Collapsing Marsh Dwarfs BP Oil Blowout as Ecological Disaster

[dipsydoodle]

Source: Bloomberg

Claude Luke throttles down his 21- foot aluminum work boat. Off to the left, the snout of an alligator disappears near the mouth of a watery gash in the Louisiana marshland.

The 51-year-old Cajun crab fishermen is touring the epicenter of an unfolding environmental disaster that dwarfs the BP Plc spill and predates it by decades, according to state scientists and environmentalists. If unchecked, the destruction threatens to undermine the world’s seventh largest estuary and one of the most important U.S. energy corridors.

His boat idles near a canal dredged more than two decades ago for a petroleum pipeline. Back then it was about 15 feet (4 1/2 meters) wide. Now it sprawls 100 feet wide, opening this once-protected upland marsh to toxic salt water. Not far away, Luke nods toward a water tower visible across about 2 miles (3 kilometers) of almost open water.

“You used to be able to walk there from here,” says Luke, who moonlights as a warden on the private Harry Bourg Corp. preserve deep in Louisiana’s delta. “Before the oil companies came, this was good, solid marsh.”

Read more: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-08-18/collapsing-louisiana-marsh-dwarfs-bp-oil-blowout-as-environmental-disaster.html

[WillParkinson]

1. Luke is so full of himself!

Everyone knows that drilling for oil is completely safe.

:sarcasm: (Should I really need it.)

[SpiralHawk]

2. "It's all completely natural. Smirk." - Rush DraftDodger Limbaugh (R)

"I can guarantee you that this destroyed marsh will have absolutely no impact on the $40 million a year in corporate payola I get to spout propaganda shit like this, and to continually sucker the RepubliBagger base of dittoheads. Smirk."

- Rush DraftDodger Limbaugh (R)

[saigon68]

3. LOL what a Gasbag