http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2010-05-15-gulf-oil-spill_N.htm
What will the consequences be this time as the penalty for another case of
"Hurry up and do something even if it's wrong"
Why does this situation remind me of the "Banking fix"
Possibly because, with money being used as a dispersant, it to has hid the toxic sludge from coming to the surface, but the problem is still there out of sight and it's volume grows.
In the first on-site measurements of the oil spreading below the surface, researchers found the plume of crude stretches 15 to 20 miles southwest from the site of the damaged wellhead and is about 5 miles wide, said Vernon Asper, a University of Southern Mississippi marine scientist leading the research.
The plume is compact, much thicker than the lighter remnants reaching the surface and suspended in about 3,000 feet of ocean, he said. A deepwater current is dragging it out to sea. The underwater oil cloud is not connected to the surface slick — now the size of Delaware and Rhode Island combined.
"This [underwater] plume is some of the heavier products of the oil that won't reach the surface," Asper said in a radio-telephone interview from aboard the R/V Pelican, a 116-foot research ship at the site of the spill. "We think this oil is going to stay down there. It doesn't look like it's coming to the surface."
The company has already dropped more than 560,000 gallons of dispersants on the surface slick and 28,700 gallons at the subsea wellhead, BP spokesman John Crabtree said.
The use of chemical dispersants at such depths has been controversial because it's never been used at such depths. Dispersants injected into the spewing wellhead is likely keeping the underwater plume suspended in 3,000 feet of water, said Mandy Joye, a marine sciences professor at the University of Georgia.
That keeps the oil from bubbling to the surface and potentially reaching fragile coastal marshes. But it's also creating a massive, toxic plume of oxygen-less oily water stretching through the deeper reaches of the Gulf of Mexico, Joye said.
The underwater plume, invisible to satellite imagery or aerial photographs, can also get stirred up and tossed into shallower waters if a hurricane passes over it, Joye said. The Atlantic hurricane season, which includes the Gulf, starts June 1.
"It is a good thing the oil is not damaging the coast line," Joye said. "But to say everything is fine because it's not hitting the coast is missing a very important part of this equation
