Tar Balls have turned up on the beaches of Florida for the first time since BP’s disastrous oil spill began polluting the Gulf of Mexico nearly a month ago.<\/p>\n
Laboratory tests are underway to determine the source of the oily, sticky gobs, ranging in size from three to 8 inches. The U.S. Coast Guard found the 20 tar balls on the sands of Fort Zachary Taylor State Park, just a mile or so from Key West’s busy cruise ship port and tourist magnet Duvall Street.<\/p>\n
While no one can say these tar balls washed in from the BP Deepwater Horizon spill, this is THE scenario that has worried Florida, the Federal Government and the scientific community for 4 weeks now.<\/p>\n
Based on BP’s estimates, more than 5 million gallons of oil has gushed into the Gulf so far, threatening the coastlines and already harming the economies of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and the Florida Panhandle. But if the oil slick meanders east and south, into the gulf’s Loop Current, the oil could be carried down Florida’s West Coast, through the Florida Keys and up the eastern seaboard.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, at the spill site, BP announcing today it now is successfully siphoning 2000 barrels of oil a day from the largest of the two leaks up to a ship on the surface, which is collecting the oil and burning off the natural gas. Efforts to cap the well with “drilling mud” and cement by this weekend are planned in what’s called a “top kill.” BP’s C.O.O. Doug Suttles says if that succeeds, that will be “the end of this incident.”<\/p>\n
That only applies to the ongoing spilling of oil. The containment, collection and cleanup is estimated to still take months and years, at a cost that no one knows for sure just yet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Tar Balls have turned up on the beaches of Florida for the first time since BP’s disastrous oil spill began polluting the Gulf of Mexico nearly a month ago. Laboratory tests are underway to determine the source of the oily, sticky gobs, ranging in size from three to 8 inches. The U.S. Coast Guard found […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6664,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-568410","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/568410","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6664"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=568410"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/568410\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=568410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=568410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=568410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}