100 - 400 gallons of oil per day leaking into the Gulf since 2004

And that's just this one pipleline.

The Waterkeeper Alliance and several Gulf Coast Waterkeeper organizations filed suit Thursday against Taylor Energy Co. for failing to halt the flow of oil from wells off Louisiana's coastline that were severed by an underwater landslide during Hurricane Ivan in 2004. The organizations filed suit under provisions of the federal Clean Water Act and Resource Conservation and Recovery Act that allows citizens to go to court to enforce federal laws. In an October notice to the company and federal agencies that the groups intendedd to sue, they said between 100 gallons and 400 gallons of oil a day were being released by the wells.

Hard to imagine this is the only such case given the scope, age, and lax oversight of our offshore infrastructure.

Roughly half of the Gulf's more than 3,000 production platforms are 20 years old or more, and a third date back to the 1970s or earlier, long before the development of modern construction standards. More than half have been operating longer than their designers intended, according to federal regulators.

Older structures are more prone to accidents, especially fires, and more dangerous for workers. According to a Wall Street Journal analysis of federal accident records, platforms that are 20 years old or more accounted for more than 60% of fires and nearly 60% of serious injuries aboard platforms in 2009.

"There is an infrastructure issue confronting the industry," says Charles Swanson, a managing partner with Ernst & Young's Oil & Gas Center in Houston. "We're reaching a point now where we're not going to be able to ignore it any longer."