Deepwater Horizon Incident, Gulf of Mexico

On April 20, 2010 the offshore oil rig, "Deepwater Horizon," located off Louisiana's coast exploded, killing eleven workers and injuring seventeen others. The rig and the oil it was pulling from the floor of the Gulf of Mexico burned for two days before the rig sank and the fire was extinguished. However, the nightmare continued. Some 200,000 gallons of oil continues to leak each day from a well owned by BP Oil, the company who leased the Deepwater Horizon rig from Transocean, Ltd. Consequently, the oil is spilling from locations 5,000 feet below the Gulf's surface - as a result, all efforts to shut down the spill have failed. BP began drilling a relief well on May 4, 2010, an endeavor that will take up to three months.

BP is distributing "booms" to help keep the oil out of Louisiana's seafood rich waterways and its wetlands. In further attempts to control the disaster, BP is also conducting "controlled" burns of 500 feet of an oil when the weather permits, and they are dispersing chemicals into the Gulf of Mexico in hopes of dissipating the surface oil. The homes and the livelihoods of thousands of Louisianans, and hundreds of species of animals and sea life are in grave danger of elimination.

Oil Spill Resources

• For information about the response effort, visit www.deepwaterhorizonresponse.com.
• To volunteer, call 1-866-448-5816.
• To report oiled wildlife, call 1-866-557-1401. Messages will be checked hourly.
• To report spill related damage, please call 1-800-440-0858;
• For information about validated environmental air and water sampling results, visit www.epa.gov/bpspill.

Breaking Gulf Oil Spill News