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President Obama has called the BP oil spill "the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced," and so has just about everyone else. The Deepwater Horizon explosion on 20^th April was an awful tragedy for the 11 workers who died on the rig and has been the biggest oil spill in U.S. history inflicting serious economic and psychological damage on coastal communities that solely depend on tourism, fishing and drilling. 

The US government has said that almost three-quarters of the oil spilled in the Gulf of Mexico has been cleaned up or broken down by natural forces.

A government report says only a quarter of the oil from the BP well remains and that it is "degrading quickly". About a quarter of the oil released by the well evaporated or dissolved in the Gulf in the same way sugar dissolves in water, federal officials said. Another one-sixth naturally dispersed when leaking out of the well, and an additional one-sixth was burned, skimmed, or dispersed using chemicals.

However, nearly 53m gallons (200m litres) of oil remain in Gulf waters, which is close to five times the amount of the 11m-gallon Exxon Valdez spill in 1989.

"The good news is that oil is a natural product and is relatively easily degraded," says Prof Ed Overton, an environmental scientist at Louisiana State University. Oil which hasnot been dispersed or washed up on shore will be targeted by microbes. "They use the oil as a food," says Prof Overton.

However the bad news is the severe damage it has already caused to the wildlife. The death toll, says Stan Senner - Director of Conservation Science for Ocean Conservancy, already includes a "thousand bird carcasses - half of them are oiled; others are just carcasses, a few hundred turtles, 50 or so dolphins". But those small numbers reflect the fact that only a small percentage of carcasses are recovered; in most spills, particularly offshore spills, most of the dead animals simply sink and are never recovered or
counted.  "The assumption is that the actual mortality rate is many times what has been recovered," says Mr Senner. "The rule of thumb for the bird carcasses is that they find one in 10, but that could be low."

 The question everybody will be asking is how quickly animal numbers can return to normal. It all depends on the life span of the animal. In the Ixtoc spill of 1979, there was a 60-70% reduction in shrimp in the year of the spill, but they were back to normal within one or two years, says Dr Larry McKinney, director of the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies. Then there are longer-lived animals like dolphins, whale sharks and sea turtles. If a single generation has been largely wiped out, numbers might not fully recover for 10-20 years.

 
Unfortunately, the wildlife and eco-systems weren’t the only ones to fall victim to the spill - while it may take generations to completely calculate the environmental damage; fairly reliable estimates are now coming to light on the damage to employment caused by the BP oil spill.

According to documents released by the Wall Street Journal on August 22, approximately 100,000 jobs may be lost due to the oil spill.  Tens of thousands of commercial fishermen have been unable to work during the spill, a suspension that many may simply not recover from. But it is not only the fishermen that have been impacted, of course. Companies that provide services to the fishermen, foods processing companies, even restaurants and other support services for offshore oil exploration have seen their business all but disappear. Many of these businesses, already barely hanging on during the Great Recession, may simply be unable to weather this latest setback and close entirely.

Gulf state officials have estimated about 80,000 jobs in their states in support services to oil drilling, accommodation and food industries, and other private sector jobs are probably lost forever due to the crisis in the Gulf.  These rates are expected to rise as more and more businesses, unable to survive the dramatic downturn in business close for good.