Dispersal of Oil Means Cleanup to Take Years, Official Says - NYT

** SO WHY do they keep using the dispersants exactly!?


Although the Coast Guard had trained for the possibility of cleaning up a disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, it had never anticipated that oil would spread across such a broad area and break up into hundreds of thousands of patches as the current spill has done, the commander heading the federal response to the spill said Monday.

Luke Sharrett/The New York Times

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs and Adm. Thad W. Allen, the Coast Guard commander, spoke to reporters in Washington on Monday about the response to the oil spill.
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“It’s the breadth and complexity of the disaggregation of the oil” that is now posing the greatest clean-up challenge, the commander, Adm. Thad W. Allen, said at a news conference at the White House.

He underscored the challenge by acknowledging, in response to a reporter’s question, that it would take years to mitigate the impact of the spill on the marshes, beaches and wildlife on the Gulf Coast. On Sunday, the admiral had said it could take well into autumn to deal with the slick that is spreading relentlessly across four states of the gulf.

“This is a long campaign, and we’re going to be dealing with this for the foreseeable future,” he said. MORE

Or possibly centuries?

go to the beach both in Germany and in Spain, and it was just expected that you'd come home with tar on your feet - which I now recognize as the remnants of oil spills generated from the sinking of ships during WW2, twenty years earlier. And those spills were nothing in comparison to this. Most was the fuel for individual ships, and even the tankers of the day carried only a fraction of what tankers today carry, and yet even after 20 years it was simply expected.

A 'spill' of this magnitude could turn the entire gulf into a dead zone for decades.

They are using the word 'dispersal' to mean, how large and wide the oil has traveled. That is different than the dispersant chemical.

I found it odd that Adm. Thad Allen used that word, but I think he is not careful with his words. He also used the words 'production' several times when discussing extracting the oil from the riser.

I am not sure but think he is implying that the oil could have been more of a unified mass making clean up easier.

Something tells me we'll hear a lot about this later and the issues behind the use of the dispersants.. were they helpful or harmful..

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2010/06/allen-oil-spill-now-hundreds-of-thousands-of-patches/1

Adm. Thad Allen says the 1 million gallons of dispersant used to break up the oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico has helped create "hundreds of thousands of patches" of oil that need to be cleaned up.

The spill is "no longer a single spill but a massive collection of smaller spills," said Allen, who briefed reporters at the White House before heading into an 11 a.m. ET meeting with President Obama and Cabinet officials working on the spill response.

The upside is that mass quantities of oil don't wash up in any one place along the shore, according to Allen, the federal incident commander for the spill. But finding and removing so many patches is "increasing vastly the complexity of the response," he said.

To find and skim the oil, the government has now trained the operators of 1,500 fishing boats. More Coast Guard cutters and patrol boats also are being brought in, Allen said.