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[smjjames]

Well, letting it drain basically has a 100% chance of success, although, one would hope that there are faster approaches that involve less leaking. I still like my idea of using balloons to temporarily clog the pipe while you fille it up with something solid...

Depends on what we're talking about letting drain. For the oil, we probably don't even know how long that will leak before it reaches pressure equilibrium or the hole collapses on itself.

"Oooops, we goofed, sorry about that, but we are dong our best to fix it."
is much better from a PR perspective than
"Get your mindless plebs out of our business!"

If the stupidly-named 'top kill' effort had been successful, I would hope to have heard by now. So I can only guess that its value has been limited to PR. It would seem to be a wild success too! People are still talking about how to fix it rather than boycotting the company for being so lax...

Can't blame them for the terminology as they didn't make the terminology.

From what they are saying on CNN and the live video, its sounding like the top kill didn't work so well, yay for BP for fucking it up.

The whole thing is likely to get worse as the official start of hurricane season has begun, so if a hurricane comes through.... man....


Hopefully this will get us (the US that is) away from dependance on oil faster since this spill is orders of magnitudes more visible than the exxon Valdez spill was.

[PTTG??]

Yet more proof that Obama and the Liberal Crime Squad was behind this whole thing. *clutches bible*

[Duuvian]

Hey guys, who called it?

Don't be mad everyone, we're just unsure about anything numbers related to our job

When they say they don't know how much is in it, I bet what they really mean is that they do know and it was entirely too much.

Yet more proof that Obama and the Liberal Crime Squad was behind this whole thing. *clutches bible*

How much trouble would we get in if we led someone who desperately wants to believe in a real life Liberal Crime Squad into believing there really is one? I was thinking Glenn Beck. Maybe we should all write letters into his show about how we've noticed suspicious activities in our home towns and have been noticing grafittis proudly claiming to tagged by Liberal Crime Squad members. After all, it was Fox News who had the landmark court case wherein it was settled that lying on national television is protected by the right to free speech. After all, we'd merely be lying to the liars.

EDIT: Fixed the link. I didn't know how to shorten it like that before. My powers of internet are growing daily.

[Nikov]

Nuke the well! Nuke the well!

[Realmfighter]

That link was so long it broke my browser.

[Criptfeind]

So the mud did not work but we swear our next plan will, plz don't kill us kthxbi.

-BP

[Duuvian]

I hope the next PR stunt BP tries gets a neat code name too. How about Diagonal Death? Or Southern Slaughter? I like that one actually, it has a nice play on words feel about it.

[PTTG??]

I hope the next PR stunt BP tries gets a neat code name too. How about Diagonal Death? Or Southern Slaughter? I like that one actually, it has a nice play on words feel about it.

You just made my day.

[Criptfeind]

Southern Slaughter sounds weird to me considering how it is in the golf of Mexico.


The bodies and congealing blood will block the flow! Don't worry they are only Mexicans.

-BP

[Duuvian]

Southern Slaughter sounds weird to me considering how it is in the golf of Mexico.


The bodies and congealing blood will block the flow! Don't worry they are only Mexicans.

-BP

Hey, it's apparently the strategy for blocking the flow of drugs. It's worth a try to try to stop the flow of oil too.

[Duke 2.0]

 New plan: Block oil spill with piles of drugs.

[Duuvian]

New plan: Block oil spill with piles of drugs.

Actually, it might be a better use than whatever it is they're using those record breaking opium crops from Afghanistan for. But then how would teens and radio hosts get their daily dosage of vicodin?

[fenrif]

Did someone say it can't get any worse from a PR perspective?

It just did. Apparently BP knew their rig was failing almost a year ago and cut corners on safety standards.

On June 22, for example, BP engineers expressed concerns that the metal casing the company wanted to use might collapse under high pressure.

“This would certainly be a worst-case scenario,” Mark E. Hafle, a senior drilling engineer at BP, warned in an internal report. “However, I have seen it happen so know it can occur.”

The company went ahead with the casing, but only after getting special permission from BP colleagues because it violated the company’s safety policies and design standards. The internal reports do not explain why the company allowed for an exception. BP documents released last week to The Times revealed that company officials knew the casing was the riskier of two options.

[KaelGotDwarves]

Yeah, my father works for Chevron, he said that the guys at Chevron are joking that BP should have stuffed the leak with BP Lawyers and Manager-level engineers.

[fenrif]

From the NYT article it looks like it's a combination of the BP guys cutting corners and trying to eke out more profits, and the US regulators not doing their jobs and making sure everything was checked out properly.

Also check out this article from The Guardian about Nigerian oil leaks that are largely ignored by the US and Europe. Very relevant to the topic at hand I think.

One report, compiled by WWF UK, the World Conservation Union and representatives from the Nigerian federal government and the Nigerian Conservation Foundation, calculated in 2006 that up to 1.5m tons of oil – 50 times the pollution unleashed in the Exxon Valdez tanker disaster in Alaska – has been spilled in the delta over the past half century. Last year Amnesty calculated that the equivalent of at least 9m barrels of oil was spilled and accused the oil companies of a human rights outrage.