Coast Guard aims to reopen Houston ship channel after oil spill
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/03/24/oil-spill-cleanup-blocks-major-texas-shipping-channel/
...Authorities are still trying to determine how much oil spilled Saturday, when a barge carrying about 900,000 gallons collided with a ship. Initial estimates were that as much as a fifth of the barge’s cargo spilled.
By Sunday, oil had been detected 12 miles offshore in the Gulf of Mexico. Twenty-four vessels were working to skim the spilled fuel and deploy containment booms...
...Draining the remaining oil from the barge and transferring it to other vessels eliminated the risk of additional spillage, said Capt. Brian Penoyer, commander of the Coast Guard at Houston-Galveston.
Nearly 400 people joined a fleet of oil-retrieving skimmers and other vessels in deploying some 60,000 feet of containment booms around environmentally sensitive areas...
Houston Ship Channel Could Reopen on Tuesday After Weekend Oil Spill
http://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/Houston-Ship-Channel-Could-Reopen-on-Tuesday-Following-Weekend-Oil-Spill-252209631.html
Mar 25, 2014 | Updated 6:57 AM CDT
...Three days after the collision, the cleanup effort is still going on in earnest. But authorities hope the channel’s closure could end sometime Tuesday, allowing more than 80 stranded ships to resume activity.
Officials believe most of the oil that spilled Saturday is drifting out of the channel into the Gulf of Mexico, which should limit the impact on bird habitats around Galveston Bay as well as beaches and fisheries important to tourists.
“This spill — I think if we keep our fingers crossed — is not going to have the negative impact that it could have had,” said Jerry Patterson, commissioner of the Texas General Land Office, the lead state agency on the response to the spill.
The best-case scenario is for most of the slick to remain in the Gulf for at least several days and congeal into small tar balls that wash up further south on the Texas coast, where they could be picked up and removed, Patterson said.
However, officials said Monday night that changing currents, winds and weather were pushing the oil not only further into the Gulf, but also southwest along Galveston Island, resulting in expanded oil recovery efforts.
The Coast Guard said earlier Monday that it hoped to have the channel open to barge traffic as quickly as possible but that more tests were needed to confirm the water and the vessels traveling through the channel were free of oil....
Bacteria in the Gulf would eat the oil if they just left it alone.