Abbie Fentress Swanson
Follow her on Twitter @dearabbie.
Oil is still pouring into the Gulf of Mexico today, nearly two weeks after an oil rig called Deepwater Horizon caught fire and sunk.
The Associated Press reports that BP, the British oil company that contracted the rig, is trying a new strategy today to plug the leaks in a pipe connected to the rig. It plans to lower 74-ton, concrete-and-metal boxes to capture the oil spewing from leaks and siphon the oil to a barge above sea. The only catch is that the boxes may take a week to get into place.
This morning, twenty dead sea turtles who may have been killed by the oil washed ashore on the Louisiana coast. The federal government halted fishing from the Mississippi River to the Florida Panhandle on Sunday and Florida's Governor Charlie Crist declared a state of emergency in six counties in his state. "It's not a spill, it's a flow," Crist said last night. "Envision sort of an underground volcano of oil and it keeps spewing over 200,000 gallons every single day, if not more."
Visiting the region on Sunday, President Barack Obama called the spill a "massive and potentially unprecedented environmental disaster." He said BP would have to take full responsibility for cleaning up the spill. This morning, BP said on its website it would pay for "all necessary and appropriate clean-up costs" from the spill.
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