BP Oil Spill Live Feed Update: A Whale Supertanker Oil Skimmer Utilized
Written by David Delano on Tuesday, July 13th, 2010The latest BP Oil spill update now places the Gulf of Mexico oil spill as the worst oil spill in history on record. This pertains to several oil spills that had happened and excluded the deliberate oil spill made by Iraqi troops during their Kuwait invasion.
A massive cleanup is already being done in order to save marine life in the area and to avoid further injuries. A Taiwanese supertanker oil skimmer named “A Whale” arrived last July 2 to begin preliminary efforts to skim oil in the Gulf of Mexico. However strong winds and rough seas were making the skimming effort more difficult than expected. Such condition in the Gulf of Mexico is expected to remain for the days to come.
35,000 to 60,000 barrels of oil per day has been gushing out of the Deepwater Horizon ruptured oil well since April 22. The BP containment cap procedure had already captured about 557,000 barrels of oil and a third vessel should have been deployed but the sea conditions prevents it at the moment. The third vessel is seen to increase the capture capacity to 53,000 barrels a day.
As of today experts estimates that around 1.9 to 3.6 million barrels (79.5 to 153 million gallons) of oil has leaked to the Gulf of Mexico. This numbers had already surpassed the 1979 Ixtoc oil spill. That particular oil spill took nine months to cap and dumped an estimated 3.3 million barrels (140,000 million gallons) into in the Gulf of Mexico.
“This is going to be a very long and arduous clean-up operation in the days to come,” said Coast Guard Admiral Paul Zukunft. “I’m especially concerned with some of the wildlife habitats.”