US Coast Guard: oil leaking from sunken rig, 42,000 gallons a day!

NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- No oil appeared to be leaking after a drilling rig exploded and sank in the Gulf of Mexico, the Coast Guard said Friday, though officials were trying to contain what spilled from the blast and prevent any threat to the coast's fragile ecosystem.

.....

The rig burned for nearly two days until it sank Thursday morning. The fire was out, but officials initially feared as much as 336,000 gallons of crude oil a day could be rising from the sea floor nearly 5,000 feet below.
Coast Guard Rear Adm. Mary Landry said Friday morning that no oil appeared to be leaking from a well head at the ocean floor, nor was any leaking at the water's surface. But she said crews were closely monitoring the rig for any more crude that might spill out.

.....

"If it gets landward, it could be a disaster in the making," said Cynthia Sarthou, executive director for the environmental group Gulf Restoration Network.

.....

Ed Overton, a Louisiana State University environmental sciences professor, said he expects some of the light crude oil to evaporate while much of it turns into a pasty mess that ultimately breaks apart into small chunks of oily residue that can wash ashore.
"It's going to be a god-awful mess for a while," he said. "I'm not crying doomsday or saying the sky is falling, but that is the potential."

Weather forecasts indicate the spill was likely to stay well away from shore at least through the weekend, but if winds change it could come ashore faster, said Doug Helton of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's office of response and restoration.

.....

Landry said crews saw a 1-mile-by-5-mile rainbow sheen of what appeared to be a crude oil mix on the surface.

At the worst-case figure of 336,000 gallons a day, it would take more than a month for the amount of crude oil spilled to equal the 11 million gallons spilled from the Exxon Valdez in Alaska's Prince William Sound.

A turn in winds and currents might send oil toward fragile coastal wetlands - nurseries for fish and shrimp and habitat for birds.
"As you get closer to shore, you get richer and richer marine habitats, and also get the potential for long-term exposure," Helton said.

.....

In addition to other environmental concerns, the well is in an area where a pod of sperm whales is known to feed, said Kim Amendola of NOAA.

.....

NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- The Coast Guard discovered Saturday that oil is leaking from the damaged well that fed a massive rig that exploded this week off Louisiana's coast, while bad weather halted efforts to clean up the mess that threatens the area's fragile marine ecosystem.

For days, the Coast Guard has said no oil appeared to be escaping from the well head on the ocean floor. Rear Adm. Mary Landry said the leak was a new discovery but could have begun when the rig sank on Thursday, two days after the initial explosion.
"We thought what we were dealing with as of yesterday was a surface residual (oil) from the mobile offshore drilling unit," Landry said. "In addition to that is oil emanating from the well. It is a big change from yesterday ... This is a very serious spill, absolutely."

Coast Guard and company officials estimate that as much as 1,000 barrels - or 42,000 gallons - of oil is leaking each day after studying information from remotely operated vehicles and the size of the oil slick surrounding the blast site. The rainbow-colored sheen of oil stretched 20 miles by 20 miles on Saturday - about 25 times larger than it appeared to be a day earlier, Landry said.

By comparison, Exxon Valdez spilled 11 million gallons in Alaska's Prince William Sound in 1989 - the worst oil spill in U.S. history.

.....

Complicating efforts to stop the leak is well head's depth at 5,000 feet underwater, said Lars Herbst, the regional director for the Minerals Management Service. Leaks have been fixed at similar depths before, but the process is difficult, he said.

.....

The sunken rig may have as much as 700,000 gallons of diesel on board, and an undetermined amount of oil has spilled from the rig itself. Suttles said the rig was "intact and secure" on the seabed about 1,300 feet from the well site.

.....

The U.S. Minerals and Management Service is developing regulations aimed at preventing human error, which it identified as a factor in many of the more than 1,400 offshore oil drilling accidents between 2001 and 2007. An MMS review published last year found 41 deaths and 302 injuries during that period.

The cause of Tuesday's blast hasn't been determined.

The Deepwater Horizon was the site of a 2005 fire found to have been caused by human error. An MMS investigation determined that a crane operator on the rig had become distracted while refueling the crane, allowing diesel fuel to overflow. Records show the fire was quickly contained, but caused $60,000 in damage to the crane.

Environmentalists said the rig explosion and oil spill should push the nation to develop new energy sources.

"This should be a wake-up call," said David Helvarg, the president of the Blue Frontier Campaign, a marine conservation group, and author of "Rescue Warriors: The U.S. Coast Guard, America's Forgotten Heroes."

"I would rather risk a 'wind spill' than an oil spill offshore," he said, ruefully pointing out that the source of wind-powered energy can't sully the environment.

The flaming collapse of an offshore oil rig near Louisiana is having an impact on the perennial coastal oil-drilling issue in the Florida Legislature.

"It's not going to make it any easier for us," Barney Bishop, head of Associated Industries of Florida, said Thursday. "We'll have to wait to see what the environmental damage is. (...")

.....

The state House passed a plan last year to permit drilling for oil and natural gas on state waters of Florida's Gulf Coast. Senate President Jeff Atwater, R-North Palm Beach, slowed the process this year and the matter made no real progress.
But next year's presiding officers — House Speaker-designate Dean Cannon, R-Winter Park, and Senate President-designate Mike Haridopolos, R-Merritt Island — are ardent proponents of energy development.

.....