The Gulf of Mexico is facing a danger of environmental mess due to oil spill three months back. Now the company BP is under cloud about a big question of clean up. Louisiana, the most affected state, is the first to discuss and set the standards for declaring the nation’s largest offshore oil spill officially mopped up. Retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the Obama administration’s point man on the spill, said that how do we get to the inevitable question of how clean is clean
Many scientists and environmentalists believe there won’t be a quick or easy answer. Ron Kendall, director of the Institute of Environmental and Human Health at Texas Tech University, told that they have never dealt with this before, the complication of this much oil coming from the deep sea and being hit heavily with chemical dispersants. There are some signs the experiment may not have the cataclysmic long-term ripple effects originally feared.
Terry Hazen, a microbial ecologist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in California, credited the Gulf’s self-healing powers. Unlike the nutrient-lean waters of Alaska, still suffering lingering effects from the Exxon Valdez two decades ago, the Gulf teems with bacteria that eat for oil and gas leaking from natural deep-sea seeps. In the warm, wave-churned, microbe-rich Gulf, nature alone might already have consumed 30 to 50 percent of the oil. A tropical system stronger than meek Bonnie could further disperse the oil, speeding the process even more.
