As BP struggles to mitigate the impact of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, animals continue to suffer the effects of the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history.

Here are two graphic reminders of the toll being felt by the animals of the Gulf of Mexico. First, Mike Ellis, a boat captain who is attempting to help BP with the cleanup, describes his efforts to save Kemp’s Ridley turtles, and finding the endangered animals caught in the oil company’s burn-offs.

Second, here is a report by NBC News on the plight of birds such as the endangered brown pelican, which, after finding themselves coated in oil, are literally cooked to death because of the high temperatures and an inability to use their feathers to cool down their body temperature.

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A Deepwater Horizon rig worker has told the BBC that he identified a leak in the oil rig’s safety equipment weeks before the explosion.

Tyrone Benton said the leak was not fixed at the time, but that instead the faulty device was shut down and a second one relied on.

The blowout preventer, as the device is known, failed….
The most critical piece of safety equipment on the rig, they are designed to avert disasters just like the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

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New figures indicate that up to 100,000 barrels of oil a day may be gushing into the sea from BP’s blown-out well at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.

Representative Ed Markey, chairman of the energy and environment subcommittee of the Committee on Energy and Commerce in the US House of Representatives, released an internal BP document on Sunday that revealed the new figure which is considerably more than announced earlier.

The actual amount of oil being released from the well has been a matter of controversy with BP being accused of deliberately understating the leakage rate.

“This document raises very troubling questions about what BP knew and when they knew it,” Reuters quoted Markey as saying.

“It is clear that, from the beginning, BP has not been straightforward with the government or the American people about the true size of this spill. Now the families living and working in the Gulf are suffering from their incompetence,” he emphasized.

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In Florida, the Bay County Emergency Operations Center confirmed that tar balls had washed onto the beach at Panama City, a popular tourist destination.

Residents of the U.S. Gulf Coast battled to save their beaches as oil washed ashore at Florida’s Panama City, the latest casualty of BP’s ruptured deep-sea well.

The spill in the Gulf of Mexico is the largest in U.S. history, and the White House criticized BP CEO Tony Hayward for taking time off from dealing with its consequences to watch a yacht race on Saturday off the south coast of Britain. [ID:nN19148130]

To try to minimize the leak’s environmental impact, the British energy giant is containing some of the oil as it gushes from a well on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico.

It restarted its effort to siphon oil spewing from the well after one system was shut down for 10 hours to fix a problem with its fire-prevention equipment and to let a storm pass.

The system has been “building up to stable rates since” it was restarted, BP said in a statement. A second system is also running, though oil continues to escape into the sea.

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While U.S. residents living near the oil-stained Gulf Coast were suffering from another day of oil leaking onto their shores, BP CEO Tony Hayward was out yachting with his son instead of helping to solve the crisis caused by his company.
Source

As The Hill reports, President Obama hits the golf course with Biden on this hot and humid weekend in Washington, D.C.

President Barack Obama hit the golf course Saturday with Vice President Joe Biden.
The White House pool report noted that Obama left at about 1 p.m. for the course at Andrews Air Force base, and his golfing parters included White House Trip Director Marvin Nicholson and David Katz, the energy efficiency campaign manager at the Department of Energy.

All the while the oil continues to gush!

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