Gulf Oil Shouldn’t Spill Beneath the Radar

[n2doc]

By Dave Mosher

A year after the Deepwater Horizon blowout sent 200 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico, smaller leaks still bubble across the Gulf — but unlike big spills, they’re largely ignored.

A nonprofit organization called SkyTruth, which uses public and commercial satellite imagery to assess environmental damage, recently added airplanes and ships to its Gulf monitoring. But the group can still investigate just a tiny fraction of spills and leaks that may be reported, underreported or not reported at all by oil companies.

SkyTruth founder John Amos, a geologist and a former oil-company research scientist, thinks roughly $3 million per year could buy the necessary data and provide the first continuous, accurate assessment of Gulf oil pollution.

“The oil industry has done a great job convincing the public that modern drilling pollution is nonexistent. But we’ve discovered wells damaged by hurricanes in 2005 that are still leaking,” said Amos, who may have caught an oil company grossly under-reporting one of its leaks. “We have some tools available to do investigations, but in many cases it’s just not enough. For smaller spills, we need an up-close look from satellite imagery.”

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/04/satellites-gulf-oil-spills/#more-58756

[Marblehead]

1. the oil companies

want a toxic waste dump in the gulf, they don't give a damn about the people that get sick from it..to them people sick and dying is a good thing for the bottom line.

[DirkGently]

2. "50,000 holes in the Gulf of Mexico." And see, everything's finejustfine.