Maybe this is why John McCain cancelled his trip to the Gulf of Mexico oil rig

Ship traffic on the lower Mississippi River stopped Wednesday as an oil spill from an early morning accident between a tanker and a barge closed a 47-mile stretch of the nation's major waterway.

The closure is likely to go on for days while remediation teams rush to clean the heavy slick of tar that is drifting southward, shutting access to all of the facilities of the Port of New Orleans.

"They say it's going to be closed for days but not weeks. It looks like a fairly extended closure, but we don't have any specifics yet," said Chris Bonura, a spokesman for the port.

The port loses about $100,000 in revenue each day it is closed, and that does not include the losses to terminal operators, stevedores, tug boat operators and other private businesses.

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Wednesday's accident closed the river from mile 50 at Venice to mile 97 at New Orleans, and its consequences for river traffic will likely reverberate far more than when the Zim Mexico III container ship slammed into a supply boat at the mouth of the Mississippi in February 2004 and closed the river for five days.

That incident took place below the Port of New Orleans, and the port remained open in its immediate aftermath. Only ships that needed to sail to or from the Gulf of Mexico were affected, and some of those vessels were able to reach open water by traveling down the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, or MR-GO.

But this time, Bonura said, the closure extends to the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal, a channel that connects the river with the MR-GO. Ships can't get to the gulf outlet, and even if they could, they wouldn't be able to sail through it. Hurricane Katrina dragged silt into the waterway, and its entrance is now only 13 feet deep.

"There's just not a lot of alternatives out there right now," Bonura said.

The river could reopen gradually, as it did after Katrina, Bonura said. The Coast Guard will probably work as fast as it can to push the oil to one side and partially reopen the river, but one lane open may mean travel in one direction at a time.

The impasse at New Orleans also affected other ports in and above the slick. The St. Bernard Port, Harbor and Terminal District, which handles about 260 calls a year from ships carrying bulk and break-bulk cargo such as fertilizer, sand, iron ore, plywood, steel, metals, was shut in by the spill.

"There's no traffic moving in or out of our port," said Bobby Scafidel, its executive director.

(source)

Wouldn't be prudent, would it, to extol the virtues and cleanliness of oil drilling while there are almost 10,000 barrels of fuel oil spilt in the Mississippi River.