The calendar just flipped over to 2014 -- that means that it won't be long until April, and the 4th anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. A lot has happened since then -- Osama bin Laden has been killed, Occupy Wall Street came and then mostly disappeared, Mitt Romney re-emerged, ran for president, lost, and dropped off the radar screen. But some things have remained depressingly constant. Some 44 months after the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history, crude oil is still spoiling what had been finest white-sand beaches in this country.
The picture above was forwarded to me and others from a Florida state environmental official. The picture was taken this Tuesday morning -- New Year's Eve -- and it was taken off the beaches of Escambia County in the Sunshine State. Some 42 pounds of tar balls were collected and tested, confirming that it came from the Macondo oil field, site of the BP spill. In fact, there were so many tar balls from BP's 2010 spill that a Coast Guard oil-spill response team was called in.
This is a routine ...