We Now Return You to Our Previously Scheduled Gulf Coast Disasters, Already in Progress

The BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico on July 28, 2010. Around the location of the oil leak, and around the Mississippi Delta, relatively light swirls and patches appear on the ocean surface. Photograph: MODIS/NASA via Bloomberg

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By Eric Roston

September 5, 2014 at 2:04 AM UTC

This article is for subscribers only.

Now that a federal judge has ruled that BP acted in “gross negligence” in 2010, when the Deepwater Horizon exploded in the Gulf of Mexico and killed 11 people, it’s a good time to ask: How bad were the environmental damages?

At that time, with news networks reserving a corner of their screens for streaming undersea video of streaming undersea oil, the projections were apocalyptic. President Barack Obama delivered an Oval Office address on June 15, 2010, in which he expressed a sentiment widely felt at the time: “Already, this oil spill is the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced.”