It doesn\'t look to me like it is a barrel a second... honestly.
The MMS who came up with the 5000 barrels a day estimate looked good to BP who never have done or released any analysis of how much they think is coming out.
The methodology used to get the 5000 barrels per day was a method not designed for measuring such large volumes. Then again there are a bunch of oil guys much smarter than me that also put in their two cents and didn\'t believe the leak was nearly as large as the 70,000 barrels a day estimates either.
There are a lot of unknowns that the estimates has to simply guess at when they made their guess. One, and only one of those unknowns was how much gas was mixed in with the oil. BP now says it is about 50/50.
When it is all said and done we might never know the answer. But how much is leaked is really not important to me anyway. How much makes it to shore, where it hits, how long it stays in the enviroment etc etc, that is what really matters.
I would rather have a larger leak where most of it stays offshore and evaporates and degrades versus a much smaller leak that puts crude oil directly in the marshes.
It sucks that this happened in deep water because that makes it harder to fix.... yet had it happened seven miles from Grand Isle or Marsh Island it would have been easier to fix but we might have actually had more damage to the marshes. It is all about tradeoffs. So far we have been pretty luck considering how bad it could have been.
When I can still see pictures of sea turtles making the news about the oil spill occasionally when it has been shown that they are dying of something else like a virus and started dying before the explosion then you know it isn\'t nearly as bad as it could be.
Think back to the first week. Think of all the visions you had of much of the gulf coast having crude oil lapping at the shore, 1000\'s of acres of marsh destroyed by the oil being measure in square mile after square mile, 1000\'s of birds dying, talk of putting the Pelican back on the endangered species list, massive fish kills, and on and on.
The situation certainly isn\'t good but it certainly isn\'t the Armageddon that was so often predicted. You still planing on saling you boat... your camp because of this? The fish are freaking tearing it up right now. So get out and fish.