OIL pouring into the Gulf of Mexico from a fractured well spread around a 320km radius but broke into thousands of small spills, a top U.S. coast guard official said today.
“This spill is just aggregated over a 200-mile radius around the wellbore, where it’s leaking right now, and it’s not a monolithic spill,” said Admiral Thad Allen, in charge of the U.S. operation against the leak.
“It is literally hundreds of thousands of smaller spills,” he told U.S. broadcaster ABC’s This Week, adding that the ribbons of oil floating in the Gulf complicated the offshore fight to stop the leak from hitting the coastline.
“It’s an insidious war, because it’s attacking, you know, four states one at a time, and it comes from different directions depending on the weather,” Mr Allen said.
Speaking on CBS, he declined to estimate what percentage of the leaking oil was being captured by BP’s containment dome, saying those figures were still being determined.
But regardless of how much oil was contained, he said, it would not stop spewing into the water until a relief well was completed – expected to be in August.
Mr Allen added that authorities would be dealing with “oil and mediation and long-term environmental impacts” well into the fall.
“There will be oil out there for months to come,” he said. “This spill is keeping everybody hostage.”
