Time for a Little Perspective on Oil Spills

American Thinker: Time for a Little Perspective on Oil Spills
"But these incidents are dwarfed by the 1979 Gulf of Mexico Pemex/Ixtoc I Oil blowout -- until now the largest accidental spill in history. This spill lasted almost ten months, releasing between ten and thirty thousand barrels per day (BPD). In total, it released approximately 3.3 million barrels into the Gulf.

Using the current upper end estimate of 60,000 BPD, the Deepwater Horizon spill has now surpassed the Pemex spill, so it can rightfully claim its place as record-holder for accidental spills. But it still is dwarfed by Saddam Hussein's deliberate release of somewhere between 5.7 and 11 million barrels from tankers ten miles off the Kuwaiti coast.

While the Pemex spill affected 162 miles of coastline in Texas and Mexico, the long-term environmental consequences were negligible. As one marine biologist put it, 'To be honest, considering the magnitude of the spill, we thought the Ixtoc spill was going to have catastrophic effects for decades. ... But within a couple of years, almost everything was close to 100 percent normal again.'"