The hole is 5 feet in diameter and is CONSTANTLY spewing oil out at a pressure of over 70,000 PSI. Now think...the average household pressure washer (yes the thing you blast water at your car with to clean it) has a maximum (on average) of 2000-3000 PSI (and that's on the high end gas powered models). You're household unit is enough to strip the paint off your vehicle and actually cause bodily harm to a person. The pressure from the well is almost 25 times more powerful then your house pressure washer...and no one constantly runs their pressure washer ALL DAY AND NIGHT for over a week...now you see how bad this is?
As the article states, human science and technology pushed their limits when they tapped this oil reserve at over a mile below the ocean and 30,000 feet below the ocean floor. It was bad enough that a "supposed" bubble of methane came up the drill column and caused the oil rig to explode exposing a hole which may have originally been gushing 5,000 gallons a day. Yet, what caused the enormous hole was how when the oil rig exploded it keeled over on one side then proceeded to flip over as it sunk landing directly on top of the gushing well further expanding the diameter of the hole.
I'm usually not frightened or nervous of what doom-sayers forecast, but I think this is wayyyyyy past the "doom-sayer logic" and should actually be looked at as a possible reality that the future of our environment may not be what we envisioned it to be. The leak needs to be stopped as soon as possible, even if it is humanly possible to stop it.. The 100 ton concrete plug actually failed when it was lowered down as crystals were forming at the mouth due to some chemical reaction between methane and petroleum ultimately clogging the hole meant to slow the flow of oil down.
Who wants to take bets that BP either goes bankrupt or pretty damn close to it?
Have a peek at the article, pretty interesting stuff. Click here!
Cheers to, hopefully, a better tomorrow,
Accidents will happen, as surely as death and taxes. Unlike taxes, but like death, you don't know when they will happen, but you know they will. BP should have seen this and contracted with a big financial firm to cover the cost of the biggest accident they might have. As things stand now, that wouldn't have helped, because those financial firms are nearly bankrupt, saved only by a government bailout. The reason they went bankrupt, or nearly so, is that they each agreed, for a fee, to cover each other's bankruptcy, so that when some went bankrupt it drove them all to bankruptcy. If they had only contracted to cover isolated accidents, like oil spills, they might have survived without help. How that would have affected the progress of the oil slick is, however, debatable.
ReplyDeleteI totally agree, BP SHOULD have predicted something like this might happen. If they were to go bankrupt, I'd say they fully deserve it - the implications of this mess are devastating and as such punishment should be dealt out to those that deserve it.
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