As I posted earlier, there was a time when 42,000 gallons a day seemed impossible to comprehend. Now try to wrap your head around 100,000 barrels a day. That's 4,200,000 gallons a day. 100 times more than that quaint little number from yesteryear.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An internal BP Plc document released on Sunday by a senior U.S. congressional Democrat shows that the company estimates that a worst-case scenario rate for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill could be about 100,000 barrels of oil per day.
Put another way, you'd have to max out the slider on the PBS widget to reach 4,200,000 gallons a day. If this has been the flow rate all along, the total oil spilled will have been 245,000,000 gallons and counting.
And they're injecting toxic dispersant directly into the plume, so all of that oil will be spread around and impossible to collect.