Gulf of Mexico oil rig spill serious, leaking 42,000 gallons daily

The disaster on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, which sank last week in the Gulf of Mexico shows no sign of going away as 42,000 gallons of oil (1,000 barrels) a day are leaking into the sea from the damaged well, officials have said.

There are fears of an environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, as the latest efforts to clean up have been suspended because of bad weather. BP has been using a robot submarine to try to activate a blowout preventer, a series of pipes and valves that could stop the leak.

However, this was a “highly complex task” and “it may not be successful”, chief operating officer of BP’s exploration and production unit Doug Suttles was quoted as saying by Reuters.

A Very Serious Oil Spill – 5,000 ft Underwater

The coastguard earlier said it had thought it was dealing only with a surface residual oil spill from the rig. “In addition to that, is oil emanating from the well. It is a big change from yesterday… This is a very serious spill, absolutely, ” said Rear Adm Mary Landry.

Although the oil is not flowing directly from the well, but from the damaged rig pipes, and is therefore being released at a somewhat constrained rate, the effort to stop it will be complex and difficult, response team members said at a news conference.

Latest Video on the Oil Disaster (with thanks to the Associated Press)

Many of the best-known oil spills in history have resulted from tanker accidents, with the release of oil near the water surface. In contrast, this leak is nearly 5,000 feet (1,500 meters) beneath the surface, where pressure is extreme.

The task force does not know how long the oil has been flowing from the damaged pipe nor how much has spilled. But at the current rate, it would be less than three days before becoming characterized by federal authorities as a major spill, greater than 2,381 barrels (100,000 gallons).

One of the worst oil spills to impact the Gulf was also a well blowout, in the Bay of Campeche off Ciudad del Carmen, Mexico, in June 1979. By the time the well was brought under control nearly nine months later, 140 million gallons ( 530 million liters) of oil had been released into the bay. The spill, which eventually fouled the Texas coast, was the second largest oil disaster of all time, surpassed only the deliberate release of oil in the Gulf War in January 1991.

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