Now might be a good time to start investigating their status. As you might guess, the AP study has found gaps in the maintenance of the wells which are supposed to be sealed. This may explain why there were tar balls that washed ashore in south Florida that were not from the Deepwater Horizon leak. It's a free-for-all in that industry and again, self-regulation has proven to be a failure. Why do the Republicans consistently put big business ahead of everyone else?
More than 27,000 abandoned oil and gas wells lurk in the hard rock beneath the Gulf of Mexico, an environmental minefield that has been ignored for decades. No one — not industry, not government — is checking to see if they are leaking, an Associated Press investigation shows.
The oldest of these wells were abandoned in the late 1940s, raising the prospect that many deteriorating sealing jobs are already failing.
The AP investigation uncovered particular concern with 3,500 of the neglected wells — those characterized in federal government records as "temporarily abandoned."
