Posted on Monday May 10th by The Infrastructurist | 5,535
CLICK TO ENLARGE
There’s no good news to report about the oil spill in the Gulf — so we won’t try to create any. But what we can do is isolate just how bad it is at any given moment. The above graph, created by Matthew Baker of ESRI Educational Services, uses data from the Louisiana government and the U.S. Department of the Interior to plot a full picture of the Gulf Coast, BP’s remaining presence in it, and the depth and gravity of the oil slick during the past week. Assuming the former “good guy” of Big Oil gets its act together and actually manages to plug this disaster, perhaps we can move on to graphing the total damage and the effectiveness of cleanup efforts.
May 10th, 2010 at 4:39 pm
how could we land on the moon, transplant organs, make bacon, invent the wheel…yet we have no clue how to plug a hole in the ground?
May 10th, 2010 at 5:01 pm
Oh, we’ll figure this out.
It’s just that we should have gotten it figured out BEFORE drilling this hole.
May 11th, 2010 at 6:57 am
So here we have it, this toxin (COREXIT) disperses the crude oil, so that it will settle in thick ugly globules on the bottom of the ocean, killing off marine life, but the shore line will remain pristine?
The fishing industry will be kaputzeed! Severe loss of jobs and loss of food for the supply chain, but the beaches will look pretty for the tourists!
http://just-me-in-t.blogspot.com/2010/05/corexit-dispersant-known-to-be-toxic.html
May 21st, 2010 at 8:22 am
With nearly 4k drill sites in the Gulf alone, what was different about this one drill site that caused this to happen? Equipment, under-trained operators? What? And, what is being done to prevent this from happening here or elsewhere in the future?
May 22nd, 2010 at 1:22 pm
To Just ME -
Correct. But don’t know how long tourist will remain when sharks not killed off find the only thing to eat are humans swimming in dead zones. Happens now all around the world in smaller dead zone pockets.
May 28th, 2010 at 7:03 pm
I think the spraying of dispersal at the wellhead was a direct effort to reduce the viewable extent of the oil spill. BP has now acknowledged they were derelict their responsibility and they knew they cut corners which laying the foundation for this entire disaster. They sprayed the chemical in a direct attempt to hide the gravity of the mess and they knew why when they did it. Now we will deal with a hidden disaster to a VAST area of marine biome. BP should be made to develop the means to “vacuum” the ocean floor for as much of the oil tar balls as possible. They were trying to mitigate their liability to people by spraying the spill and shoved that expense to the living ecosystem which really provides the long-term survival of a huge number of people.
I expect the reticient Obama administration to be more than a talking head of yap yap yap and actually do the right thing. BP should be made to absorb the ENTIRE cost of the potentially global affecting screw up. This crap gets in some of the current streams it can affect areas far beyond US shores. But maybe BP is gambling for just that. Try to disperse the mess across such a wide area they can effectively be incapable of doing anything about and the world would throw their hands up, letting them off the hook. Heck nobody in the world could do anything about it, except live or die with the consequences. That is precisely WHY they should not be let off the hook for any reason at all. They fix it, period. If it costs them bankruptcy, so be it. Another company will buy up their assets. The wells will keep going with no more cut corners, and the world and business will have learned that here is a new Sheriff in town. His name is Reggie Hammonds. Ya’ll be cool now, Heay.