familiar with the term 'irreparable damage'?

This is a great write-up, and gives terrible news on the Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster. The tragedy was bad enough, but the handling (or, actually, lack of) of it is such a mess. As if all the dodging of responsibility and the shifting of blame is not enough, the shrugging and 'We don't know how serious this is' is so scary, and infuriating. What the fuck. You're the experts. It's not like you don't know. It's just that you've been gagged by BP and are unwilling to reveal the truth.

This is how it happened and how bad it currently is.

The US military is joining the action because they fear an environmental disaster. Oh, really?

The satellite images show the scale of this leak, although experts are of the opinion that maybe it's worse than previously thought.

Enough. Here's what concerns me. Apparently, only around 25% of marine wildlife survived the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989. This might be as bad as that in terms of amount of oil spilled. Or worse.

There are nearly 16,000 species of plants and animals in the Gulf of Mexico, according to marine biologist Thomas Shirley of Texas A&M University, "not counting microbes."

Some Wiki reading-up.

It is late in the day to be finding out that staunching the three leaks on the ocean floor with robot-controlled submarines is like doing open-heart surgery at 5,000 feet in the dark. Nor is this the time to be doing things never yet tried before at this depth, like building and lowering 74-tonne steel funnels to hoover up the gushing oil. These technologies should have been tried and tested before BP got the licence to drill there.

No shit.