"Bill Salvin, a BP spokesman, told NPR that “there's no way to estimate the flow coming out of the pipe accurately."
The U.S. government has not yet released its own estimate, and the Coast Guard said it was “comfortable” with the BP estimate, according to U.S. Coast Guard Rear Adm. Mary Landry.
However, on a call with bloggers today, Admiral Landry said that, “I have never personally trusted that as an exact number.”
While speaking only for herself, Admiral Landry’s answer raises a lot of questions about the flow rate, and offers plenty of room for speculation by experts who have viewed the available footage of the oil gushing into the Gulf from the pipe at the bottom of the sea floor.
For whatever reason, there is no official plan for any U.S. agency to estimate the actual current flow rate anytime soon, if ever.
While Admiral Landry said that responders had seen additional footage of the scene on the sea floor, there was no way for the agency to provide that footage to the public since BP is holding all of the archived footage at its offices in Houston.
Perhaps that is due to the reaction of scientists and the general public to the few seconds of footage that BP provided of the oil gushing from a pipe on the sea floor last week.
Scientists who reviewed the footage believe BP’s figures are way out of line with reality.
As NPR reported last week, the actual flow rate could be as high as 70,000 barrels a day".
more:
http://www.energyboom.com/policy/how-much-oil-spewing-bp%E2%80%99s-deepwater-disaster-every-day