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It's been almost five years since the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster occurred. More than 100 million gallons of oil were released into the Gulf of Mexico before the Macondo well was finally capped, making it the largest oil spill in U.S. history.

So what kind of shape is the gulf in today? BP and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill Natural Resource Damage Assessment Trustees have differing opinions.

In July 2010, responders used in situ burns to remove oil in the Gulf of Mexico from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. NOAA photoBP issued a news statement Monday regarding a report the oil company has released about the gulf environment's recovery and restoration in the five years since the disaster happened. The company says that scientific data and studies show that the gulf's environment is returning to pre-spill conditions.

The NRDA Trustees don't agree. They quickly issued a statement, noting that the NRDA is still assessing the injury resulting from the spill.

"It is inappropriate as well as premature for BP to reach conclusions about impacts from the spill before the completion of the assessment," the Trustees said. While the BP report cites scientific studies conducted by experts from around the gulf and by the NRDA Trustees, "BP misinterprets and misapplies data while ignoring published literature that doesn't support its claims and attempts to obscure our role as caretakers of the critical resources damaged by the spill," the Trustees assert.

Given the magnitude of the spill — it's 10 times larger than the size of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska's Prince William Sound — experience from previous oil spills shows that it's likely that environmental effects from the Deepwater Horizon disaster are likely to last for generations, the NRDA Trustees said.

Still, at this point, even five years down the road, neither BP or the NRDA Trustees can say for certain precisely how the spill has affected the environment and when it will return to its pre-Deepwater Horizon condition.

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