Two hundred thousand gallons per day of Gulf crude are leaking from a hole 5000 feet under the water's surface in the wake of the still mysterious destruction of British Petroleum's Deepwater Horizon drilling platform last week . How and when it will be stopped is entirely unknown. The mayonnaise-like oil is being blown ashore into the nursery for shrimp for the whole region and the home of hundreds of the other species. Welcome to what may turn out to be the worst single human-caused environmental disaster ever. (Unless you regard global warming in general as a single event. Semantics.)
This thing is going to need a name. The Exxon Valdez incident was a spill - there was a finite amount of oil aboard the ship. A lot of oil: 11 million gallons (40 million liters). The new one in the Gulf of Mexico could blow past that, depending on ...
