oil-spill-from-the-Deepwa-006

In her long-awaited feature on the expedition to the site of the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, Antonia Juhasz explains,

Mississippi and Florida are the only Gulf states that do not allow off­shore drilling in their coastal waters, which extend several miles out from shore.

It’s one of the few things the Sunshine State got right (but only partially, as Antonia explained on today’s show – but the headline worked!).

Antonia’s article in the current issue of Harper’s magazine is called “THIRTY MILLION GALLONS UNDER THE SEA: Following the trail of BP’s oil in the Gulf of Mexico” – and it was well worth the wait.

The article is behind a pay wall, but it’s worth the price, as she confirms what we’ve long believed, that the oil that spewed into the Gulf five years ago is sitting on the bottom of the Gulf and will remain there forever. I urge you to read the whole thing, but here’s a sickening taste:

The sediment samples we’d gathered were, it turned out, virtually identical to the ones collected in 2010. The layer of oil residue deposited four years earlier was still there. “It looks the same no matter where you are,” Joye said. “And it hasn’t changed.”

Today a coating of degraded oil, as much as two inches thick, extends across nearly 3,000 square miles of ocean floor. It is expected to remain there forever. In the Atlantis’s com­puter lab, Andreas Teske, a microbial ecologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told me, “When another expedition comes here in a hundred or a thousand years, they will say, ‘Ah, okay. Here is the 2010 oil spill.’ ”

Of course, this discussion comes on the day that Santa Barbara begins cleaning up the previously pristine coastal waters after a broken pipeline spewed approximately 21,000 gallons there yesterday.

We just never seem to learn.

In the first hour, I was once again joined by fellow FloriDUH resident Deborah Newell Tornello for our trek inside the Oy FloriDUH Files. Some of the stories we discussed include

Cuz you know, Florida is stranger than fiction.

I’ll be back tomorrow, with more tales of mystery and insanity… radio or not!