Correction: The "experts" have tried in vain for 5 weeks to stop this, and have thus far failed.
Even the most cynical of minds cannot possibly conjure up the conspiracy theory that everyone is just sitting around doing nothing. It is in BP's own best interests to fix this ASAP - the magnitude of fallout this creates for them increases as the problem drags on.
One of the less impressive aspects of our new information culture is that every Joe Schmoe now thinks he is an expert materials engineer, rocket scientist, political expert, economist, sociologist, historian, physicist, chemist, biologist, medical professional, and general.
As a trained mechanical engineer turned software guy, I find it ironic that we softies bitch about laymen's assumptions about our field, and we are aggravated constantly by other people who assume that everything just takes "a couple of days" to build... yet we are so quickly to leap to the same conclusion when it concerns a field that is not our own.
BP is working to fix it ASAP, by drilling relief wells, a fix that is known to work, and known to take a long time.
In the meantime they're attempting to keep their PR as good as possible by a) downplaying the size of the spill and b) taking mediagenic actions that are unlikely to succeed, but are useful distractions. Giving them names like "Top Hat" and "Top Kill" and "Junk Shot", and whatever they will be calling "lower marine riser package cap" in a few days.
On the conspiracy point, I disagree. Oil companies are mostly aligned with the Republican Party, and we have a Democratic president and Congress, Bush had a Katrina black eye, so one theory is that BP is "taking one for the team" in order to give Obama a black eye. Even Halliburton is involved, which Cheney led at one point and likely still has strong connections to behind the scenes. I'm not saying I 100% think that is what happening, or that they even caused the original accident in the first place, but there is political benefit at play here, which gives somebody a motive, somewhere. Just a theory, but I can't rule it out yet. Especially given what appears to me to be dangerous incompetence and/or a lack of planning, preparation beforehand, and a lack of hustle and applied common sense after the incident began. I have to wonder how much is due to incompetence and how much to evil/intent.
Also, I'm not sure these experts have really "tried". If someone's hair catches on fire on Monday at 3pm, then BP's first attempt to put out that person's hair fire is at 8pm, then next on Wednesday, then next about 2 weeks later (failing again), then 2 weeks later the next attempt, etc. -- it makes one wonder whether there could have been more attempts made earlier -- I mean, afterall, this person's hair is on fire. And whether they could have had more backup/failover techniques sitting on the sidelines ready-to-go quickly during the first few hours and days after the leak began. All the talk about the challenges of having the depth and pressure constraints are legitimate, but what should also be obvious to any reasonably intelligent person is that another constraint is time. Regardless of what particular technique is use to stop/reduce the leak, the most effective thing you can do is to implement it very early. The total damage to the environment will be proportional to how many hours/days/weeks the oil is left to leak into the sea. So making the investment in process and equipment and people and training to be able to stop this very early will pay off. Since a decent engineer could probably have told them there was a chance the blowout preventer could fail (for a variety of reasons) they should have had several alternate/backup plans to execute very soon afterward. Given that the magnitude of the downside impact could be so obviously huge.
Also, this is one of the cases where the fundamental elements of the problem are actually pretty simple: oil leaking into water. Just stop that flow from happening. Lots of ways to do that. Yes it is deep. Yes high pressure. With a decent background in physics and engineering I think one can come up with lots of solutions and tactics that would work. But they all need to be tested (at 5000 foot depths) and fine-tuned and resourced and have people trained on before a real accident occurs. What angers a lot of people in this case is the sense that BP and friends did not do this.
Also there have been big oil spills in the past and the companies involved almost always live to fight another day. Exxon Valdez was one of the biggest spills in US history. In the recent news about Apple overtaking Microsoft in market cap, that still only brought them up to #2. Know who was #1? Exxon. All costs/penalties/grief BP will get from this is really just going to turn into a dollar charge against their balance sheet. And they already have billions in cash. The negative PR/psych effect will slowly fade away. And if they have to raise prices, they just pass it on as a cost-of-doing-business to the folks who buy their product. Us.
> "If someone's hair catches on fire on Monday at 3pm, then BP's first attempt to put out that person's hair fire is at 8pm, then next on Wednesday, then next about 2 weeks later (failing again), then 2 weeks later the next attempt, etc."
Fixing a large fissure deep under the ocean is not at all like putting someone out of fire. To even make such a comparison betrays a severe lack of understanding about the magnitude the difficulties of such a problem.
Honestly, I'm trying to be as civil as possible here, but your attitude aggravates me. You are laying down serious claims of impropriety on the part of all of the scientists and engineers who are working on this problem based on your, let's be honest, uneducated notions about what plugging an underwater leak is like. If you are going to accuse others of such grievous impropriety, you should at least make some effort to be qualified to make the judgment. As it is you are, like many others, armchair geological engineers.
> "Also, this is one of the cases where the fundamental elements of the problem are actually pretty simple: oil leaking into water"
Jesus. Fucking. Christ. I'm not sure how much more you can oversimplify that. Would you also characterize your car's engine as a fire burning in a confined space? Or how about let's use your extensive experience with bottle rockets to criticize NASA engineers? I suppose absolute zero is a lot like the inside of your freezer, too, just colder.
