BP admits oil spill ‘catastrophe’ as Americans likely to get the tab

By Chuck Frank / chuck@theklaxon.com / 05.28.2010

Updated on: 05.28.10 at 9:53 am

Wright, The Detroit News/caglecartoons.com

Thirty-eight days ago, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, in a conflagration that killed 11 workers and was the result of poor decision making after nearly two days of arguments as to how to proceed.

The result of replacing heavy-drilling fluids with light-weight sea water allowed methane gas to surge up the riser, expanding at an incredible rate and igniting the platform. Nineteen million gallons of spilled oil later, the gusher continues its unrelenting assault on what eventually will involve the entire Gulf coast from Louisiana to the southern tip of Florida.

From the White House to the wheel house, hopes ran high Thursday that BP had found a way to stop the deluge from below in, what they now call, an “environmental catastrophe.”

It was not to be.

Using a technique referred to as “top kill,” the oil men employed a 30,000-horsepower pump to force drilling mud one mile down and into the outlet orifice of the acutely named, “blow-out preventer.” If enough mud can be forced into the orifice to overcome by pressure the mass escaping, the problem can be stopped.

So far, top kill’s greatest effect, employing all of these metrics, has been to remove the top person at the U.S. Department of the Interior, Ken Salazar, and the top person at MMS, S. Elizabeth Birnbaum. Who knows how much longer BP will employ the top kill technique and how many top people will be forced to step down, or how much high-pressure mud it eventually will take to plug their orifices.

One thing is for certain: The high-pressure mud will continue to fly under great pressure and the oil plume will continue to grow.

The oil plume is the 800-pound gorilla, currently lurking out of sight in this saga. Just below the water surface, like a huge angry hippo bottom feeding in the Nile, this oil plume is now 22 miles long, 6 miles wide and 3,300 feet deep; and, it is moving, undulating ever-so slowly, on a collision course with an environmental holocaust.

Sand berms, skimming rigs and floating booms are pathetic attempts at sand-bagging a tsunami. Political and business leaders rival our most productive wind farms, bloviating about who is at fault. In the end, though, the American people will pick up the tab at the gas pump and American wildlife will once again find it increasingly difficult to share the planet with a voracious energy consumer.

Fill er up.