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At a meeting of mayors in Louisiana on Monday, Roger Laferriere of the US Coast Guard put the Deepwater Horizon disaster in perspective: "Every day it's a new oil spill. In previous spills, we always had a known quantity of oil."
Laferriere is absolutely right. In this spill, the numbers have changed constantly. In April, BP thought that their broken pipe was only pumping 1,000 barrels of oil every day into the Gulf of Mexico. In May, they bumped that number up to 5,000 barrels per day. Last week, they proudly announced that they had started capturing 25,000 barrels per day. And, over the weekend, they admitted that that little broken pipe could be pumping oil at a rate of 100,000 barrels per day.
In case you're wondering just how big 100,000 barrels is, this is what a stack of 25,000 barrels looks like.
A new spill every day indeed.
