Thank you WW. I’ve saved this info for future reference. I’m watching this whole episode with great anticipation being a native of Florida.
Not to dismiss the catastrophic effects of an oil spill, but if you were to capture the volume of oil spilled and contained in a square mile, it would be approximally six inches deep. Just think of the hundreds of thousands of square miles of the gulf, and the average depth...The oil vs. water volume is miniscule...
You can get an idea of what Florida is looking at in the long run from the report published by the Texas "Bureau of Land Management" on the post-spill effects of the Ixtoc spill. Lots of good hard scientific data.
Texas was "hit harder" than Florida is likely to be from the BP Spill.
http://invertebrates.si.edu/mms/reports/IXTOC_exec.pdf