Gulf Oil Slick Dwarfs Response Vessels
Detail from SkyTruth image showing response vessels and Gulf oil slick on April 25.
We just got a detailed ALI satellite image from NASA that was shot two days ago, on April 25, when the oil slick was about 817 square miles in size (it has since more than doubled to at least 1,800 square miles). You can see several response vessels working at the periphery of the slick. The magnitude of the job they have to do is plain to see.
See more in our growing image gallery for this incident.
I'm just curious, but I thought the USCG would have coordinated containment efforts much sooner, rather than taking a wait and see approach. I'm not all that familiar with oil spill recovery operations, but it would seem that the US Gulf Coast would have some type of disaster response team for incidents such as this. The Coast Guard is small and not prepared to handle spills of this magnitude, but one would expect more to be don pro-actively, rather than leaving it to chance.
I think the sheer size of this event, and the rate of oil coming from the damaged well on the seafloor, is overwhelming our response capability. We haven't geared up for the worst-case scenario. The eerily similar blowout and spill last year off Australia should have been a clear wakeup call – it took 10 weeks to bring it under control.
Thank you so much for setting up this site. We need photos. We need folks to understand.