It's been three years since the notorious BP Oil Spill, and workers have just dug up a huge chunk of the hardened crude of the coast of a Louisiana beach.
The massive slab of dried oil measured 165 feet long by 65 feet wide, and weighed over 40,000 pounds, CNN reported. The chunk was found off the Isle Grand Terre, about 90 miles south of New Orleans. A crew has been using an excavator to pull the slab out of the water chunk-by-chunk. Most states affected by the spill have been cleaned up for the most part, but the efforts in Louisiana have been ongoing.
Up until the beginning of this month Alabama, Florida and Mississippi were also still undergoing cleanup. BP has recovered about 2.7 million pounds of crude from the Louisiana shoreline this year alone.
The oil rig responsible for the spill exploded and sank in 2010, it killed 11 men in the process. The rig spewed oil into the water of the Gulf of Mexico. Some of the oil evaporated or was consumed by microbes, but a great deal of it sank to the ocean floor and washed ashore, becoming a hazard for local wildlife.
The spill severely depleted the abundance of marine life as well, which proved to be a problem for some fishermen, according to CNN. About two-thirds of America's oysters come from the Gulf Coast, but the water has been drastically more barren since the oil spill.
"My fellow fishermen who fish crab and who fish fish, they're feeling the same thing," said Darren Stander, a local fisherman. "You get a spike in production every now and then, but overall, it's off. Everybody's down. Everywhere there was dispersed oil and heavily oiled, the production is down."
There is no telling when or if the sea-life will return.
"Things's changing, and we don't know what's happening yet," oysterman Byron Encalade said.
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