The Gulf of Mexico oil spill

More bad news.  Actually, news so bad the term catastrophic doesn’t begin to describe it:

In a closed-door briefing for members of Congress, a senior BP executive conceded Tuesday that the ruptured oil well in the Gulf of Mexico could conceivably spill as much as 60,000 barrels a day of oil, more than 10 times the estimate of the current flow.
Federal officials have raised the possibility of a leak of more than 100,000 barrels a day if the well were to flow unchecked, but the chances of that situation occurring were unclear.
Also on Tuesday, the company’s chief executive, Tony Hayward, told Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, that the spill would clearly cause more than $75 million in economic damage, the current cap on liability for drilling accidents.
Mr. Nelson and the two Democratic senators from New Jersey, Frank R. Lautenberg and Robert Menendez, have introduced legislation to raise that cap to $10 billion, and to make sure that the new limit applies to this spill.
While BP continues to acknowledge its responsibility to shut off and clean up the oil, it is being barraged by government officials and civil lawyers who are redoubling efforts to ensure that the company’s legal obligations are clearly defined and strictly enforced.
Attorneys general from the five Gulf Coast states have been drafting a letter to BP that will lay out demands. In the letter, they are expected to urge BP specifically to define what is meant by its repeated statement that it intends to pay “legitimate” claims, a term Attorney General Troy King of Alabama said was unacceptably nebulous.
For now, weather patterns seem to be holding the giant oil slick offshore, and are expected to do so for several more days, temporarily sparing the coast — and sparing BP the renewed criticism that would surely come with oil landfall. A containment dome is being readied to drop over the worst of the leaks.

So we could be looking at a disaster that is 10 times bigger than the worst estimates we’ve been given so far.  This could mean that the entire northern part of the Gulf of Mexico could be turned into a dead zone for decades to come, with countless animals dying and no businesses related to fishing or tourism being able to thrive.
And let’s not forget that there are many other drilling platforms out there that could have an accident like this at any point, compounding the catastrophe.
Link.