Oil spill vessels would scatter if tropical storm approaches

[highplainsdem]

Source: Times-Picayune

Oil spill vessels would scatter if tropical storm approaches
By Sheila Grissett, The Times -Picayune
May 29, 2010, 10:59PM


A fire drill-like scramble is under way to figure out how, if a hurricane approaches, to decontaminate and evacuate the armada of vessels and army of people amassed to fight the Macondo oil well spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Emergency planners are asking and struggling to answer questions that were unthinkable before BP's Deepwater Horizon blowout on April 20. In the face of an oncoming storm, how long would it take to clean everything touched by oil -- booms, boats, skimmers, heavy equipment, everything contaminated -- and then get it trailered and hauled away before it's too late.

"This is absolutely not in our hurricane plan," said Jefferson Parish homeland security chief Deano Bonano, who said the prospect of a tropical storm mixing it up with the largest oil spill in United States history on Louisiana's coastal stoop is a science fiction-like scenario never envisioned. "It's just too large a scale, too incomprehensible to get your arms around."

BP and the Coast Guard estimate that 8,000 people using at least 1,300 vessels are working on the oil leak, cleanup and protection.

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Read more: http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill/index.ssf/2010/05/oil_spill_vessels_would_scatte.html

[Shadow Creature]

1. wait it out

Then afterwards they'd have to go back and start over.

[aquart]

2. Of course we're not ready. We've been preparing for terrorists.

Ask the people of the Gulf region what scares them more: a fool with a bomb or a hurricane?

[bettyellen]

3. i think BP is loking forward to a hurricane despersing this spill for them - then they'll have all..

the southeast coated in oil, but no one will have an easy time proving it's BP's or calculating the damage. I knw already somewhere quoted experts saying that the best thing to do was nothing.