WASHINGTON -- At a recent hearing of the House Natural Resources Committee, U.S. Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., called the BP oil spill the "worst oil spill in our nation's history," a commonplace description of an event that President Obama, in his Oval Office address on the spill last June, told the nation was "the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced."
Later in the hearing, Rep. Jeff Landry, R-New Iberia, who had not been present when Markey made his claim, sought to correct the record. The distinction of being the largest oil spill in American history, he said, belongs to California's Lakeview Gusher of 1910.
For 18 months in 1910 and 1911, the Lakeview Gusher spewed 9.4 million barrels of oil onto the scrubland of California's San Joaquin Valley -- nearly twice the 4.9 million barrels discharged into the Gulf of Mexico in the Macondo blowout.
Landry's comment might seem a petty exercise in misdirection. Markey had described it as the "worst," not the "largest," oil spill. And, the Lakeview Gusher was hardly seen as a disaster on the scale of the Gulf spill. In an age before TV, let alone cable TV, it was hardly seen at all, although an excursion train transported San Franciscans nearly 300 miles to view this geyser of hydrocarbons. A century later, according to Don Maxwell, who runs a local museum, "the sagebrush is the same where it spilled as where it didn't."
But Landry said his point was to place the Deepwater Horizon disaster in context, especially as he and other members of the Louisiana delegation have pushed to get offshore drilling back on track.
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