Mississippi River Covered in Oil

The Mississippi River now has a layer of oil on top of its' surface. The coating of oil has covered almost 100 miles of the Mississippi River, spanning from the center of New Orleans to the Gulf of Mexico since Thursday's accident.

The thick industrial fuel pouring from the barge could be smelled for miles in city neighborhoods up and down the river, even as hundreds of cleanup workers struggled to contain the hundreds of thousands of gallons. Environmentalist were concerned about the deaths of fish and birds, but though officials said they had so far heard of only a handful of oil-covered birds.

“We’ve had a number of large spills in the New Orleans area, but this is a heavy, nasty product, problematic in the cleanup,” said Lt. Cmdr. Cheri Ben-Iesau of the Coast Guard, adding that it is of the sort normally used to fire up boilers at power plants.

On Thursday afternoon, the picturesque walk along the Mississippi at the French Quarter, normally full of tourists and pedestrians, was nearly deserted as a pungent chemical stench wafted up from the oil-covered water. A few skimmer boats, deployed to suck up the oil, constituted the only traffic on the nearly half-mile-wide river; a plastic boom to contain the fuel hugged the rocky shoreline, and the seagulls had disappeared.

The 61-foot barge that has been leaking heavy fuel oil for nearly two days could be seen underneath the mammoth Crescent City Connection bridge. It was carrying 419,000 gallons of the heavy fuel it had just picked up from an oil distributor when it collided with a 600-foot tanker ship around 1:30 a.m., just off this city’s Uptown neighborhoods. The tanker did not leak.

The Coast Guard said the incident was being closely investigated, though no blame had yet been assigned. Oil continued to leak from the barge Thursday afternoon, and the Coast Guard was deploying a diver to check the flow.

Absorbent barriers floated along the banks of the Mississippi River in New Orleans on Thursday.

For the complete article check out: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/25/us/25spill.html?_r=1&ref=environ ment&oref=slogin