Hurricane Alex and the BP Oil Spill Disaster

June 30, 2010 -- BP, for now, appears to have dodged Hurricane Alex. If current forecasts hold, the eye of the storm will miss the site of the Deepwater Horizon blowout by about 600 miles, and the Mexican coast south of Brownsville, Texas, will get the worst of the storm.

But Alex still qualifies as a warning shot. What happens when a hurricane or tropical storm passes over the site of the worst oil accident in America's history?

"This is a first, to see a spill of this size in tropical waters," said Chris Vaccaro of NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which forecasts weather and hurricanes. "So nobody has a lot of experience."

But scientists say some of the effects can be predicted -- some bad, some of them not so bad. A storm could make a mess of the cleanup effort, but it could also speed the effort along.

Some major factors, with the potentially-complicating ones first:

Now imagine all that floodwater ... mixed with oil.

Those are generalities, though, says the agency. The particulars of a storm can be very different.

They work, very simply, because most oil floats -- and won't go under a floating barrier. But if the seas are churned up by a major storm, a flotation boom may not be very effective. More work for already-stressed-out cleanup workers after the storm is over.