It seems the bad news keeps getting worse..... failures plugging the leak, much more volume than reported the first few days, weather conditions hampering preparatory efforts, yadayadayada....
Times-Picayune reporter's update, an informative video:
http://videos.nola.com/times-picayune/2010/05/saturday_oil_spill_update_vide.html
interesting comments from a photography site:
1. The light oil sheen reached the lower delta this morning with heavier slicks approaching. Rough seas from strong southeast winds are pushing the oil north and making containment extremely difficult. This oil is a light crude and is easily mixed into the water column by the wave action,,,,think of shaking a bottle of salad dressing,,,,so skimming becomes less effective. Also the wave action makes containment by floating booms less effective.
I was down on the coast this morning at Port Fourchon (no oil yet to the west of the river) and tides were above normal which is also not good. The entire LA coast is made up of low sand barrier islands and marsh.
If oil gets into the intricate maze of grassy waterways that comprise the marsh, it will be catastrophic. The inland marsh is the nursery that drives life in the gulf and the barrier islands are the major seabird rookeries. This is right in the middle of the nesting and migration season for birds, spawning season for fish and oysters and the beginning of the brown shrimp season. All we can do now is hope they can stop the flow and minimize the damage that is sure to come. (underlined for emphasis by me)
2. Horrible. Just horrible. Don't forget too, that tourism in the redneck riviera is about to hit it's seasonal peak. No one will go to the gulf coast beach towns this summer. How will the beach towns be compensated? I think back to my past life as a nuclear engineer designing reactor safety systems, where critical safety items had to be triple redundant. No two failures could put the reactor at risk. Why can't we implement similar design concepts in the equipment we use to drill and pump oil? There ought to be three independent ways to plug that hole in place before the first drilling is done. One would be nice in this case... Environmental stewardship cannot take a back seat to our need for energy independence. They must co-exist peacefully.
http://www.naturephotographers.net/...SSID=5c55160439e5dc46417b0a3df3065130&u=10246