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=environment&oref=slogin 

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