility the oil that washed ashore came from the side of a ship or from the bilge of a vessel that had [passed] through the spill.
[...]
The consistency or “weathering” of the tar balls is inconsistent with what they would look like if they had drifted directly from the site of the spill 400 miles away, Woodring said.
[...]
Ships that have been navigating through the oily water in the Gulf are required to go to a decontamination station near Louisiana.
There have been a couple of ships, however, that came into port without the Coast Guard’s knowledge.
I don't know. A ship is a pretty big thing. Not much place to hide out there on the water coming into port. After reading how the Coast Guard is bowing to BP in the area of the Horizon well disaster, it wouldn't take much for me to believe that the Coast Guard was fully aware of those ships and the skirting of the decontamination process.
Not to mention, the government has colluded with BP for months to downplay and deny the true extent of the disaster, and to keep independent investigators and reporters from learning the truth.
As a forceful reminder of the potential harm, the well beneath BP's Deepwater Horizon rig was being sealed with cement for temporary abandonment when it blew April 20, leading to one of the worst environmental disasters in the nation's history. BP alone has abandoned about 600 wells in the Gulf, according to government data.[...]
More than 27,000 abandoned oil and gas wells lurk in the hard rock beneath the Gulf of Mexico, an environmental minefield that has been ignored for decades. No one — not industry, not government — is checking to see if they are leaking, an Associated Press investigation shows.
The oldest of these wells were abandoned in the late 1940s, raising the prospect that many deteriorating sealing jobs are already failing.
[...]
Regulations for temporarily abandoned wells require oil companies to present plans to reuse or permanently plug such wells within a year, but the AP found that the rule is routinely circumvented, and that more than 1,000 wells have lingered in that unfinished condition for more than a decade. About three-quarters of temporarily abandoned wells have been left in that status for more than a year, and many since the 1950s and 1960s.
[...]
Despite the likelihood of leaks large and small, though, abandoned wells are typically not inspected by industry or government.
....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.
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