BP well-head just one of 400,000 shut off in Gulf.

By Alastair Good in The Gulf Of Mexico
When BP finally seal off the Macondo well-head that's been spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico since April 20th it will become just one of many abandoned wells that litter the area.
"With all the bad press that BP has gotten over the Macondo well, the oversight should be pretty good once it's been shut off, ' explains Lower Mississippi Riverkeeper Paul Orr, 'but the hundreds of thousands of other well-heads are just closed down and forgotten about."

That's a problem when you have steel fixtures laying in water that has a high salinity from the Gulf being washed back into the marshes and when this is combined with the extreme weather conditions in the area it creates a serious risk of erosion.

Orr says: "A lot of boats use these channels and it only takes one to strike an ageing, rusted well-head to create another oil spill right in the heart of the marshes."

In fact the well-heads seem to be crumbling without the need for any external force, one that we pass in the marshland off Venice, Louisiana is bubbling natural gas from a leak under the surface.

"Sometimes you can track back to who owns the wells but they often change hands many times and once they have stopped extracting oil or gas from them no-one is really interested in what happens
next."

It's that sort of carelessness that many blame for the BP spill happening in the first place and down here in the Gulf it's not hard to see how it could all happen again.