If it was my home...

The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has been an important media event for some time now. Whether it's about the inapt measures by either the USA or BP, or the actual effects of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Basically, the environmental damage is terrifying both in scale and effect.

But, truth be told, even though I knew that the oil spill was big, I never really got my head around how big it actually is. Because, in the long run, it's just another big environmental disaster, and the sheer magnitude doesn't always speak for itself. How much is one million gallons of oil a day? Or how much is 26.000 square kilometer? To me, those figures imply that it's big, but not exactly how big.

That's where the website ifitwasmyhome.com comes in handy. This website enables you to drop the oil spill anywhere on the world map, to give you some reference of the size of it. In the image above, I put the centre of the spill on my home town (Amsterdam). And then, by reference, I start to really comprehend the vast size (and corresponding damage). Sometimes, quite a simple method of reference can give you more insight than numbers ever could...