Will the Gulf of Mexico ever recover from the BP oil spill?

A year ago today, eleven men died in an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. The oil spill disaster that followed changed the world in ways that neither BP, nor the United States government appears willing to admit. Oil still washes up on the shores of Louisiana, despite official claims that the spill was cleaned up.

The BP Gulf oil spill may one day be acknowledged as the worst environmental disaster cover up in history. From the day the oil began pouring into the Gulf, the media blackout wheels were in motion. BP didn’t want to tell the public that the spill rate was far more than the 2,000 barrels a day originally reported, or that the catastrophe underway was already out of control.

By the time the Macondo well was capped 4 months later, 5 million barrels of oil and more than 1 million gallons of the deadly chemical dispersant, Corexit, had been dumped into the sea.

Thousands of birds, turtles, dolphins, whales, and fish had been killed. The corpses collected from the shores were only a tiny fraction of what remained beneath, in the icy depths on the sea floor.

The BP oil spill police chased reporters and camera crews away from Louisiana beaches, ashamed to let the world see what they had done; not out of concern for the poisoned, dead and dying wildlife, but to protect their falling stack price, and avoid costly environmental damage fines.

Just days after the onset of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, BP began buying the silence of scientists with lucrative contracts that have entombed biological a great deal of data.

Evidence that has escaped the snare of BP’s gag orders has revealed blankets of sunken oil smothering the breeding grounds of the food chain. Studies on dead dolphins and sea turtles show internal bleeding and brain damage lead to painful deaths.

Established oil spill data proves that the damage does not go away. Thousands of miles from the site of an oil spill, animals continue to die months and years later. Some suffer reproductive problems, or are found with cancer and other tumors. Once the food chain has been tainted, there is virtually no limit to how far currents and weather patterns will carry it.

Animals cannot file lawsuits, but people can. If all long and short term scientific data on the BP oil spill was publically released, there might not be enough money in the world to repair the damage that has been done to animals, the environment, the food chain, and the health of human beings.

See:

BP oil spill turning Gulf of Mexico into graveyard: Endangered species may be lost forever 

BP oil spill wildlife dying by the thousands