Oil Spill Volunteer Toolkit

Surfrider recently created this toolkit to assist our chapters and the public in how to get involved with response and cleanup efforts for spills. This is general in nature and not specific to the current Gulf Coast crisis.

Please remember to coordinate with your local response agencies, as they will offer volunteer training. While the environmental damage can be devastating, oil is a hazardous material, so please stay safe.

White House: no new drilling until oil spill review

This morning the White House said there would be no oil drilling authorize in new areas until a review of the spill in the Gulf of Mexico has been conducted. More...

We don't believe that is going far enough. The horrific spill in the Gulf makes it clear that new offshore oil drilling is not the answer!


Tell the Obama administration to restore the moratorium

http://www.surfrider.org/nodrilling

Oil from Gulf spill is reaching Louisiana coastline

With an oily stench permeating the air across southeastern Louisiana, a massive oil spill was expected to start coming ashore in the Mississippi River delta early Friday, triggering all-out efforts to stave off an enironmental and fishing industry disaster as some state officials feared a repeat of the botched response that doomed the region during Hurricane Katrina's aftermath.

Read more...

Detailed Map of the Growing Monster......and a Projected Landfall

These images are from the response team's website.

Lessons From the Disaster

The LA Times today published a great editorial regarding lessons learned (or lessons that should be learned) from the ongoing oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Here are a few excerpts:

"Last week’s oil rig disaster should remind us that expansion of the environmentally risky practice is not the way to go.

Here's what we've already learned: Offshore drilling is more dangerous than industry apologists claim (11 men are believed to have died in the explosion), and it can have environmentally devastating impacts.

This kind of environmental tragedy isn't unprecedented — a similar rig explosion happened last year off Australia — and we'll probably be seeing it more often if Congress expands drilling off U.S. shores. There's a better way of using our coastal resources to generate energy. On Wednesday, the Obama administration approved the country's first offshore wind farm, a 130-turbine project off Massachusetts that is guaranteed never to foul beaches with tar or emit carbon into the atmosphere. Cape Wind is the future; the sunken Deepwater Horizon drilling rig represents a tarred past."

Oil Spill Counter: Gulf Oil Disaster is spilling 210,000 gallons a day

This is an explanation of how we determined what number to use to count the total amount of oil spilled from the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

We based our calculation on the approach used by SkyTruth, which is explained below.

Using their method it is estimated that 5,000 barrels or 210,000 gallons of oil has been spilling each day since the incident began.

U.S. Coast Guard estimates:

When the Deepwater Horizon initially caught fire at 11 PM on Thursday, April 20th and burned until it sank mid morning on Thursday, April 22nd, the U.S. Coast Guard estimated that approximately 8,000 (or 336,000 gallons) barrels of oil was leaking per day.

On early Friday, April 23rd, the U.S. Coast Guard reported that the leak appeared to have stopped.

Sometime on Saturday, April 24th, the U.S. Coast Guard reported that oil was leaking from the sea floor (5000 feet below the surface) at 1,000 barrels (or 42,000 gallons) per day. Until today, that was the number they were reporting.

To our knowledge, the U.S. Coast Guard has not provided any specific justification for how these numbers were estimated.

SkyTruth estimates:

The folks at SkyTruth took a different approach. On April 27th (approximately Day 6 of the spill) they calculated the total volume of the spill based on satellite observations and divided by the amount of time that oil had occurred. This approach yields a conservative estimate that the spill is leaking approximately 5,000 barrels (or 210,000 gallons) of oil each day. It does not account for the oil that burned or has been cleaned up to that point, which, if accounted, for would make the daily estimate higher. This estimate is based on empirical evidence - the area and minimum thickness of the spill to be visible.

You can read this post by SkyTruth here to see precisely how this calculation was made.

February 21, 2011 Update: SkyTruth wanted us to note that Dr. Ian MacDonald from FSU was the one who initially calculated the 26,500 barrel a day estimate. Read here.

Bigger Than Exxon Valdez Spill?

SkyTruth is reporting that their analysis of radar satellite images and "conservative calculations" indicate that in the first week of the oil spill at least 6 million gallons may have entered the Gulf. That's a spill rate of at least 850,000 gallons (20,000 barrels) per day, 20 times larger than the official Goast Guard estimate of 42,000 gallons per day.

The Australia blowout and spill took 10 weeks to control.

The Exxon Valdez tanker spill totaled 11 million gallons.

Do the math and you'll see that this spill has the potential to blow by the Exxon Valdez amount.