And it probably won’t be the last.
The oil and gas industry has a long history of spills in the Gulf of Mexico, dumping 517,847 barrels of petroleum into the Gulf between 1964 and 2009, federal records show.
In all, those spills double the volume of oil that leaked in the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989. The oil has reached as far as Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula and has killed thousands of birds and other wildlife.
The records from the former Minerals Management Service may not even tell the whole story. In at least one case, the amount of oil recorded was 10 times smaller than the actual size of the spill. Regulators rely heavily on company estimates when organizing the data.
The data contradicts the talking points of many industry supporters. The American Petroleum Institute’s president, Jack Gerard, called the BP spill the “first time an incident of this magnitude has happened,” and Rep. John Duncan Jr. (R-Tenn.) has praised the almost “astonishingly safe, clean history” in the Gulf.
Recently, technology improvements have lessened the spills, and the flow rates have been modest since 2006. In 2009, the largest spill was 1,500 barrels.
Some say the spill records indicate a need for more safety regulations and oversight, since the many spills resulted from poor maintenance and accidents (Steven Mufson, Washington Post, July 24).