Excerpt:
As they work to contain the spill off the Louisiana coast, authorities are trying to determine if a pipeline was the source
Skimming vessels are working to contain and recover oil from a spill in the Gulf of Mexico off the Louisiana coast, which the U.S. Coast Guard on Tuesday estimated to be at least 1.1 million gallons.
The spill was discovered Thursday near a 67-mile pipeline operated by the Main Pass Oil Gathering Co., owned by Houston-based Third Coast Infrastructure, and the Coast Guard said it was still reviewing whether that pipeline was the source of the contamination.
On Friday, pilots on reconnaissance flights saw oil moving southwest from Plaquemines Parish. Under the surface, “remotely operated vehicles, deployed Friday morning, continue to survey the pipeline with no findings of a source area at this time,” the Coast Guard said in a Monday statement. “The vehicles will continue to survey the pipeline if weather conditions permit.”
The spill, officially called the “MPOG11015 incident,” is the latest in an area that has seen some of the worst offshore oil disasters in the nation’s history.
In 2010, 130 million gallons of crude poured into the Gulf of Mexico after an explosion at the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig. Six years before that, a hurricane toppled a Taylor Energy platform, causing crude to leak from several broken oil wells…
As much as 1.1 million gallons of oil may have been discharged into the Gulf of Mexico from a pipeline system off Louisiana’s southeast coast, the U.S. Coast Guard said Tuesday…
