Engineers have stopped the flow of oil and gas into the Gulf of Mexico from a gushing BP well, the federal government’s top oil-spill commander, U.S. Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, said Thursday morning.
Live video feed!
That’s the very good news! And now…
The “top kill” effort, launched Wednesday afternoon by industry and government engineers, had pumped enough drilling fluid to block oil and gas spewing from the well, Allen said. The pressure from the well was very low, he said, but persisting.
Allen also said that, later Thursday, an interagency team would release a revised estimate of how much oil had flowed from the well into the gulf before the “top kill” effort began.
Think of yourself as a turtle on the information super-highway. It took a long, long time for you to find out anything about how much oil was flowing into the Gulf of Mexico from Deepwater Horizon.
But now a semi-truck full of bullshit is rolling down that highway at a hundred miles per hour, and it’s aimed at you, little turtle!
The pressure from the well was very low, he said…
And a very low estimate of total damage is on the way!
But what if BP hadn’t blocked access to the well-head for five long weeks, so nobody except BP could measure the “pressure from the well,” way back when the pressure from the well was high enough to blow down Deepwater Horizon?
What kind of estimate of total flow would some pointy-headed independent scientists have produced, when that godawful leak was young and frisky?
We info-turtles will never know.
And why did BP waste so much time with preposterous gew-gaws like the “top hat” instead of applying the “top kill” right away?
We info-turtles will never know.
Update: And now suddenly on the video feed you can see an ugly mess of mud and who knows what boiling out of the pipes!
But I might as well mention (since it wasn’t obvious enough for some people) that the main subject of my diary is what comes next, in the form of low-ball estimates of the damage.
There are plenty of ROVs out there which can operate at 5,000 feet, and if anyone in the chain of command had wanted a better estimate than eye-balling a video feed allows, we would already have some real measurements, instead of a very fuzzy collection of videos.
But now it doesn’t really matter what anybody sends down to the well-head! The flow has been radically diminished, at the very least, and there’s essentially nothing left to measure.
Second Update: And now of course it has all gone backward, and BP has suspended their “top kill.”.
BP had to halt its ambitious effort to plug its stricken oil well in the Gulf of Mexico on Thursday afternoon when engineers saw that too much of the drilling fluid they were injecting into the well was escaping along with the leaking crude oil.
