The deadliest marine oil spill in history happened in 2010 on the 10th of April when an explosion caused the Deepwater Horizon oil rig to sink and about 4,900,000 barrels of oil to leak into the gulf. The spill happened when a public comment period on President Obama’s administration plan to add ten new offshore leases in the Gulf of Mexico. Studies that were done on the BP disaster showed that the spill affected the corals in the deep, dolphins, whales, tuna, and whale sharks. Scott Eustis, a coastal wetlands specialist with Gulf Restoration Network thinks that the environmental impact is being underestimated and that only three of the seven available skimmer vessels were even deployed to vacuum the oil off the surface. A skimmer vessel is a device that separates …show more content…
The reason the public doesn’t hear about the frequent spills is because it gets less media attention, less environment impact assessment and most critically, fewer funds to clean up the spill. Oil that is leaked into the Gulf is very toxic to the mammals that take breaths above the surface but instead of air there are breathing in oil that may cause fatal pneumonia-like health issues. Many of the oil rigs located on the coast of the Gulf aren’t even operational. The abandoned wells contain not so small amounts of oil in the pipes that could leak or sit in the path of future hurricanes. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement (BOEMRE) is a government agency that approved a flawed plan by Shell Oil. They wanted to drill in the same exact place that BP drilled where high water pressures are a huge risk of another Oil spill. Additionally, the company is going to use the same equipment and technology as the one that failed at BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling site that could cause a spill six times greater than the BP