A website is trying to raise awareness about the seriousness of the BP oil spill through an interactive map.
“If It Was My Home” allows you to type in your geographical location and check what impact the spill would have in your area.
In the Bay Areas case, it would run cover our entire region, according to the website. The spill would go from outside the Golden Gate and all the way to Reno. In reality it would not go that far inland, but if the spill happened off our coast, oil would be coming up on beaches from Mendocino to Monterey.
In the Gulf, the Coast Guard is ramping up efforts to capture oil closer to shore -- signaling a shift in strategy to fight the ruptured well.
An estimated 2,000 private boats in the so-called "vessels of opportunity" program will be more closely linked through a tighter command and control structure to direct them to locations less than 50 miles offshore to skim the oil, Adm. Thad Allen said Friday.
Allen, the point man for the federal response to the spill, previously had said surface containment efforts would be concentrated much farther offshore.
Estimates of the oil being siphoned from the well a mile below the Gulf are growing. Allen said more than 1.2 million gallons was sucked up to containment vessels Thursday.
