BP Finally Has a Fix

Finally, good news from the Gulf: BP has successfully inserted a tube into the damaged oil pipe that will siphon the oil into tankers at sea. However, it has also been discovered that oil from the blown-out well in the Gulf of Mexico is forming underwater plumes stretching as far as 10 miles long. Three or four submerged oil clouds are raising eyebrows about when the oil might hit shore—and one of them is 10 miles long and a mile wide. “It could take years, possibly decades for a system to recover from an infusion of this quantity of oil and gas,” said a researcher. “We’ve never seen anything like this before. It’s impossible to fathom the impact.” BP has wrestled with many fixes to try and slow down the leak nearly one month after the oil rig explosion.