The Deepwater Horizon oil spill tragedy is bad and getting worse by the hour. For several days the well was thought to be spewing 1,000 barrels a day from the seafloor. On Thursday morning that estimate was ramped up to 5,000 barrels a day. Louisiana is bracing for an oily sheen to coat coastal swamps as early as Friday night.
If the well continues to flow unabated at 5,000 bpd for two months until BP can cap it, the Deepwater Horizon spill could surpass the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill of 270,000 barrels as the biggest in U.S. history. But to keep things in perspective, this spill would have to continue gushing at this rate for 200 days to break into the top 10 worst spills ever, and for more than a year to enter the top five.
The worst spill ever to hit the Gulf of Mexico, and the second-biggest of all time, was the 1980 blowout of the Ixtoc I exploratory well drilled in Mexican waters by Petroleos Mexicanos. It took nine months to cap, during which time the well spewed more than 3 million barrels into the gulf, or more than 10,000 barrels a day. Two months after the blowout, the oil started washing onto Texas shores.
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It was almost as bad when the Atlantic Empress collided with another tanker, the Aegean Captain, in 1979. It continued leaking while being towed and 2.1 million barrels of oil ended up in the oceans off Trinidad & Tobago.
Four years later, in 1983, a tanker ran into an oil production platform in the Nowruz oil field off Iran's shores. For more than a year, 1,500 barrels a day poured into Persian Gulf, a total of 1.9 million barrels.
Image: Gulf War Oil Spill - Iraqi forces opened valves and emptied tankers, mostly at Kuwait's Sea Island terminal, with the intention, in part, of thwarting a landing by U.S. Marines arriving.
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