major oil spill on the Mississippi River

[welshTerrier2]

you know, the "defend bush line" is "there are plenty of National Guard troops available - Iraq has nothing to do with this" ... note at the end of this article, however, that ALL efforts are being put into search and rescue ...

if we really had "Homeland Security", there should be more than sufficient personnel to handle the search and rescue as a top priority BUT ALSO start the clean-up of this major environmental disaster ...

the US does NOT have sufficient personnel available !! our troops are stretched way too thin because of bush's blunderings in Iraq ...

source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9175553/


A “major oil spill” has been spotted near two storage tanks southeast of New Orleans, the state Department of Environmental Quality said Friday. The spill was just north of Venice, a town in the Mississippi River Delta, and 65 miles southeast of New Orleans.

Each tank is 20 feet tall and 200 feet in diameter, she said. The department initially estimated that total capacity could be 1 million barrels each but later reduced that to 80,000 each. A barrel of oil is 42 gallons. Kelly said the department still doesn't know who owns the tanks and therefore can’t be sure how much oil is in them.

The Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska in 1989 involved about 250,000 barrels of oil.

Homeland Security officials were restricting access to the area, and Kelly said the state agency had notified both the Coast Guard and the Environmental Protection Agency so that they can begin clean-up.

Coast Guard officials in St. Louis said they were looking into the report but that their priority was search and rescue in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

[Fritz67]

1. And of course...

...gas prices will shoot up another 50 cents a gallon, now.