For over a decade, an oil platform owned by Taylor Energy has been steadily leaking upwards to 30,000 gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico every day. Some reports indicate that the leak maybe is even worse than that, giving estimates of 70,000 gallons a day.

The Mississippi Canyon site was damaged during a mudslide triggered by Hurricane Ivan in 2004. The leak was actively hidden from the public by Taylor and the Coast Gaurd, even after a private firm tested fish in the area and submitted an assessment to Taylor Energy in 2009 that said “there is an acceptable risk to humans if fish from the . . . area are consumed.”

After six years of leaking, environmental groups noticed an oil slick when surveying BP’s Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010.

“It was during the BP oil spill and we were flying over to find out where that oil was going and we kept seeing a persistent sheen that was definitely different than the BP oil,” said Dustin Renaud, with the non-profit New Orleans-based group, Healthy Gulf. “Satellite imagery confirmed that it had been there a while and we contacted the Coast Guard and they said ‘Oh, it’s Taylor. It’s just a few gallons.’ It was 10 miles long, so that just didn’t add up.”

Still, nothing was done and the public was kept in the dark.

Finally in 2015, over a decade after the leak began, an Associated Press investigation determined that it was about 20 times worse than the company reported and the truth about the coverup started to leak.

Taylor Energy had stated that the leak was two gallons per day. The Coast Guard finally admitted it was 84 gallons or more.

Under the Oil Pollution Act, companies are obligated to report hazardous spills to the U.S. Coast Guard National Response Center (NRC), which maintains a database of chemical pollution. While there are penalties for not reporting, there are no penalties for under-reporting, as was the case with Taylor.

It turns out that Taylor Energy reported the spill to the Coast Guard, which continued to monitor the site for more than half a decade without making the public fully aware of the mess it was witnessing. In July 2008, the Coast Guard informed the company that the spill had been deemed “a continuous, unsecured crude oil discharge” that posed “a significant threat to the environment.”

Taylor Energy made a deal with federal officials to establish a $666 million trust to stop the spill.

A fortune was spent to retrieve the deck of the platform from the water and plug about a third of the wells. A shield was built to keep the crude from rising.

Nothing stopped the leak, though.

In 2015, the government assessed that the actual level of oil leaking into the Gulf was between one and 55 barrels per day. Current estimates, however, put the leak at 700 barrels a day. With each barrel containing 42 gallons, that makes the leak nearly 30,000 gallons a day. As there is no end in sight for this catastrophe, the Taylor Energy leak has taken over the Deepwater Horizon as the largest oil disaster in history. Federal agencies say it could take a century to stop the leak.

There have been conflicting reports on the actual amount of oil leaking from the Taylor site. Graph: Janie Haseman / The News-Press

Taylor Energy was sold to a South Korean company in 2008. This was the same year they created the trust with the federal government. Currently, only one-third of the money had been spent on cleanup, and only one-third of the leaking wells have been fixed. William Pecue, Taylor Energy’s president (and sole employee) wants to recover the remaining $450 million of the cleanup trust and walk away from the rest of the mess.

At a 2016 public forum in Baton Rouge, Pecue made the case for allowing the company to walk away from its obligation to clean up the mess.

His argument: “I can affirmatively say that we do believe this was an act of God under the legal definition.”

Translation: “Taylor Energy is not responsible for a disaster that happened when oil platforms were built in an area hurricane and oceanic mudslides are known to happen.”

According to Ian MacDonald, an oceanography professor at Florida State University, “There are many, many canyons and other features that were formed because there was a failure in the slope,” MacDonald said. “That’s a known geological process in this part of the world.”

Taylor is not the only problem, either. There are roughly 2,000 more platforms off the shores of Louisiana. About 2,000 others are off the coasts of Texas and Mississippi. 50,000 miles of active and inactive pipelines carrying oil and minerals to the shore.

It is estimated that 330,000 gallons of crude are spilled each year in Louisiana from offshore platforms and onshore oil tanks.

This is all coming at a time when, MacDonald says, climate changes continue to create larger and more powerful hurricanes and failures like this could happen more.

This is a disastrous prediction for the expanding industry that’s already under-regulated and not prepared to clean up leaks.

Jonathan Henderson, a representative for the non-profit Vanishing Earth says, “At a time when the administration is aggressively trying to open up the rest of the continental United States to offshore I think that’s a sign that it can’t be done safely and they’ve got this black eye that’s leaking oil.”