BP changes tack on oil spill | News | The Engineer

If you want to know what has been cleaned up so far, here's some news from The Engineer, an e-zine out of the UK.

More than 1,600 vessels are now involved in the response effort, including skimmers, tugs, barges and recovery vessels. Operations to skim oil from the surface of the water have now recovered, in total, some 321,000 barrels (13.5 million gallons) of oily liquid.

The total length of containment boom deployed as part of efforts to prevent oil reaching the coast is now more than 1.9 million feet, while an additional 1.8 million feet of sorbent boom has also been deployed.

So far, approximately 30,000 claims have been submitted and more than 15,000 payments have already been made, totalling some $40m (£27.5m). BP has received more than 110,000 calls to its helplines to date.

The cost of the response to date amounts to about $990m, including the cost of the spill response, containment, relief well drilling, grants to the Gulf states, claims paid and federal costs.

BP changes tack on oil spill | News | The Engineer