Like a hurricane menacing the Gulf Coast, the full damage from the destroyed deepwater oil well in British Petroleum’s Mancando field in the Gulf of Mexico won’t be known for many days. Nor will the cost, now estimated to be in the billions, as offshore crews work tirelessly to keep crude from coming onshore and landside volunteers prepare to begin the massive environmental cleanup. How much is at stake could be read more easily in faces than in financial calculations. “I look in the eyes of fisherman and people making their living on the coast, and you just see fear,” says Bob Thomas, director of the Center for Environmental Communications at Loyola University in New Orleans. “So far we haven’t realized the real damage because it hasn’t come into our marshes.”
BP is spending $6 million a day on cleanup costs and, on May 3, said it was giving coastal states $25 million to begin cleanup efforts. Experts say the cleanup could cost BP $4.5 billion to $6 billion.