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Originally posted by CordDragonzord
Thanks BP, that oil dispersant really worked, keep up the good work.
Grand Isle Fire Chief Aubrey Chiasson confirmed this morning that the substance is oil, but officials have not determined where it came from. It is not believed to be oil left over from last year’s spill that may have been trapped in a marsh or other area,” Chiasson said.
The sheen is believed caused by “a tremendous amount of sediment being carried down the Mississippi River due to high water,” some of it related to recent heavy rains in the Midwest and “possibly further agitated by dredging operations,” Coast Guard officials said. Reports of a sheen in Timbalier Bay, near Grand Isle, Fourchon Beach and Elmer's Island, are also being investigated and some areas have been boomed off.
Situation Update No. 1 On 20.03.2011 at 20:07 GMT+2 An oil slick measuring 12 miles wide and 100 miles long has been spotted in the Gulf of Mexico and is suspected to be from a new major leak at the Matterhorn Seastar oil rig just 20 miles from the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. Pilots from several independent organization are monitoring the slick and report it is spreading fast. Fishermen in Louisiana are reporting fresh oil slicks washing up on shore. Boom has been placed by cleanup crews to catch the spill. The Matterhorn field produces 5200 barrels of oil a day and was discovered in 1999. The well sits in 2789 feet of water and has been in production since 2003. It is 30 miles SE of the Mississippi River delta.
Emulsified oil, oil mousse and tar balls from an unknown source were washing up on beaches from Grand Isle to West Timbalier Island along the Gulf of Mexico, a stretch of about 30 miles, and it was still heading west Monday afternoon, a Louisiana official said. The state is testing the material to see if it matches oil from last April's BP Deepwater Horizon disaster.
Oil spill response workers under the direction of the U.S. Coast Guard and state officials were scrambling to block more of the material from coming ashore. ES&H Corp. has been hired to oversee the cleanup.
Mike Roberts of the Louisiana Bayoukeepers was with a group that went up in the air on Saturday and then out on a boat on Barataria Bay Sunday. “It looked like a huge amount of oil in the Gulf,” Roberts said. “They could smell it from the airplane and I could smell it from the boat. This wasn’t just Mississippi River mud.”
This is how his wife Tracy Kuhns, who went on the flyover on Saturday describes it in her Bayoukeeper blog post today:
We turned to the southwest, heading toward the reported oil sighting south of Grand Isle, LA. Almost immediately we began seeing, what appeared to be, large areas of oil just below the surface along with streaks of multicolored “sheen” on the surface. The smell of petroleum was thick in the air. We flew southwest, to approximately 40 miles south of Grand Isle and followed the “plumes” and “sheen” north all the way in to Grand Terre Island and Grand Isle. The “sheen” appeared to be flowing into Barataria Bay through Four Bayou Pass and Grand Isle Pass. We saw only a few birds, one large, dead Red Fish and only three dolphins during the entire fly over.
MORGAN CITY, La.—The oil that has washed onto nearby beaches in recent days is Louisiana sweet crude, which rules out refineries or tankers carrying foreign oil as culprits but leaves the spill's precise origins very much a mystery, U.S. officials said Tuesday.
"This is definitely crude from the Gulf of Mexico," said Capt. Jonathan Burton, who is based here and heads the U.S. Coast Guard's response to the spill.
Coast Guard Petty Officer Steve Leeman said the Coast Guard had received no reports of oil-like material east of the river, but a group of environmentalists, engineers and scientists flew over Chandeleur Sound on Monday and Tuesday, and shared photographs and detailed descriptions with The Times-Picayune showing black, streaky plumes over a 20-mile stretch from just east of Quarantine Bay to just west of the shoal remains of Curlew Island.
But Coast Guard officials confirmed Tuesday that they have not ruled out the possibility that it is from BP's Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which crippled some businesses on Louisiana's coast for months and from whose effects residents are still recovering.