Un-vanished

We mentioned yesterday that both sides in the BP litigation are now appealing Judge Barbier's ruling in the Amount Spilled portion of the trial. One reason there may be so much confusion is the constant unit conversion.  Sometimes we're talking about flow rate. Sometimes it's gallons. Sometimes it's barrels.

Right now we're dealing with pounds.

On Monday, BP released a statement claiming the environment of the northern  Gulf of Mexico had returned its “baseline condition” five years after its Deepwater Horizon disaster pumped more than 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf off Louisiana’s  coast.

But on Tuesday, the U.S. Coast Guard was supervising the ongoing removal of a large oil tar mat on East Grand Terre Island that has yielded more than 25,000 pounds of oil mixed with sand since late February, a BP spokesman confirmed.

Meanwhile, a few miles to the west, two dead adult bottlenose dolphins had washed up on Queen Bess Island, continuing what has been a large die-off of dolphins in Barataria Bay since the oil washed into that critical coastal estuary five years ago.

I don't have my slide rule handy, but I'm pretty sure 25,000 pounds converts to more than just 2 dead dolphins so obviously there's more work to do.