An oil spill you've never heard of could become one of the biggest environmental disasters in the US

In 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil tragedy commanded the nation's attention for months. Eleven lives were lost and communities around the Gulf of Mexico ground to a halt under hundreds of millions of gallons of oil. Yet, lurking underneath the fresh disaster, an older spill was spewing ever faithfully forth: A leak that began when another oil platform was damaged six years earlier. 

The Taylor oil spill is still surging after all this time; dumping what's believed to be tens of thousands of gallons into the Gulf per day since 2004. By some estimates, the chronic leak could soon be larger, cumulatively, than the Deepwater disaster, which dumped up to 176.4 million gallons (or 4.2 million barrels) of oil into the Gulf. That would also make the Taylor spill one of the largest offshore environmental disasters in US history. 
In September, the Department of Justice submitted an independent study into the nature and volume of the spill that claims previous evaluations of the damage, submitted by the platform's owner Taylor Energy Co. and compiled by the Coast Guard, significantly underestimated the amount of oil being let loose. According to the filing, the Taylor spill is spewing anywhere from 10,000 to 30,000 gallons of oil a day.
As for how much oil has been leaked since the beginning of the spill, it's hard to say. An estimate from SkyTruth, a satellite watchdog organization, put the total at 855,000 to 4 million gallons by the end of 2017. If you do the math from the DOJ's filing, the number comes out astronomically higher: More than 153 million gallons over 14 years. Dr. Oscar Garcia-Pineda, who authored the DOJ's commissioned analysis, declined to comment to CNN, citing ongoing litigation.

The Taylor spill started when an oil platform belonging to Taylor Energy was damaged and sank during a mudslide caused by Hurricane Ivan in 2004. However, it wasn't until 2010, after the BP oil spill, that people really started to notice something was wrong. According to local activists, the warnings didn't come from the Coast Guard, the government, or any oil company. They came from people around the Gulf community who simply saw it with their own eyes.

To continue reading: https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/23/us/taylor-energy-oil-largest-spill-disaster-ivan-golf-of-mexico-environment-trnd/index.html