BP Horizon oil spill volume

How much oil is spilling into the Gulf of Mexico from the Horizon oil spill? Wikipedia tells us that although no really accurate testing has been permitted by BP, estimates range from 500,000 to 4,200,000 US gallons per day.

How big is that? If we were to fit 4,200,000 gallons in a cube, the cube would be 53 ft in length, width, and height.

53 ft is about the length of my property. My house is on a lot that's about 53 ft by 53 ft.

So, to imagine the volume of the spill, imagine a typical house lot, only 53 feet high, also. That's about 6 stories high.

One such 'house of oil' every day is spilling into the Gulf.

The spill started April 22, 2010. It is now June 3. That's about 40 days. That's 40 six-story houses of oil, so far. And many more to come, we gather, because they apparently have no idea how to stop the spill.

40 six-story houses of oil is already an oceanic suburb of death and ecological annihilation.

The Exxon Valdez spill of 1989 was 10,800,000 US gallons. It takes the Horizon disaster about 2.5 days to spill that amount. The Horizon spill is already about 16 times larger than the Exxon Valdez spill.

An average-sized swimming pool holds about 100,000 gallons. The BP Horizon spill would fill about 42 swimming pools per day. We've had 40 days of it, so far. That's 1,680 full swimming pools.


3 Responses to “BP Horizon oil spill volume”

  • Joseph Keppler: June 24, 2010 at 8:00 am

    It’s a different kind of war now–no longer declared, no longer fought on battlefields, and no longer immediately, totally destructive like Hiroshima or Nagasaki. When and where military confrontation occurs, it is irrelevant to this new kind of battle. North American layers of governments give people the freedom to be consumers with rules and taxes, of course, and also give corporations the freedom to finance a culture of consumption with their own regulations and taxes. When corporations, be they banking or insurance or health or oil industries, inflict deadly harm, neither government nor people seem to know who is supposed to or how to defend themselves.
    The new battle is one-sided. No enemy is perceivable. Government power wants to be portrayed as in place and effective against enemies, but enemies are often supposedly friends and invisible to typical media or military observation. Corporations are considered associates. Impotence and incompetence look at each other in the media mirror, and people go on consuming. It’s a terrible state to live in, worse than impoverished, worse than oppressed, worse than war, worse for some perhaps than death itself for it makes human, animal, and natural life into an eternal deadness. However measured the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is another massive defeat.

  • Jim Andrews: June 24, 2010 at 9:35 am

    Yes indeed. In part, it is a defeat by addiction. Addiction to oil. Addicts often care not the cost to themselves or others. The corporation, in this case BP, supplies the state with the needed substance. Yes, an associate in the war of the addict to obtain enough of the needed substance. War in Iraq for oil, in the Persian Gulf. War in the Gulf of Mexico of a very different kind but, again, oil-related. The ceaseless war of the addict to acquire the substance on which he/she/it is hooked, and the battle against the inevitably destructive consequences of the necessarily depraved manner in which the substance is desperately grabbed and/or consumed.

  • Whitney Stillinger: June 28, 2010 at 11:52 pm

    Today has 162 conditions of sickness reported from the Lousisiana, 128 are all those employees, The oldest worker is 64 many years old in there. I really feel sorry for these workers. I honestly hate all those oil company.