The state Department of Environmental Quality is investigating the spill near Venice.  DEQ officials believe up to 2 million gallons of oil escaped from the storage facility, said DEQ spokesman Darrin Mann on Friday.

From our deutsches corresponsdent Joerg, a Reuters report from BERLIN:

The head of the West's energy watchdog said in an interview on Saturday that Hurricane Katrina could spark a worldwide energy crisis if damage to U.S. refineries led to a big increase in U.S. purchases of European petrol.  

"If the crisis affects oil products then it's a worldwide crisis. No one should think this will be limited to the United States," Claude Mandil, head of the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA) told German daily Die Welt.

"They are already buying gasoline in Europe. If the refineries are damaged, that will only increase. Then this will become a worldwide crisis very quickly."

Mandil told the paper that high oil prices represented a risk for global economic growth and urged consumers to alter their behaviour to save more energy and limit the fallout.

Poor countries were bound to suffer most from a recent surge in energy prices, which has been aggravated by Katrina and the shortages it has caused, he said.

On Friday, the IEA launched a rescue plan to ease those shortages, saying its 26 members would release two million barrels per day of oil over a 30-day period.

U.S. gasoline prices have spiked by nearly a fifth over the past week, pushing up fuel prices around the world.

Another from Joerg who pointed us to an interview yesterday with the Tagesschau (the main (evening) news in Germany) reporter Christine Adelhardt talking about Bush in Biloxi. (Realplayer feed:  http://www.tagesschau.de/video/0,1315,OID4700936,00.html).  Joerg says:

It is quite revealing was the comment by the reporter that before Bush came, there was an influx of rescue workers into a largely destroyed and deserted area who did some clean-up work, then the President came, and afterwards everybody left. The reporter was pretty upset about it: "Das Ausmass der Naturkatastrophe hat mich geschockt. Aber das Ausmass der Inszenierung hier heute schockt mich mindestens genauso"= "The scale of this natural disaster has shocked me. But the scale of the staging here today has shocked me as much." Seems like the classical photo-op.

There also was a more explicit audio by the same reporter on the Tagesschau site yesterday evening in which she also said that vacant buildings were searched for corpses before the president came but others where there were really corpses where left unsearched though they knew about it. Maybe they pulled that of the server because it displayed a to damaging image of a foreign statesman.