With British Petroleum’s summer-long oil-gushing well apparently plugged, attention turns to gathering evidence at the bottom of the sea while yellow crime-scene tape was strung along black cob-webbed beaches lapped with sticky surf.

To establish responsibility for the biggest peacetime oil spill in history, authorities will want to examine the failed blowout preventer and the burned wreckage of the drilling platform.
Unlike a conventional criminal case, the companies being investigated will be charged with recovering evidence.

Investigators number in the hundreds. The FBI is conducting a criminal probe. The Coast Guard wants to identify the cause of the April 20 explosion. And lawyers seeks millions of dollars in damages for families of 11 workers killed and dozens injured.

BP will surely shoulder a share of responsibility, but there are other companies involved, such as the Halliburton crew that cemented the wall; Transocea, owner of the Deepwater Horizon platform; and Cameron International, which made the blowout preventer.

A big news story the government pushed last week was where all that oil went, suggesting the resilience of the Gulf had already made a cleanup so remarkable that many are backtracking on all the scenario that it represents the apocalypse environmental disaster in American history.

Crude oil contains a multitude of chemical compounds which can be lethal in high concentrations.

While some drifted to the surface, heavier compounds undoubtedly stayed near the bottom. Worse, BP responded to the disaster by pumping some 2 million gallons of toxic chemicals into the Gulf, subdividing slicks so they looked less threatening on television.

By Day 65, there were 94 airplanes, 6,210 ships, more than 35,000 people and 2.6 million feet of boom.

The fleet of vessels in this crude war was more than 20 times larger than the U.S. Navy for a geyser that equaled the Exxon Valdez about every four days. During the Valdex the dispersant Corexit earned a telling nickname, “Hides-it.”

The Coast Guard reported oil sheets covering 35,000 acres of water at a time.

Perhaps the best factoid is that if put in gallon jugs, the oil spilled could line all 1,680 miles of the Gulf Coast — 19 times — although a close second would be that our rapacious demands for energy consume a patch of wetland the size of a football field every 38 minutes. There is a dead zone in the Gulf the size of New Jersey.

By Day 65, there were 94 airplanes, 6,210 ships, more than 35,000 people and 2.6 million feet of boom.

The fleet of vessels in this crude war was more than 20 times larger than the U.S. Navy for a geyser that equaled the Exxon Valdez about every four days. During the Valdex the dispersant Corexit earned a telling nickname, “Hides-it.” Dispersants are faster than skimming, combining aerial bombing runs with robot injections down below, the oil-spill equivalent of lashing the Taliban with predator drones.

BP in May approached the Environment Protection Agency for permission to inject dispersants directly into the oil stream 5,000 feet underwater, arguing it would reduce the amount applied and limit response workers’ chemical exposure.

EPA head Lisa Jackson called it “the toughest decision I’ve ever made.”

Perhaps the best factoid is that if put in gallon jugs, the oil spilled could line all 1,680 miles of the Gulf Coast — 19 times — although a close second would be that our rapacious demands for energy consume a patch of wetland the size of a football field every 38 minutes.

There is a dead zone in the Gulf the size of New Jersey.

The blowout could not have occurred in a worse place or at a worse time, the fragile ecosystem that is home to 1,200 species of fish, five species of endangered sea turtles, scores of mammals such as dolphins and millions of migratory birds at “biological spring” when the Gulf awakens.

President Obama promised to “guarantee scientific integrity throughout the executive branch,” but from the permitting of BP’s well to the cleanup, the federal government has been outmatched by corporate greed.

We can wish that nature prove resilient, but the oil and gas industry sacrificed this region like a coal-filled Appalachian Mountain for our short-sighted, self-destructive addiction to oil.

It ought to keep lawyers employed for years.