Officials confirmed yesterday that a large patch of oil, about a mile long and two hundred yards wide, came through Dog Keys Pass into the Mississippi Sound, catching oil spotters by surprise, reports The Sun Herald.
"The unified command task force is on site, skimming and pulling boom," state Department of Marine Resources Director Bill Walker told The Sun Herald. "It should be handle-able, but what bothers me is that we didn't know about it while it was still way outside the islands. This is the second or third time we've been surprised by material that got too close."
Gov. Haley Barbour stepped up surveillance of the Mississippi coastline after a small amount of oil hit Petit Bois Island June 1. More than 400 boats are on patrol, and helicopters and airplanes make regular surveillance flights, the story says.
"But that's a lot of area, and some of these things can be difficult to spot," Walker said. "We sent a fixed-wing plane out of Gulfport today, and they knew the coordinates for it but still had trouble finding it."
At the site of the gusher, BP says it has reattached a cap that is allowing the oil giant to siphon some of the estimated 60,000 barrels (2.52 million gallons) of crude rushing into the Gulf of Mexico nearly every day, reports ABC News. Since the April 20 explosion of its Deepwater Horizon oil rig, BP has attempted several different methods to stop or contain the volcano of oil rushing up from a mile under the ocean's surface. To date, the cap has been the most effective, allowing BP to capture as much as 17,000 barrels a day for the past couple of weeks.
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