TLMT313 WEEK 4 FORUM - Assignment Example

TLMT313 Week 4 Forum During the year BP oil spill incident was identified to kill 11 people and injuring 17 individuals. The incident was regarded as one of the worst gulf oil spills in the US history. It was identified from the evidences that at around 42 miles off the ‘coast of Louisiana’ came under its trap and around 4.9 million barrels of the oil have leaked into the area of Gulf of Mexico. It was also estimated that around 20% of the oil flowed in the seafloor, which adversely affected the sea corals of the deeper part of the sea and degraded the entire ecosystem of the sea.

The intervention measure for removing oil spills was difficult for the government, as the treatment procedure i.e. ‘in-situ burning’ has negative impact on environment. Finally, skimmers are engaged into the task to remove the oil through the use of sorbents in order to trace the left spills. With regard to adverse effect of it in the ecosystem, it was noticed that the pelicans becomes black due to it, fish belly-up with brown sludge and the turtles were noticed to wash up on beaches. However, this spill does not have a major impact over the global oil pricing, as Mexico was not the key producer of oil.

However, with an immediate impact of such an unexpected event, the government of the US was highly concerned regarding public health and significantly, adopted different preventive measures for mitigating such incident and loss in future. In this regard, ‘The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’ offered safety measures and advices to the Gulf Coast residents including the workers involved in the relief program to take precautionary measure and physical examination of toxicity tests on dispersants (The Ocean Portal Team, 2013).

ReferenceThe Ocean Portal Team. (2013). Gulf oil spill. Retrieved from http://ocean.si.edu/gulf-oil-spill