More Fountain Than Leak

So, after numerous difficulties both medical and professional, my somewhat heralded return is accomplished. Sorry to have been gone so long. I was actually planning to put this off for another week, but then an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico blew up and created a disaster that seems, at this point, likely to become the American version of the Chernobyl tragedy.

It is difficult to believe that you don't already know what I'm talking about, but if that is somehow possible, please go here, here, and then here.

Now, this sort of thing isn't exactly unprecedented, but I have to admit I'd long thought of oil drilling platforms as relatively safe. In large part, this was due to the fact that for some unbelievable reason, I assumed that if you were going to start drilling into oil reserves over a mile underwater, you would also have, you know, a Plan B for turning them off in case the primary (apparently, read: only) mechanism for controlling them fails. As that last link suggests, this isn't really an oil leak so much as an unreachable hole punched into an oil field that is acting at this point more like a fountain than a leak. So far, BP's efforts to shut down the control valve which is supposed to prevent this sort of disaster have failed, and the next best option at this point seems to be drilling yet another well, a process with will take months and as I understand it only slow down the original leak.

I remember when I was in grade school, reading this GI Joe comic about the time Cobra blew up the Joe's secret subterranean headquarters, The Pit. Most of the comic was about how the people trapped underground either made for the escape hatches, or for the drill machine which they'd buried on the assumption that anything capable of collapsing their base would also collapse the primary backup exits. It seems to me like a similar logic applies here- I have literally never taken an engineering course in my life, but a comic book I read in Fourth Grade designed to sell me toys(which I suspect had a minimal engineering consulting staff)pointed out that the catastrophic failure of a primary structure suspended over other important structures might break them if it collapsed on to them. You have any idea what an oil platform engineer earns? They couldn't have seen this coming?

As usual, The Economist's take on this is a refreshing departure from the rest of the coverage, pointing out that the location of oil leaks matters far more than their size. But the leak in question is set to hit the entire US gulf coast, and as the above links suggest, it's likely to make the turn around Florida and move up the Eastern seaboard. The potential scale of this disaster is breathtaking.

I'm not even going to start down the road of who knew what when, who bears the most responsibility, who is likely to win the firestorm of lawsuits that will inevitably ensue. The coming days will present us with a tragedy of currently unknowable, but probably vast, proportions, that will take years to repair, if repair is even possible. The loss of animal life will probably never be known. The economic dislocation will be dramatic. The full repercussions of this slow-motion train wreck are not yet discernible.

If only there was some alternative.