I'm in the area that was pretty much ground zero for the Deepwater Horizon spill. Venice, LA is about 15 miles from my house, and I'll never forget the days following that explosion.
For one, a buddy of mine was off-shore at the time and his mother was calling all of us to find out if we had heard from him yet because she wasn't aware of which platform he was currently stationed on and he was due home that day. We called him over and over, but due to amount of calls being made after it happened, we kept getting the "due to high call-volume" message. After two days we assumed the worst, but then luckily he showed up at his mom's house on the third day. As it turns out, some of the platforms went into a similar disaster phase as they do during hurricanes and they stopped all incoming traffic until the situation could be as contained as it could be before sending some crew members home after their shifts.
Secondly, whichever news outlet began telling the story that they were burning the oil off of the water some weeks after the accident was an outright lie. They began burning the oil within the same week because the absolute stench that was wafting in from the gulf was a mix of obvious petro-chemicals and gasses that were being carried in over land. Again, I live about 15 miles away from Venice and about 17 miles away from where land meets gulf and no more roads/levee system exists, and you could SEE the clouds of black smoke rising up over the horizon.
Our fishing industry was brought to a halt after it happened as well. Shrimping was near non-existent; Oystering had plummeted to nothing because of the oil settling the best on oyster beds and boom being set up in shallow spots to protect the coast; the only thing that was still going on was sports fishing and even that almost grinded to a halt.
Seven years later and we still haven't gotten back to 100%. Mind you, this was also 5 years after Katrina wiped us out completely; we had just begun to truly get back to some semblance of normalcy when that happened. We're still dealing with a shrunken seafood industry, and it's very doubtful that we'll ever be able to produce anywhere near the amount of seafood that we had prior to the disaster. That, besides the oil/gas field, is all we've got down here. It's our lively-hoods, it's our heritage, it's part of our culture, it's what we were the most proud of. Now, folks around here are struggling that much more because well-over 50% of people who relied on the water to make a living are out of a job because of it.
No sir! The Deepwater Horizon oil spill will not soon be forgotten for us here in the Deep Dirty South of Louisiana.