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Posted: Sep. 03 2005,5:48 pm |
Post # 12 |
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As if things couldn't get worse. 
Major oil spill feared on Mississippi River
Officials suspect slick could be from huge storage tanks.
By Miguel Llanos
Reporter
MSNBC
Updated: 11:27 a.m. ET Sept. 3, 2005
Fearing a major oil spill southeast of New Orleans, officials on Saturday monitored what they described as an ﾃ｢竄ｬﾅ登il-like slickﾃ｢竄ｬﾂ on the Mississippi River and near two petroleum storage tanks.
ﾃ｢竄ｬﾅ展e are mobilizing now,ﾃ｢竄ｬﾂ Jean Kelly, spokeswoman for the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality told MSNBC.com. Teams ﾃ｢竄ｬﾅ努ill be going out to the field today.ﾃ｢竄ｬﾂ
In a statement late Friday, the department said that ﾃ｢竄ｬﾅ鍍he slick is visible and is leaking into the river from an area near two storage tanks. Because the area is not accessible at the moment, there is no way to verify that the tanks are the cause of the leak. Also, there is no confirmation on how much of the product, which appears to petroleum based, has leaked.ﾃ｢竄ｬﾂ
The slick is just north of Venice, a town in the Mississippi River Delta located 65 miles southeast of New Orleans.
Rodney Mallett, a responder at the state's oil spill task force, told MSNBC.com that little is known about the slick so far.
ﾃ｢竄ｬﾅ展e have only seen it from a plane,ﾃ｢竄ｬﾂ he said Friday afternoon. ﾃ｢竄ｬﾅ的t looks like it is coming from those tanks, but we need more evidence before being 100 percent sure. It could be coming from nearby and just running out from under all those trees.ﾃ｢竄ｬﾂ
The spill was first spotted Thursday during a flyover, Kelly said.
Each tank is estimated to be 20 feet tall and 280 feet in diameter, Kelly said. The department initially estimated that total capacity could be 1 million barrels each but later reduced that to 80,000 each. A barrel of oil is 42 gallons.
Kelly said the department still doesn't know who owns the tanks and therefore canﾃ｢竄ｬ邃｢t be sure how much oil is in them.
The Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska in 1989 involved about 250,000 barrels of oil.
Kelly said the state agency had notified the state oil spill response task force, the U.S. Coast Guard and the Environmental Protection Agency so that they can begin clean-up.
Coast Guard officials in St. Louis said they were looking into the report but that their priority was search and rescue in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
The state department added that it hoped to soon have two helicopters dedicated to assessing wider areas for environmental problems.
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