Believe it or not, the BBC has some of the best graphical representations of what has been happening over the past 40 days. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8651333.

Believe it or not, the BBC has some of the best graphical representations of what has been happening over the past 40 days. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8651333.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8651333.stm As a past resident of Louisiana (attended LSU and lived in New Orleans for 3 years) I can tell you that this catastrophe will economically be on-par with Hurricane Katrina. Many of us have no idea how important (and awesome!) our seafood industry is. Our best shrimp, crabs, and oysters all directly come from the area that this spill is impacting. All I can say is, this sucks. With that said, reading the article leads me to believe that a good majority of reporters and people being turned away have been done so in good faith or simple mistakes. Let's not be mistaken - reporters can crowd an area and cause serious safety concerns for people who are working to contain the spill. And they can also irritate the crap out of workers who are more concerned with getting stuff done than answering lots of questions. Reporters will climb over themselves to get the latest scoop on a hop topic. And this is one. On on the subject of TFR's (Temporary Flight Restrictions) as mentioned in the article - Only the FAA issues TFR's, and those are issued to protect operating aircraft in a specially designated zone from outside interference (read: mostly the media). There was a complete TFR issued for most of south east Louisiana just after Katrina so that air traffic was carefully controlled for rescue operations. This is no different, there is an enormous amount of aircraft that are working in this area and TFR's are common to protect the working aircraft from non-essential related aircraft. I'm sure that BP has their corporate spin-doctors running at full steam, but I'm quite positive that there is no conspiracy to shut down access to the public regarding this tragedy.