Mark Mckaden News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

It's 7:11. an oil leak deep under water in the gulf of mexico is growing. along with fears of an environmental disaster after last week's oil rig explosion, the good news, the oil is expected to stay well offshore for the next few days. the bad news, more than 40,000 gallons of oil a day are spilling into the gulf. crews are deploying robot submarines to stop the leak. joining us from the command center in louisiana this morning, coast guard commander mark mckaden. thanks very much for joining us. we want to know, first of all, how serious this spill is. can you give us a sense in terms of per...

The discharge. i would say the situation of awareness here is very good. we're working very closely with partner agencies, mineral management service and bp, there's a unified command established there. >> commander, how much of this spill has to do with the explosion? was this unexpected, the fact that this leak is happening right now? because as far as last saturday, we were told that there was really no oil leaking at that point. then this developed over the weekend. was this unexpected? >> well, i wouldn't say it is necessarily unexpected. you never can be quite sure what's going to happen...

Able to determine it wasn't just oil residual oil from the rig, but in fact that there was some oil that continued to leak from the pipe itself. >> commander, this is a nightmare scenario for a lot of people that live along the gulf coast, especially the beach communities who are worried about the offshore drilling and exactly whether or not some of this oil might reach their shores and disturb some of those pristine beaches. should folks along the gulf coast be concerned about that at this point? >> well, i think, you know, certainly people are concerned and we're concerned here. that's why w...