USA Today: Hurricane Season May Make Spill Worse.

As hurricane season looms, forecasters, scientists and residents along the Gulf Coast worry that a major storm could make the oil spill worse.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says a hurricane, or a succession of them, may bring oil up from the depths of the Gulf of Mexico and then push it ashore. Forecasters say a season with multiple storms could send oil farther inland and spread it as far as Cape Hatteras, N.C.
“To think a storm surge could resuscitate a huge sum of oil (from the deep) and deposit it on land is truly catastrophic,” says Joe Jaworski, mayor of Galveston, Texas, a city hit by Hurricane Ike in 2008.
This year’s hurricane season, June 1 to Nov. 30, is expected to be above average with 15 tropical storms of which eight could be hurricanes, according to experts at Colorado State University, the nation’s oldest hurricane forecasting team.
Jeff Masters, chief meteorologist at forecaster Weather Underground, says the oil spill adds “an exclamation mark” to the “sense of foreboding” he has over the hurricane season. Storms tend to break up and dilute large spills, but they also spread them over a greater area, he says.

Or not . . .

In 1989, when the Exxon Valdez spilled 11 million gallons near the coast of Alaska, workers contained the spill, but a storm with 70 mph winds “made the damage much greater,” Masters says. A hurricane blows at 74 mph. In 1979, the IXTOC I oil well blowout spilled 140 million gallons into the Gulf of Mexico. Padre Island, Texas, “got a huge fouling,” Masters says, but “then a big storm came through, scrubbed all the oil off and it turned out to be a good thing.”