On April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, located on the Macondo Project in the Gulf of Mexico, exploded, killing 11 people and spewing 210 million gallons of oil for 87 days. Considered the largest marine oil spill in history, this disaster had far-reaching environmental impacts, but the largest impact on Bay County was its economic impact.
While the brunt of the environmental impact was not felt locally, it was not a local injury, said Mel Landry, Louisiana restoration area lead for NOAA. The spill was an “ecosystem-scale injury,” he said, for which there was no way of calculating the effects on any one species. Instead, they had to calculate the effects on the whole of the Gulf of Mexico.
Ten years later, the 15,000-species ecosystem is still recovering, and will be for decades to come, he said.
Research by the University of Southern Florida released last week found trace amounts of oil in the majority of fish living in the Gulf.