Deepwater Horizon [for API Well No. 60-817-44169] is the ultra-deepwater oil rig that sank April 22, causing a massive oil spill, estimated to be 130 miles by 70 miles in size, which threatens the Gulf Coast... \\ (Reuters) - Forecasts for the trajectory of the huge oil slick off the U.S. Gulf Coast did not show it hitting the shore for another three days, BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles said on Tuesday [May 4]. \\ (MarketWatch) -- BP officials told members of Congress in a closed-door meeting that the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico could be spewing as much as 60,000 barrels of crude a day, well over an earlier estimate of 5,000 barrels a day, according to reports on Wednesday [May 5]. \\ The oil reservoir, almost a mile underwater, was called Macondo -- the cursed town in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel: 100 Years of Solitude. - Adriano from Bookmarklet

"The Interior Department exempted BP's calamitous Gulf of Mexico drilling operation from a detailed ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT analysis last year, according to government documents, after three reviews of the area concluded that a massive oil spill was unlikely. The department's Minerals Management Service (MMS) to gave BP's lease at Deepwater Horizon a "categorical exclusion" from the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) on April 6, 2009." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn... - Adriano

Graphics: how a controlled OIL BURN works, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn... -- "A burn leaves a thick, sometimes sticky residue that either floats and can be collected, or sinks to the seafloor." - Adriano

Coordinates LAT, LON : 28.25N, 88.81W for the Deepwater Horizon. Satellite map http://3.ly/bpdh with photos. See also crisis response site http://google.com/crisisr... and http://www.nesdis.noaa.gov re "shapefiles," which indicate where the oil boundary is at a given time and where the oil will be in 24, 48 and 72 hours. The reports are based on imagery from a variety of satellites: MODIS (NASA), RADARSAT (Canadian), Advanced Land Observation Satellite (Japanese), TerraSAR-X (German) and SPOT (French). - Adriano

for visual comprehension, see Paul Rademacher's site which overlays a scaled representation of the Deepwater Horizon spill onto a Google Earth view of any city you choose: http://paulrademacher.com/oilspil... [requires Google Earth plugin -- otherwise, see some still images over Tokyo or San Francisco Bay Area here: http://www.theatlantic.com/science... ] - Adriano

15 May 2010: “There’s a shocking amount of oil in the deep water, relative to what you see in the surface water. Scientists studying video of the gushing oil well have tentatively calculated that it could be flowing at a rate of 25,000 to 80,000 barrels of oil a day. But the government, working from satellite images of the ocean surface, has calculated a flow rate of only 5,000 barrels a day.BP has resisted entreaties from scientists that they be allowed to use sophisticated instruments at the ocean floor that would give a far more accurate picture of how much oil is really gushing from the well." http://www.nytimes.com/2010... - Adriano

upcoming Hurricane season: "A storm could either move the oil along the water's surface or it could mix the oil with the water and cause it to sink. If the oil moved horizontally, the shoreline would be polluted. If it moved vertically, the marine life under the surface would suffer. \\ The oil could slow the storm's growth. Evaporated ocean water fuels hurricanes, and the oil forming a film across the Gulf could buffer the water from the air, preventing the ocean water from feeding the hurricane. But other scientists say the storms could be stronger than usual because the black oil would heat the water faster and accelerate formation of hurricanes, which rely on warm waters for their development." http://www.cnn.com/2010... - Adriano

29 May, horrible news: "BP said its complex "top kill" maneuver to plug the Gulf of Mexico oil well has failed, crushing hopes for a quick end to the largest oil spill in U.S. history already in its 40th day. It may be *another two months* before the London-based energy giant can definitively turn off the gusher." http://mobile.reuters.com/mobile... - Adriano

!!! "BP and other oil companies based their plans for responding to a big oil spill on U.S. government projections that gave very low odds of oil hitting shore, even in the case of a spill much larger than the current one. The government models, which oil companies are required to use but have not been updated since 2004, assumed that most of the oil would rapidly evaporate or get broken up by waves or weather." http://online.wsj.com/article... - Adriano