"The NOAA Ship Pisces reported a dead 25-foot sperm whale was located 150 miles due south of Pascagoula, Mississippi and approximately 77 miles due south of the spill site earlier this week. The whale was decomposed and heavily scavenged. Samples of skin and blubber will be analyzed. Sperm whales are the only endangered resident cetacean in the Upper Gulf of Mexico.
A total of 461 sea turtles have been verified from April 30 to June 16 within the designated spill area from the Texas/Louisiana border to Apalachicola, Florida. Of the 461 turtles verified from April 30 to June 16, a total of 355 stranded turtles were found dead, 34 stranded alive. Four of those subsequently died."
-as reported on June 16, 2010 by the Dept. of Commerce’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Click here to go directly to this webpage.
Having gone to Tulane Law School down in New Orleans, LA and personally traveled to both the Louisiana wetlands and Gulf Shores of Mississippi, this seemingly endless oil spill is breaking my heart.
Known as the “Deep Water Horizon Oil Spill,” this could-have-been-avoided “accident” has yet to be contained despite a month having passed since its commencement. Given that this literally growing problem must be affecting vessel operators and others involved with international trade, I decided to take a look at the Federal Maritime Commission’s (FMC) website to see what it had to say.
The FMC has an entire section of its website dedicated to this incident. It is monitoring the spill's potential effects on shipping lines, rates, schedules, ports, and terminals and offers a number of resources. In addition, it is providing expedited review for agreements to facilitate adjustments that may be required as a result of the spill or response activities. Through the link above, the FMC further directs interested parties as to where they need to go for relief.
The FMC has incident sheets, response updates from various government agencies and interestingly, the NOAA’s website allows you to see trajectories (scroll down the page until you see the section entitled “Current Trajectory Maps”) which are updated once a day and include trajections based in part, on weather patterns, of the spill’s growth and direction.
Let’s hope that the hole on the ocean floor gets plugged soon. With hurricane season here, it's only a matter of time before the siphoning project will have to be put on hold.
Questions/comments? Post below or email me at clark.deanna@gmail.com
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