> "Lots of ways to do that. Yes it is deep. Yes high pressure."
Uh-huh. I really like how you've just completely dismissed two of the most bleeding-edge limits of human technology, understanding, and ingenuity with a wave of your hand. Yep, it's deep, yep, it's high pressure, but surely our trained scientists will breeze right past those minor inconveniences! Otherwise what the hell are they good for, if they can't even make mincemeat of such minor roadblocks like being 5000 feet under the ocean?
> "With a decent background in physics and engineering I think one can come up with lots of solutions and tactics that would work."
As someone with a decent background in engineering, I would like to know what in the blue hell would lead you to believe this. Our scientists and engineers are smart, talented people, they are not magicians.
> "What angers a lot of people in this case is the sense that BP and friends did not do this."
Good misdirection. You started off by criticizing the people in charge of plugging this hole, saying that because of the long delay between each try to plug the well, they are clearly not trying hard enough, and that lay advice would be useful to these people who clearly don't know WTF they are doing. Now you're steering this into a criticism of oil regulations - which has nothing to do with the original topic at hand.
Free speech is awesome - everyone should have the right to say whatever they want. It does not, however, make you a qualified commentator on everything and anything. "It can't be that complicated" is all too common a sentiment with laymen, and I'm particularly disappointed that a tech-savvy crowd, who has to deal with the limitations of scientific and engineering understanding everyday, is so easily susceptible to this.
My example about putting out a person's hair fire had to do with speed, frequency and preparation for the attempt. I clearly did not say anything about relative difficulty. Stopping the oil leak under these conditions I agree is harder than putting out a person's head fire. The point was about preparation and hustle and being able to move very quickly, very early to stop the fire/leak ASAP, given the downside. In this, I personally think they've failed ridiculously.
I did not accuse any scientists/engineers who are actively trying to solve the leak now of doing anything unethical. I do not and cannot know for sure the details of exactly which person did what, when -- none of us can, and much will be hearsay. However, I thought it was clear from my post that I think it appears more of a lack of preparation before the accident, and/or a lack of will after the accident began, at a leadership level. At the level of an individual engineer, he may want to do the smart/cautious thing, but if he is overruled by executives or accountants, etc. then his intent has no effect.
I did not completely dismiss the challenges of depth and pressure. I even cited them specifically. But if you focus on the core goal we have right now, it's that there is oil flowing into water at a certain location. Just stop that flow and/or contain it to a finite controlled volume, and prevent it from spreading out into a much larger area. It doesn't matter exactly how quickly you stop/contain it, and it doesn't matter exactly the volume of the containment zone, or even whether you use 1 technique or 3, together or in sequence, just make it happen and do it quickly. And they fundamentally know how to put and operate equipment down there, and lay pipes, and draw oil up to the surface for further processing and transport. What BP needs to do is basically just a variant on that same fundamental task. Again: there is some fluid in another fluid. Bad stuff getting into some good stuff. Keep it from spreading in an uncontrolled manner. That is not fundamentally impossible, even at 5000 feet depth. Walls. Pipes. Suction. Seals. Tanks. Valves. This is all well understood technology and can be put together in a variety of ways.
Also, all your claims about how lay people (such as myself, you imply) are inherently unqualified to talk about this subject would apply equally well to you. However, in reality, I would argue that a reasonably intelligent and educated person can come up with a decent analysis and decent solution ideas, comparable to that of professionals within a field, given that the constraints that that field operates within are sufficiently knowable and understandable by said lay person. In essence, Mother Nature doesn't know or care what degree you have.
You and I may have differences in how solvable or preventable we perceive this situation to be, but frankly you keep going overboard and saying rude things. Imagine you are sitting across a table from me, speaking to my face, and adjust your words accordingly. Free speech is awesome. But with it should come the sense of responsibility to not be rude to whom you are speaking.
Checking the shipping time calculator at searates.com it looks like a typical shipping time from Newark to New Orleans would be 6 days. I assume some time could be knocked off that if you were traveling at emergency speed and paying extra for whatever other obstacles arise. Call it 3-4 days from east coast ports to gulf waters. West coast ports would presumably take longer.
Transit time alone is not a factor to dismiss. It's not too hard to see how time adds up, really.
Good point! Yeah I agree that's a factor. Heck, even if they could contain the leak in 6 days it would be a huge improvement over 6 weeks or 5 months or whatever it will end up being now.
On the point about transportation time being a factor: in getting resources to accident site, there are many well-known ways of mitigating that. They can keep things cached on site, or use equipment from other nearby platforms that are not in accident mode, or, they can keep stuff based at a closer port, like New Orleans rather than New Jersey, for example. Plus they can fly in as much as they can, which would be a matter of hours in those cases. Lots of other things they can do, have trained teams and ships on standby, ready to deploy quickly to any of say 5-20 wells (or whatever) in their service area, if an accident occurs. The cost of keeping those people and equipment sitting idle and nearby can just become a cost of the operation, and considered to be justified as a net-win in accident scenarios. And again, we're talking about a company making billions in profits every 3 months -- they probably have enough margin to divert some of it upfront to buy better preparation and reduced accident-containment-latency.
