Archive for May, 2010

  So the estimate I’ve heard is that it will take 90 days to repair the BP Oil Spill, that is to say, it will take them 90 full days to drill a relief valve and stop the spill from pouring an unfathomable amount of oil (you honestly can’t fathom it legitimately) into the Gulf of Mexico.

  I have to raise the flag on what appears to be BS from BP. I’m not here to strike a flint in hopes of lighting the company aflame but there is no way it actually takes 90 days. It takes 15 hours to fly from the US to Japan and drop a warhead that wipes an entire city off the face of the map, and the bomb itself would only take 4 times as long as the estimate for this drilling to be made (assuming you have the fissile material which is a fair exception considering BP already has the materials necessary to repair the problem). Now those might seem like loose comparisons, and quite frankly they are, but I’m just trying to give a judgment of time here. BP is saying that it will take one fourth the time it takes to wipe an entire city off the face of the map, from the entire distance of the Pacific Ocean, as it would to locate and repair a situation using far less elaborate materials in a location you can sail to (with nice winds) in 1 to 2 hours. That’s just assuming that nobody in this year has a boat with an engine…

  I wouldn’t be so quick to judge, as I rarely critique the work of a surgeon, but their fixes are what lay the groundwork for my judgment. They attempt first to cap it off like a gushing fire hydrant, then they decide to try a smaller cap, next they’ll try to just re-route the flow with a tap system (from what I understand), and finally…they’ll try just stuffing a bunch of random stuff into it and hope it clogs. This last one is what got me. If it is that easy why don’t they just take a thick fabric like emergency raft material, coat it in something that is very resistant to moisture and oil and stuff it into the pipe then inflate it? If golf balls and tire shreds are enough to clog it then surely a tough hide inflatable material can do it.

  That should take all of a weekend to pull off. It might sound like a lot of work but when you have the kind of money oil companies have you could pull of something like this for a party in a day easy. Secondly I move on to the idea that it will take them 90 days to produce a new functional hole to stop the problem. There is absolutely no way this can possibly be true-90 days is a really long time. You know what you can do in 90 days? You could fly from the Earth to the Moon and back nearly 18 times, with 2-3 people you could build a 2,800 square foot home, you could get 18 E60 BMW’s custom ordered and shipped to you.

Want 18 of these? Not my thing but you’d have them in custom order before BP finishes repairing the oil spill. Course then you’d have to fill them all up with gas…oh dear.

  BP has over 80 thousand employees, or enough people to build between 26,000 and 40,000 houses in the time it is quoted to take them to repair a single blown pipe. It isn’t fair of me to assume all those people are skilled in this kind of repair work but I’m more trying to stress the fact they have an enormous staff and lest we forget the 239 billion dollars they brought in according to their website in 2009, they aren’t exactly hurting for cash to invest in a quick repair.

  Had they been honest about the situation or even cared in the slightest this would have been taken care of at most two weeks after the situation occurred. It would have taken that long only because they’d have invested dubious amounts of time to assure that they won’t screw up and cause a bigger problem. The actual work would have taken 3 days of straight work with revolving crews and we’d be looking back on this as a really bad but at least expertly resolved incident.

  The biggest humor in this sluggish and unenthusiastic repair is the this is the company who has one of the most “nature friendly” looking logos of any company in existence today.

“Look at our earthy green, sunny yellow, and life white all meshed into a hybrid flower-sun. We love nature that’s why we drill for Oil <3”

  I don’t necessarily begrudge them for drilling for oil, but their logo annoys me. They are quite intentionally trying to grasp the shapes and colors that make the brain view them as a nature conscious company whose main goal is to circumvent natural catastrophes. But instead a multi-billion dollar mega company is just dragging its feet with merry disregard as a completely manageable situation unfolds without halt.

  It took the US less than a year to invade a country on the other side of the planet and locate a single human being who was hiding in a hole. A hole that was amidst an area of land that measured a full 169,234 square miles. The average person is something like 3 feet across, and something like 5 square feet total space taken, which means (with my shoddy math) there were 178,711,104 unique spaces in Iraq that Saddamn could have been standing (assuming a flat landmass and people standing one by one beside one another…there are far more places in actuality). We found him…we found that 1 in 178 million in less than a year.

  How on Earth can that happen so quickly and yet this repair work is going to take 90 days? I don’t see it, both the US and BP have a stake in this incident, how neither could at least stop the leak  on a weekend is beyond me. Just a matter of spending too much time pointing fingers and not long enough time putting a finger in the leak.