The video says it all: A tideline of tar balls, off Horn Island Pass south of Pascagoula, Mississippi – blobs stretching as far as the eye can see.
While a good portion of the country was gearing up for the U.S.-Ghana World Cup game, workers and residents in the Gulf were coping with day 68 of the oil spill – the day that the oil slammed into the as-yet-little-affected Mississippi coastline. Here’s the raw footage:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlbfdQnfiMU]
The people behind the camera seem aghast that there are no skimming vehicles trying to trap and extract this tar, visible everywhere they turn. The situation would only get worse the next day; on Sunday, tourists were evacuating beaches in Biloxi as the oil crept up the beach.
Seeing footage like this, one starts to appreciate the scale and magnitude of the problem. With oil as far as the eye can see, and with the gushing continuing uninterrupted on the sea floor, there’s no way to have enough equipment or manpower on site to tend to all the affected areas.
BP says it now has 39,000 people involved in the relief effort. That’s not enough.