BP's "top kill" attempt to stop the flow of oil from a ruptured well in the Gulf of Mexico failed, the company's chief operating officer said Saturday.If these other plans were more likely to work than top kill, wouldn't BP have tried them first? Everything BP has thrown at this thing has failed miserably. If we're risking 3-4 months of unrestricted flow putting potentially tens of millions of gallons of oil in the Gulf from any one deep water well, then why are any of the hundreds of these wells still being allowed to operate?
The oil giant has tried for days to stop the the largest oil spill in U.S. history by pumping heavy, mudlike drilling fluid into a ruptured oil well, a method known as "top kill."
The next option is to place a custom-built cap known as the "lower marine riser package" over the leak, the company's chief operating officer, Doug Suttles said. BP crews were working Saturday to ready the materials for that option should it become necessary, he said.
"We've been prepping that all along in case we need to move to that option," he said. "People want to know which technique is going to work, and I don't know."
And if "lower marine riser package" were to fail, he said, BP engineers would try placing a second blowout preventer on top of the first, which failed to cut of the oil flow after the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig. The failed blowout preventer is a 48-foot-tall, 450-ton apparatus that sits atop the well 5,000 feet underwater.
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Top Kill Slays The Drag--OH YOU'RE KIDDING ME!
Top Kill(tm) has now officially failed. Surprise!
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3 comments:
Your choices are accept the risk or pay $10 a gallon of gas. Any thinking person figured that out long ago...
That is where "decent public transportation" comes in. High gas prices don't hurt so much when you're sharing the cost with at least 40 others. Just sayin'.
What about those who don't have that option? People living out in the country, etc. I can think of plenty of places where plenty of people would be effected by this..
So "decent public transportation" would work for some, but what about the rest?
Also a lot of wells are closer to shore, what BP was doing was on the more innovative side, as in never tried nor done before. The silver lining to all of this is that the amount of knowledge learned will either prevent this from happening again or at least show us the best possible way to contain.
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