Last night on NBC Nightly News, John Hofmeister, former exec of Shell Oil, ran down the possibilities. In his rundown of bad to worse, he noted that the last option would be to implode the well, which I recall him saying "which no one wants to see" (or something to that effect, the video is no longer available on their site.)
That got me thinking: really? no one wants to see the well imploded? Um, if that will stop the leak, then I want to see it. In fact I would have been much happier if that's what they did a month ago now.
And that got me thinking about that containment dome strategy to contain the oil--the first effort to stop the out of control gusher. I went back to June 9th to see what the report was on this failure, and I found this on Yahoo News:
The containment box plan, never before tried at such depths, had been designed to siphon up to 85 percent of the leaking oil to a tanker at the surface. It had taken about two weeks to build the box and three days to cart it 50 miles out and slowly lower it to the well.
Icelike hydrates, a slushy mixture of gas and water, clogged the opening in the top of the peaked box like sand in a funnel, only upside-down.
So, tell me again why this clogged dome was a problem. I thought the goal of the strategy was to stop the spew of oil, which based on this report, as well as others, is what occurred. However, BP was apparently unhappy that the clogged port didn't allow them to siphon the oil. So they scrapped the clogged dome even though it was preventing the oil from fouling the ocean?
We've got the worst man-made environmental disaster in history, and BP is still acting as if obtaining the oil is the priority. It's long past time to put them on notice: our planet is more valuable than their profits.