The BP / Deepwater Horizon environmental disaster is going to be the costliest environmental disaster ever. If you haven’t looked at just how large the spill really is … look at the following image. The spill now covers much of the Gulf and the scary thing is that the image only shows the progression of the spill over five days and the spill now encompasses more than 9,000 square miles of ocean.

The scary thing is that no one even knows how much oil is actually leaking from the well.

BP original estimate: 1,000 barrels/day
4/28 NOAA estimate: 5,000 barrels/day
Wall Street Journal: 18,000 barrels/day
Ian McDonald (oceanographer): 25,000 barrels/day
BP worst case scenario (from a permit filing mentioned on Wikipedia but not sourced): 163,000 barrels/day

I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news but this couldn’t have hit a more vulnerable region of the United States. The Gulf Coast is still rebuilding from the effects of Hurricane Katrina. I know that last sentence sounds like a cliche but literally, visit it and see for yourself.

Fishing

I think the next great money making opportunity for anyone with the money is to set up some fish farms for gulf coast seafood. The reason is that considering the volume of oil leaking from the former Deepwater Horizon lines, this has the potential to wipe out much of the area’s fishing economy and permanently destroy ecosystems.

Its no secret. Obama is desperately trying to assure fisherman that the government will do everything possible to assist them but really the only thing we can do is set up an industry bailout because this situation is going to quickly grow from bad to worse.

This really really sucks and no one is going to care until the oil starts washing up on the shore but at that point, its the last phase of the environmental disaster. From that point, the oil will begin seeping into freshwater areas and this summer will probably produce a hurricane in the gulf and flooding will wash oil onto land which is incredibly difficult to cleanup and compounds the ecological destruction.

Tourism

Even if you hate the environmental angle and believe that in time, everything will return to normal … think about what this will do in the short term for tourism. Summer gulf vacations? Forget about it, who wants black beaches and depression? Even years from now, little droplets will continue to wash up on the shore and if you have ever gotten oil on your skin, it doesn’t just wash off, your skin absorbs the oil and it takes some work to remove.

Anyone trying to sell beachfront property … no one will take it, even if its free. Just thinking about all of the direct and indirect ways this will change the gulf is really depressing. This is going to wreck local economies and could lead to the shuttering of many small towns who are heavily dependent on fishing.

Furthermore, what if this spill begins heading towards Mexico. What will happen when a bunch of fishermen can’t fish? Well how do people without opportunities make money in Mexico? Drugs.

Its one thing to cleanup after a hurricane. You know what to repair and how to repair it … but cleaning up a persistent environmental problem on a scale unseen in modern history is the problem facing everyone involved.