If you’re having a hard time grasping the scope of the sheer size of the Deepwater Horizon oil slick, this looks like a job for Google Maps! Someone has whipped up a website called “If It Were My Home.com” that superimposes the current dimensions of the oil slick onto whatever geographical coordinates you might call home (or whichever ones you type into the interface).
Placing the epicenter of the spill on Boston, the current slick would extend as far north as Brunswick, Maine, as far south as Hartford, Connecticut and Providence, Rhode Island, and as far west as Albany, New York…and then some.
While I appreciate the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” position this situation has put Barack Obama in, I was still more than a little disappointed to read this Daily Beast story yesterday that reveals that he was briefed at the outset about the actual severity of the leak and the length of time it would take to properly correct it and chose to play a waiting game before public opinion forced him to “get angry”. Erich Vieth at Dangerous Intersection points out that it’s SOP for Obama to sit back rather than act, and then when he does get around to doing something it’s usually the weakest possible response.
