Ships chaos as oil spill paralyses Mississippi

Dozens of cargo ships, petrochemical tankers and smaller vessels were stacked up near a closed stretch of the Mississippi River today, after a collision between a barge and tanker spilled more than 400,000 gallons of fuel oil into the busy shipping waterway.

The US Coastguard said reopening nearly 100 miles of river to ship traffic could take days, and clean-up efforts by hundreds of workers trying to remove the oily sheen could take weeks.