Democratic Underground - "could become 50,000 barrels a day"....

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The prospect remained that the snapped oil pipe rising from the crippled well could continue to spew its poisonous load for three months or longer. The surface slick was last night already 3,850 square miles in area, three times larger than Hampshire. An internal memo from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, obtained by a newspaper in Alabama, suggested that the rate of leakage could "become unchecked, resulting in a release volume an order of magnitude higher than previously thought". That would imply that the 5,000 barrels a day rate of flow – the current estimate – could become 50,000 barrels a day.

Worse still, the oil coming from the well is of a particularly viscous nature and hard to clean up. "If I had to pick a bad oil, I'd put this right up there," Ed Overton, an industry expert at Louisiana State University, cautioned. Like other experts, he said everything was combining to make this spill as bad as any seen before. "This has all the characteristics of a category five hurricane."

As he arrives here, Mr Hayward of BP will plunge into what would be any energy company's worst nightmare. The questions awaiting him include why it took the company so long to recognise what was happening one mile under the ocean's surface. This time last week, the word from BP – and the US Coast Guard – was that the spill from the collapse was small. Even when that was exposed as inaccurate, the company insisted that any slick would be contained and would not reach land.

He will also be asked to explain more distant actions, including the company's resistance to Washington's attempts to introduce a new rule to make deep-sea drilling safer. A letter from BP to the US government dated 14 September 2009, made its position clear. "While BP is supportive of companies having a system in place to reduce risks, accidents, injuries and spills, we are not supportive of the extensive prescriptive regulations as proposed in this rule," the letter said.

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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/bp-accused-as-size-of-oil-slick-triples-in-a-day-1960372.html

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