Illustration and description of the next procedure BP will attempt to stop the leak in the Gulf of Mexico: Capping the blowout preventer’s lower marine riser package, or LMPR. (Los Angeles Times/MCT 2010)
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The BP oil spill has been called an “unprecedented disaster” by both the president and BP’s top executive. But the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe has echoes of a 1979 spill, when a rig in the southern Gulf exploded after the blowout preventer failed.
Thirty-one years later, we haven’t come that far technologically with how we deal with underwater oil drilling spills. The Mexican company running the Ixtoc I rig attempted a slew of now-familiar remedies —- they pumped mud into the well, capped it with a metal “sombrero,” shot lead balls into the well and drilled relief wells — but it took 10 months to stop the leak even though the drilling was taking place just 160 feet below the surface.
The Deepwater Horizon, which blew on April 20, was drilling 5,000 feet underwater.
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Spilling our information across the Internet!
In an effort to reach as many people as possible, BP Global PR announces its new tumblr page. We’re promising less OMG’ing and more LOL’ing!
Any tips on our page? Let us know! We’re in the billion dollar business of oil, so this tumblr biz is new to us! Hope we can keep it real!
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Wait, are you telling me that there is a public sector, and it has a leadership role in solving industry-sponsored problems?
Obama 1-Grover Norquist 0.
Zachary Roth | May 14, 2010, 5:36PM
President Obama’s new plan to fix the Gulf oil spill is so crazy it just might work…
As BP’s high-priced industry experts flail, the president has turned to a rag-tag band of big-think scientific renegades, and sent them on a mission to somehow MacGyver a way to stop up the leak — before it’s too late.
OK, maybe that’s going a bit far. In fact, the news that Obama and his energy secretary, Steven Chu, have sent a team of leading physicists and engineers to the Gulf to work with BP offers further evidence of the administration’s essentially technocratic approach to governance, and its faith in knowledge-based expertise. That might seem like common sense, but it represents a shift from the Bushies’ faith in the problem-solving power of industry, and its willingness to let science take a backseat to the concerns of its religious base.
Still, asking one of the key inventors of the hydrogen bomb, along with an engineer who helped develop techniques for mining on Mars, counts as out-of-the-box thinking. Here’s a quick rundown on the president’s unlikely team…
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The more things change, the more they stay the same.
04/30/2010 by Peter HartWhen FAIR released a study of the PBS’s NewsHour (then known as the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour) in 1989, one finding stood out:
The Exxon Valdez oil spill was the major environmental story of the period. MacNeil/Lehrer had seven segments on the spill; not one included an environmental representative. Several discussions were limited to Exxon officials and friendly officials: The March 30, 1989 program, for example, featured Exxon’s chairman and Alaska’s governor (“The chairman of the board of Exxon, I think, has been to heavy on his own company”).
And the summary of a segment from last night’s broadcast of the NewsHour (4/29/10):Costs Climb as BP Struggles to Contain Oil Spill
The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is threatening sensitive coastline and commercial fisheries, following last week’s explosion at an offshore oil rig. Jeffrey Brown talks to a BP spokeswoman about the implications of the spill for the company and for offshore drilling.Let’s hope the company wasn’t too hard on itself.
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