Overflight of Leaking Taylor Wells

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Overflight of Leaking Taylor Wells
On April 10, 2012, Gulf Monitoring Consortium (GMC) conducted an overflight of the Lower Mississippi River Delta looking for oil spills including the ongoing leak at the Taylor Well site. Paul Orr the Lower Mississippi Riverkeeper flew with a SouthWings pilot over the Mississippi River Delta south of New Orleans out to the site of the ongoing crude oil leak from the Taylor wells around 11 miles south of South Pass of the Mississippi River.
On April 10, 2012, Gulf Monitoring Consortium (GMC) conducted an overflight of the Lower Mississippi River Delta looking for oil spills including the ongoing leak at the Taylor Well site. Paul Orr the Lower Mississippi Riverkeeper flew with a SouthWings pilot over the Mississippi River Delta south of New Orleans out to the site of the ongoing crude oil leak from the Taylor wells around 11 miles south of South Pass of the Mississippi River.

Crude oil, which we believe is coming from the damaged Taylor wells Crude oil, which we believe is coming from the damaged Taylor wells, floats in a rainbow sheen through the Gulf of Mexico past an unrelated oil platform.

There were no obvious signs of oil at the locations checked in Quarentine Bay and just offshore of Delta National Wildlife Refuge. These were areas where oil spills had been reported to the National Response Center recently. From there they headed south over South Pass and out to the coordinates of the site of the leaking Taylor wells.

Rainbow sheen through the Gulf of Mexico. Crude oil, which we believe is coming from the damaged Taylor wells, floats in a rainbow sheen through the Gulf of Mexico.

There, at approximately 11:43 am, a long oil slick was encountered trailing off to the horizon in both directions. The slick was between 200 and 550 feet wide and traveled for around 13 miles at which point it double-backed on itself and continued on for a ways in the direction that it had come.

slick3
Crude oil, which we believe is coming from the damaged Taylor wells, floats in a rainbow sheen through the Gulf of Mexico past another unrelated oil platform.

A report of a crude oil spill was submitted to the National Response Center (NRC) at 9:20 am on April 10th listing Taylor Energy as the suspected responsible party and coordinates in the same area where the GMC flight encountered the slick. The NRC report gave an estimated spill volume of 0.58 gallons and reported that the observed sheen was 75 feet wide and 4.5 miles long, obviously much smaller than the slick observed by the GMC overflight just two hours later.

As Gulf Monitoring Consortium has been monitoring this ongoing event one of the things that has been encountered is that there is often a discrepancy between what other parties are reporting to the NRC and the observations that GMC has been making. The NRC reports made by others have slick and estimated spill volumes much smaller than the observations that have been made by GMC via overflights and satellite imagery.

We hope that this ongoing leak can be fixed sooner rather than later and will continue to do what we can to move that forward.

  • waterkeeper
  • oil spill
  • taylor well
  • ealert
  • riverkeeper
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