Five years after Hurricane Katrina—promptly followed by Hurricane Rita—many Gulf Coast residents are still struggling to get back on their feet.

One restaurant owner’s family had gotten a loan to rebuild a business after losing everything after the hurricane, but the business is now imperiled by a new threat. “[W]e don’t know how we’re going to pay that back now,” she told National Public Radio.

“I’ve been through Hurricane Camille, Hurricane Frederick and Hurricane Katrina,” says one Alabama realtor. “They all pale in comparison to this.”

“This” is the estimated 10 quarts of crude oil spurting into the Gulf of Mexico every second as you read this.

That’s a million quarts every 30 hours—200,000 gallons a day. And that’s only as long as the leaking doesn’t get worse.

Dump a single quart of motor oil into the ocean, and over two cubic miles of seawater become toxic to wildlife, according to one engineer.

Since an explosion on April 20 killed 11 workers and sent BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig drifting to the ocean floor one mile below the surface, a 2,000-square-mile storm cloud of oil has formed in some of the most commercially productive seas in the world.

This is merely the latest link in a lengthening chain of curses for the United States.

The financial, ecological and political costs are already huge—but could grow many times worse depending on the success of response efforts. These efforts are entering uncharted waters—both in trying to stop the leaks (which are far deeper underwater than any prior oil well breakdown), and in trying to contain the noxious mess as it drifts into currents that could paint a swath of destruction across the Gulf states, through the Florida Keys and up the Atlantic coast.

The oil well’s internal safety systems failed. Then, remote-controlled underwater robots were unable to restart them. The “best”-case scenario now is Plan C—huge steel lids to enclose the leaks. If this works, and containment of the existing oil is successful, the damage will run in the tens of billions of dollars, and cleanup will take years. But complications are likely, and officials are bracing for far bleaker developments. If for whatever reason the lids don’t stanch the seepage, the next best solution—drilling a new well close by—will take at least three months, by which point the damage would be many times costlier and more catastrophic. “[U]npredictable currents, extreme pressure and low temperatures make such endeavors almost as difficult as a second moon landing,” reported Der Spiegel.

Action is needed, because the problem isn’t going away. Unlike a wrecked tanker, which holds a fixed amount of oil, this is effectively a bottomless, active underwater oil volcano. And the eruption could get far more furious. Officials believe that as the oil rig sank, it kinked the piping like a garden hose, actually restricting the errant oil flow to its present level. As bad as it is, a government report from last week said that if the wounded infrastructure deteriorates further—not unlikely, considering the high-pressure, abrasive-sand-filled contents being forced through the piping—the leakage could explode to 10 times worse. That would mean over 2 million gallons of the thick, black, poisonous, non-degradable stuff pumping into the seawater every day.

Worst-case scenarios see the Gulf—and its seafood, tourism and related industries—fundamentally changed for a generation or more. The biggest environmental disaster in American history.

“Worst-case scenarios almost never happen,” Prof. Bob Thomas, of New Orleans’ Loyola University, told the UK’s Times. “In this case, almost everybody I have known with technical knowledge of oil spills, people who have worked in the industry 30, 40 years, … say this is the worst-case scenario … it is upon us.”

This already looks more damaging than the 1989 Valdez oil spill, simply because of the geography. Far more than Alaska’s Prince William Sound, the Gulf of Mexico is a hive of economic activity. The surrounding coastland, aside from being densely populated, has long stretches of marshland—which would be far more difficult to clean than the rocky Alaskan coast.

Gulf commercial seafood harvesting brings in over $650 million a year; recreational fishing another $750 million and almost 8,000 jobs. Wildlife-related tourism adds over half a billion dollars annually. Small investors and vacationers are already cancelling plans throughout the area expected to be hit. This past Sunday, fishing was shut down from the mouth of the Mississippi to Pensacola Bay; no one knows when it will be able to resume. The pinch on America’s energy and shipping industries is also hard to predict, as both depend heavily on unhindered use of Gulf waters. Not exactly the concerns the country wants to deal with as it languishes in economic depression.

Federal lawsuits are proliferating, from local businesspeople and private individuals throughout the Gulf states against the companies responsible for the mess. Politicians and businessmen are particularly eager to pinpoint blame for the disaster. BP has accepted some responsibility, but it is pointing fingers at the manufacturer of the fail-safe mechanism that failed to prevent the initial explosion.

In looking for a deeper cause, however, it is crucial to see this event in the broader scope of such disasters that are hammering the United States: economic woes; rising unemployment; spiraling food prices; unfavorable weather; environmental disasters; deteriorating health; loss of industry; illegal immigration and related crime and drug problems; social and racial division; political polarization; terrorist threats; costly, intractable wars; foreign-policy failures; weakening alliances; international isolation. These are not all isolated and unrelated concerns. They are mounting evidence of a spiritual reality the Trumpet has been writing about for two decades—as its parent magazine The Plain Truth did for five decades before that: that America is being cursed by God because of its sins.

The left sees the Gulf disaster as an opportunity to end offshore oil drilling. The right sees it as a chance to condemn the president and score political points for upcoming elections. But this issue is far bigger than either side acknowledges. Freakish troubles will continue to intensify until people unite in realizing that the cause is essentially spiritual. America doesn’t suffer merely from bad luck, or corporate incompetence, or weak problem-solving skills. It suffers from pride, self-reliance, greed, materialism, moral bankruptcy.

“Hear the word of the Lord, oh people of Israel, the Lord has filed a lawsuit against you listing the following charges,” wrote the Prophet Hosea: “There is no faithfulness, no kindness, no knowledge of God in your land. You swear and lie and kill and steal and commit adultery. There is violence everywhere, with one murder after another. That is why your land is not producing: it is filled with sadness and all living things grow sick and die: the animals, the birds and even the fish begin to disappear” (Hosea 4:1-3; The Living Bible).

The Bible is full of such warnings for America today—the curses we can expect to proliferate because of the people’s defiance of God and reliance on themselves. These are placed into their biblical and historical context—and then brought right up to date—in Herbert Armstrong’s book The United States and Britain in Prophecy.

These prophecies give a warning we would all do well to remember: The frustration and despair among Gulf residents being hit with another disaster before they’ve recovered from the last is about to become epidemic, nationwide. It is only when we begin to address the underlying spiritual causes that we’ll see the trend turn—and, after intervention from God, be able to rebuild on solid ground.