thousands of gallons of oil each day. it s since gone to shocking all over again with revelations that this spill, this flow of crude is more enormous than originally seemed. how did we get here? how s the response been so far? here s the tick-tock of what s happened. that deepwater oil drilling rig exploded about 10:00 central time on the night of april 20th. what followed was an all-hands on deck search and rescue mission led by the u.s. coast guard. on april 22nd, the devastated oil rig sank into the gulf of mexico. it was at that point that president obama received an oval office briefing from the top coast guard official, as well as other high-ranks officials. the next day on april 23rd the coast guard called off the search and rescue mission and announced no oil was leaking from the underwater oil well. that was ten days ago. the following day, bp officials acknowledged that in fact oil was leaking from that well at a rate they said of 1,000 barrels per day. in the ensuing days,