The Gulf Oil Spill
It has been quite a while since I have written an article. I have three topics I am going to write about this week. I know that these three stories have probably been written about to the point of exhaustion but I don’t really care. I am still going to write my three articles, and give my thoughts and opinions.Let’s start with an article about the biggest story of the summer: OIL SPILL!!! Wow, like we haven’t had enough of this story. I mean it’s only been going on for like 3 months or more and continues to spew vast amounts of petroleum into the Gulf. I really don’t know where to start with this story. It is just a horrible mess that is so messed up in so many ways you could talk about it for hours on end.
I am just going to start at the beginning of it and work my way through it the best I can. The explosion could have been avoided I am sure. But, let’s face it these things happen, stuff breaks. Planes crash, trains derail, buildings collapse…stuff breaks. Was there some measure that could have been done to prevent it in the first place? Probably. Was there a short cut taken somewhere? Most likely. But as far as global impact is concerned the explosion was the smallest part of this catastrophe.
Now the containment is just ridiculous. We can send a man to a totally different orb in the sky, the Moon, but we can’t fix a leaking pipe at the bottom of our own ocean. Just how bass-ackwards is that? Now I understand that a mile below the ocean’s surface is extremely deep and the pressure is unreal. But, seriously, if we are going to drill down there we have to have some way of being able to stop a leak if something like this occurs. Did no one honestly think that something like this was possible and that we did not have to have immediate plans in place in order to stop something like this???????? How could someone be so entirely stupid to think that this was not possible and that we didn’t need a tested and sure plan to fix it when and if it ever happened? No one is that stupid of course. The answer is that they just simply did not care! There was no money for them to make in developing a contingency plan in case of an explosion like this happening. So then when this did happen we have the companies and the government running around like chickens with their heads cut off trying to figure out what the hell to do. And I am sorry I am not a scientist, but I consider myself an intelligent man, how the hell were robots and a diamond tipped saw third on the list of containment possibilities?!?!?!? I mean really, how did shooting mud, rubber, and rubbish into the hole beat out robots and diamond tipped saws? That just blows my mind. I obviously would have voted differently than they did. Now this method hasn’t fixed it but at least it has helped and they are siphoning off more of it, and are now being able to lower a cap on it and hopefully contain the leak until the relief wells are dug.
Lastly, I will just touch on something which I read about just the other day, and that is other abandoned wells and temporarily sealed wells. There are literally thousands of them littering the bottom of the Gulf and guess what…they leak! Some of these are 40-50 years old and we don’t check on them. The only time they really get reported on is if some happens to fly over and sees and oil sheen and then reports it. Then it might get checked on. Even then they said it is hard to determine whether it is a temporarily sealed well that is leaking or just a natural leak from the seabed. We have basically no responsibility or accountability over the old wells. Who knows what is really going on down there? It is really a sad state of events!
Tags: BP, containment, explosion, global impact, goverment, gulf, Gulf of Mexico, oil, oil spill, oil well, siphon, spill, well
