In other spill news, the McClatchy Newspapers is reporting US government regulators warned a decade ago about the dangers of a major deepwater oil spill in the Gulf. The warning said such a spill could start with a fire on a drilling rig, prove hard to stop, and cause extensive damage to fish eggs and wetlands because there were few good ways to capture oil underwater. The disaster scenario was contained in a May 2000 offshore drilling plan for the Shell Oil Company. The 2000 warning indicates that some federal regulators were well aware of the potential hazards of deepwater oil production in its early years. Part of the 2000 report warned that not all the spilled oil would rise to the surface and that the spill would likely cause toxic subsea oil “plumes” similar to the ones scientists have identified in the BP spill.