Gulf beaches oil cleanup nears end

The unmistakable whiff of crude eight months after the BP spill is one of the last, reminders of the oil spill on the Gulf Coast. For months, in what BP calls Operation Deep Clean, crews have been scouring the Gulf Coast's sandy shores for oil — digging, scraping, tilling and sifting beach after beach. They will not get all of it by the time college students begin flocking to the Gulf Coast for spring break at the end of February, which is the Coast Guard's deadline for cleaning bathing beaches. Tar balls may be washing up for months, if not years. This is a long process. You clean them up, they come back, you clean them up. The Coast Guard says 1,500 kilometres of beach were fouled with oil and fewer than 50 kilometres are left to clean. In many places, tar balls and black sticky patties that once littered the shoreline are gone. The sand is no longer stained brown, and the surf is clear of crude. Beaches that once looked like excavation sites are back to normal.

What is amazing about this is that the beaches are almost completely cleaned up. Everyone thought that this was going to be an environmental disaster but it is pretty much all cleaned up and you do not here about it any more in the news.