NEW ORLEANS--relatives of the 11 men who were aboard the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform died flying over the Gulf of Mexico on Wednesday, back to the epicenter of the worst offshore oil disaster in the history of the nation.

Meanwhile, on land, Vigils were planned in Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama on the occasion of the leakage.

On the night of April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon, a rig operated by Transocean Ltd, burst into flames if it is a good for BP PLC. drilling was, killing 11 workers at or near the drilling floor. The rest of the crew evacuated, but two days later toppled the rig in the Gulf and sank to the seabed. The bodies were never found.

In the next 85 days, 206 million litres of oil--19 times more than the Exxon Valdez spilled--spewed from the well. In response, the nation's largest offshore fleet of ships command since d-day and BP spent billions of dollars in cleaning up the mess, self storing collapse.

"I can't believe that tomorrow a year because it seems like everything just happened," Courtney Kemp, whose husband Roy Wyatt Kemp was killed on the rig, wrote on her Facebook page Tuesday. "I've learned a lot of things through all this, but the important thing is to live each day as if it were your last. .. What matters is if you really live."

Transocean invited to three members of each family to attend the flyover. They are expected to fund a $ 20 billion by BP founded ciom, she said.

Still, it's not all so gloomy.

Congestion on the roads narrow coast of Alabama, crowded seafood restaurants in Florida and families holiday along the Louisiana coast attest to the fact that familiar routines return, albeit slowly.

"We used to fuss about that," said Ike Williams, referring to the heavy traffic headed for the water in Gulf Shores, Alabama, where he chairs and sunshades to beachgoers hires. "But it was such a welcome face."

Many questions linger: the fishing industry will recover? The environment will bounce back completely? Accepts an oil-hungry audience ever more deep water drilling?

"It looks like it is all gone," said Tyler priest, a historian oil on the University of Houston. "People have turned their attention elsewhere. But it will play like Exxon Valdez did. There will be 20 years of litigation. "

Most scientists agree the effects "were not as severe as many had predicted," said Christopher D'Elia, Dean at the School of the coast and the environment to the Louisiana State University. "People had said this was an ecological Armageddon, and that did not come to pass."

Biologists are concerned about the impact of the spill in the long term for the marine environment.

"There are these cascading effects," said D'Elia. "It would be accumulation of toxins in the food chain, or changes in the food Web. Some species can dominate. "

Meanwhile, accumulated oil is believed to lie on the floor of the Gulf, and it still shows up as a thick, sticky black crust along miles of Louisiana's swampy shoreliand distant memory, "said Douglas Brinkley, a historian from the University of the rice. But the accident will affect long-term environmental history, he said.

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