The Gulf of Mexico-Lower Mississippi River watchdog group, On Wings of Care, was able to take advantage of good flying, good photographing weather, and calm seas Sunday, to overfly the site of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout and spill area.  Here’s a short description of what was found there:

the most troubling vision today was the Macondo area itself.  The slick that we had first noticed last fall, which was spreading over the area within a half-mile or so of the scene of the Deepwater Horizon explosion, was huge today. It stretched over 7 nautical miles in the south-north direction and was almost a mile wide in some spots. There were some patches of rainbow sheen and even some weathered oil (brownish “mousse”), although overall it remained a light surface sheen.

The flight also took them over expanded coal terminals on the lower Mississippi, a new access road being bulldozed through wetlands, and another ongoing oil spill – the “chronic Taylor Energy slick.”

The blog entry about Sunday’s overflight contains a very large amount of photographs and supportive data, such as GPS coordinates, Google Earth plots and the aircraft’s flight log.  It is a must see, not just for the images of the obvious ongoing leakage spill at the Macondo site, but for a look of the sheer scale of the coal ports being rapidly expanded on the lower river, and of environmental degradation in the delta.

Back to writing an update on Shell Oil’s Arctic drilling fiasco.

Hat tip to Zach Roberts.