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[ChairmanPoo]

That would be engineering, not architecture.  There is a very distinct difference: Architects draw good looking lines on paper.  Engineers scratch their heads trying to make reality conform to the crazed architect's misguided view of how things work.

Or stare at the space where a bridge is going to be, if you believe Dwarf Fortress. And who doesn't?

This reminds me of a man I met, whose son (who was in his thirties) was an architect. Once, during lunch, the  remarked: "Do you want to know what an architect is? An architect is a man who doesn't know enough maths to be an engineer, yet at the same time is not effeminate enough to be a decorator". No, for the record, they didn't get along too well. And the original quote used stronger words/slurs.

[IronyOwl]

Interesting. 60 Minutes interviewed a guy who was on the rig when it blew up.

From the story it sounds like it was a simple case of Time = Money Therefore Go Faster, the fact that we're dealing with dangerous pressures thirty thousand feet beneath the water be damned. The blowout preventer apparently had a weak battery, one of the control units was partially out (there's two, one's a backup), and an earlier incident had caused chunks of rubber to be ripped out of a seal and brought to the surface.

Needless to say, they carried on as though nothing was wrong. Oh! And this was after losing two million dollars and two weeks of time from going too fast in trying to do it the first time.

[Grakelin]

My oil lies over over the Ocean
My oil lies over the sea!
My oil lies over the Ocean
Oh bring back my oil to me

Bring back, bring back
Bring back my oil to me, to me!
Bring back, bring back
bring back my oil to me!

Last night as I counted my money
Last night as I ate like a pig
Last night as I counted my assets
I dreamed that I had lost a rig

Bring back, bring back
Bring back my oil to me, to me!
Bring back, bring back
bring back my oil to me!

Oh blow the winds o'er the ocean
and blow the winds o'er the sea
Oh blow the winds o'er the ocean
And bring back my oil to me!

Bring back, bring back
Bring back my oil to me, to me!
Bring back, bring back
bring back my oil to me!

The winds have blown o'er the ocean
The winds have blown o'er the sea!
The winds have blown o'er the ocean
Now oil is coating New Orleans!

Bring back, bring back
Bring back my oil to me, to me!
Bring back, bring back
bring back my oil to me!

[HmH]

Text of the interview.

Spoiler: Unfit joke (click to show/hide)

With the schedule slipping, Williams says a BP manager ordered a faster pace.

"And he requested to the driller, 'Hey, let's bump it up. Let's bump it up.' And what he was talking about there is he's bumping up the rate of penetration. How fast the drill bit is going down," Williams said.

But while it was shut tight, a crewman on deck accidentally nudged a joystick, applying hundreds of thousands of pounds of force, and moving 15 feet of drill pipe through the closed blowout preventer.

The BOP is operated from the surface by wires connected to two control pods; one is a back-up. Williams says one pod lost some of its function weeks before.

He discovered chunks of rubber in the drilling fluid. He thought it was important enough to gather this double handful of chunks of rubber and bring them into the driller shack. I recall asking the supervisor if this was out of the ordinary. And he says, 'Oh, it's no big deal.'

1. Mandate digging deeper and greedier.
2. Accidentally pull the lever and drill through your primary oil-blocking system.
3. Find out your emergency blocker doesn't work.
4. Tell everybody it's no big deal.
5. ? ? ?
6. WELCOME TO FUCKING RIGMURDERED! Hope you like oil!

[Euld]

It would probably skip the east coast and head straight for Europe; the gulf stream is a ways off shore.

I can confirm that us people on the west coast are enjoying our oil-free, hurricane-free ocean.  Of course, now that I've said that...

[Aqizzar]

Spoiler: Unfit Joke

Your joke has been unspoilered and added to the OP.

[Duke 2.0]

 What are you saying we'll find down there? Could it be that it is not the water pressure and depth that has caused all attempts to seal the breach to fail, but another much worse problem?

 Deploy the Champions!

[Aqizzar]

We're pitching them off the boat as fast we can!  Since we haven't got any adamantium yet, they're armored in the best and thickest steel we can forge.  They'll be unstoppable!

Bomrek Coglogum, Champion, has drowned.
Kish Udilurist, Champion, has drowned.
Rith Kishdastot, Hammer Lord, has drowned.
Atol Lokemlokem, Spear Master, has been crushed in the pressure.

This may be an engineering problem greater than we were prepared for.  Cheesemakers!  Man the pumps!

[Sean Mirrsen]

So, the "Just nuke the hell out of the thing" option is becoming more and more sensible... all the "next best thing" solutions will require months to pull off, in which time the potential damage to environment and economy might well be greater than from a single underground/underwater nuke going off.

[Aqizzar]

Well, BP did finally get something to work right - they've installed a siphon into a leaking pipe, so they can at least capture a portion of the oil, by pumping it up a really long other pipe into waiting ships (hopefully more than just the one mentioned).  It's kinda like "stopping" a water-pipe leak by sticking a curly straw in the leak, and having a parade of really slow fat people suck up as much as they can while you keep working.

Concurrent to that announcement, I found the Transocean spill-cleanup suggestion box.  Suggest!  Suggest like you've never suggested before!

[RedWarrior0]

Back on topic, Operation Microwave wouldn't need a wall. You just need to evaporate the water faster than it comes in.

But evaporating the entire Gulf is more dwarven.

[Nonsapient]

Chunks of rubber in the drilling fluid actually aren't a big deal-- that just means that the motor at the bottom of the string was wearing out.  That's a VERY common occurrence.  It may or may not have been from the BOP.

The 'go faster go faster' bit isn't an issue either.  that's going to do nothing but damage the drill string-- a drill string that was not, and had not been, in use for quite a while when the problems occurred.   You use one string of tools to drill, then another to lay pipe and cement, which is what they were doing when the big nasty happened.

Leaving tools in the hole is bad,  but again had nothing to do with what happened.  That's a common occurrence too.

The damage to the Blowout Preventer though.....  that was a major fuckup.  This dude is unlikely to ever work in the oil field again for opening his mouth.  Putting weight on the drill string while that was closed....oopsidaisy!

The 'company man' for the well's owner is always the person in charge.  That chest-bumping thing is silly.

[Duke 2.0]

Back on topic, Operation Microwave wouldn't need a wall. You just need to evaporate the water faster than it comes in.

But evaporating the entire Gulf is more dwarven.

You'll end up with a pillar of steam that condenses and flows into the hole as fast as you can evaporate it. And if your microwave is space-based then the steam cloud will absorb all the microwaves and leave the actual gulf intact.

[RedKing]

Back on topic, Operation Microwave wouldn't need a wall. You just need to evaporate the water faster than it comes in.

But evaporating the entire Gulf is more dwarven.

You'll end up with a pillar of steam that condenses and flows into the hole as fast as you can evaporate it. And if your microwave is space-based then the steam cloud will absorb all the microwaves and leave the actual gulf intact.

So obviously magma is the answer.

[Duke 2.0]

 Hey, if we cover the oil with a layer of obsidian we could just drill for it later.