Bitter fish in crude oil sea

It's yet another busy week of trying to figure out how to find the NOAA page that tracks caravans or determining the racism content of soup.  Also there's early voting happening so a lot of concerned defenders of democracy are occupying their day screaming at "millenials" or Susan Sarandon or whatever they imagine the problem to be other than just the racist Republicans and corporate Democrats who are actually on the ballot. Oh and the Saints just traded for a (THE WRONG) cornerback so... yeah.. lots of stuff going on.

Which is one reason we may have missed this.

NEW ORLEANS — An oil spill that has been quietly leaking millions of barrels into the Gulf of Mexico has gone unplugged for so long that it now verges on becoming one of the worst offshore disasters in U.S. history. 

Between 300 and 700 barrels of oil per day have been spewing from a site 12 miles off the Louisiana coast since 2004, when an oil-production platform owned by Taylor Energy sank in a mudslide triggered by Hurricane Ivan. Many of the wells have not been capped, and federal officials estimate that the spill could continue through this century. With no fix in sight, the Taylor offshore spill is threatening to overtake BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster as the largest ever.

Is the biggest oil disaster in history better or worse if it happens over a period of fifteen years rather than six months?  Also how does one draw so much less attention than the other?

The Taylor Energy spill is largely unknown outside Louisiana because of the company’s effort to keep it secret in the hopes of protecting its reputation and proprietary information about its operations, according to a lawsuit that eventually forced the company to reveal its cleanup plan. The spill was hidden for six years before environmental watchdog groups stumbled on oil slicks while monitoring the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster a few miles north of the Taylor site in 2010.

The Interior Department is fighting an effort by Taylor Energy to walk away from the disaster. The company sued Interior in federal court, seeking the return of about $450 million left in a trust it established with the government to fund its work to recover part of the wreckage and locate wells buried under 100 feet of muck.

It's "largely unknown outside Louisiana," according to the Wa-Po.  But that doesn't mean it's constantly on everyone's mind here either.  Sure we get an occassional update. But it's remarkable that the Taylor spill has been relegated to the middle-to-back pages in the local press all these years.

It's not like the media doesn't know who they are... what with all the "iconic" philanthropy and whatnot.