200 Million Gallons...Was It Enough to Make a Difference?

BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill stretches for hundreds of miles

200 million gallons of oil for 87 days straight was spilled during the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. This environmental catastrophe, even if it was mostly cleaned up, is unimaginable. What has the world come to that it takes something as exponentially horrible to happen for change to commence. We hear time and time again from our teachers that we must learn history to avoid repeating it or from our parents that we must learn from our mistakes, but we are constantly repeating them. It took 2 years for the majority of the oil spilled to be cleaned up, and it still wasn’t enough. The Deepwater Horizon Spill shows us that there can be every countermeasure, every calculation ever created to ensure safety and success, and yet from one unaccounted variable, everything is destroyed. Not only were 11 people killed and 17 injured, but the effects on the environment were also extensive. When the oil ridge was created surely, they took in account the safety of the people, but what about the marine animals? What about the ocean?

8 years have passed and still, there is a tremendous amount of oil that is still in the ocean because of this event. In 2014 researchers took a sample from a shipwreck near the site of the spill, it showed particles of oil that was still floating around. “At the sites closest to the spill, biodiversity was flattened,” said Leila Hamdan, lead author of the study. “There were fewer types of microbes. This is a cold, dark environment and anything you put down there will be longer lasting than oil on a beach in Florida.” If this is the effect that the oil spill had on a small section of the sea, what could it have done to the rest? While oil is a natural resource that is virtually easy to obtain and use, it will stay in the air, in the water, and in the environment for many more years after it is used. It is a toxin that is deadly to many wildlife animals, it’s a shame that not enough people want to make a difference.