Tom Linden on the BP Disaster

Posted on | June 7, 2010 | Comments Off on Tom Linden on the BP Disaster

Tom Linden

The blowout of the BP exploratory well in the Gulf of Mexico may be the biggest environmental disaster since the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident.

Eleven workers died on the Deepwater Horizon platform, and no one knows the ultimate cost to the environment and to the local economies of the Gulf states and the rest of the United States.

BP’s use of dispersants at the blowout site 5,000 feet below the surface of the ocean has kept much of the oil hidden from public view in deepwater plumes that scientists have only begun to map. The toxic brew of dispersants and oil threatens 600 species, including brown pelicans, sea turtles, dolphins and hundreds of species of fish and invertebrates.

More than 20 years after the Exxon Valdez spilled 11 million gallons of oil into Prince William Sound, the Alaskan fishery has not recovered. The herring fishery crashed in 1993, and despite claims to the contrary by Exxon, many biologists and fishermen attribute the loss of the fishery to the spill.
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