Did BP’s top kill work?
Image by uscgd8 via Flickr
All we can do now is wait. After pouring 50,000 pounds of sludge on top of the gushing Deepwater Horizon well, still more patience will be required before we’ll know one way or the other whether BP will move on to shooting golf balls into the pipe.
“We will not be rushed,” BP’s Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles said on Wednesday night. “It’s too early to know if it will be successful.”
So, when will we know, exactly?
“We’ve ridden a roller coaster and I think we just need to take the next 24 hours and see what the results are.”
With all due respect, a roller coaster has ups, downs, twists, and turns. This ride is more akin to a free fall of a very high cliff. We keep reaching for the parachute chord, but nothing ever seems to happen.
Earlier to day at Paradigms Lost, I had an interesting exchange with a reader who said he was standing on an oil rig 50 miles west of where Deepwater Horizon once stood. An engineer who seemed to know what he was talking about, “knut” (his screen name) claimed that U.S. Minerals Management Service officials told his crew today that before the accident that toppled Deepwater, BP was set to announce that it had discovered the largest oil deposit in U.S. history, that being the one that Deepwater had just managed to penetrate.
Well, here’s hoping the sludge solution works.
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I think we’re all hoping it works. And more to the point, I think we’d all like to know what failed and what could have been done differently.
Chances are, like most industrial accidents, this was not just one little mistake somewhere. There were probably a series of incorrect assumptions coupled with a bit of bull-headed stupidity, and maybe even some relatively unknown phenomena that converged to cause this disaster.
Oh, and let’s not forget a significant lack of planning…