A new federal study estimates that each day, about 380 to 4,500 gallons of oil are flowing at the site where a company's oil platform was damaged after a hurricane. That's about a hundred to a thousand times worse than the company's initial estimate, which put the amount of oil flowing into the ocean at less than three gallons a day.
The report, released this past week and written by scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and one at Florida State University, also contradicted assertions from the Taylor Energy Company about where the oil was coming from.
The leak started in 2004, when an oil platform belonging to the Taylor Energy Company was damaged by a mudslide after Hurricane Ivan hit the Gulf of Mexico. A bundle of pipes and wells sank to the ocean floor and became partially buried under mud and sediment.
To respond to the leak, Taylor Energy tried to cap nine of the wells and place containment domes over three of the plumes in 2008.
But after local activists observed more oil slicks near the site of the Deepwater Horizon Spill in 2010, the Taylor oil spill started getting national attention. And last May, the US Coast Guard installed a containment system that has been collecting 30 barrels, or about 1,260 gallons, a day to help catch the oil that's continuing to surge in the ocean.