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.
Transit time alone is not a factor to dismiss. It's not too hard to see how time adds up, really.