HuhHuh, so the spill is Giygas come to life. He was right, I couldn't comprehend the form of his attack.

Also, I assume the lack of topic was implicit of the general apathy towards it here. What more can you say besides "it's terrible, I hope we can stop it soon."

Slowly.... slowly into 2012..... slowwwly.

Yeah, but what Craig said. It already sucks as it is. No internet threads will let us know how much not sucky it can get.

Or hoping those alternative fuel sources get developed ASAP so we can avoid these.

Slowly.... slowly into 2012..... slowwwly.

So Africa is our only hope?

TO THE CONGO!

Bill Nye weighs in on some potential solutions

Bill Nye the Science Guy is here to saave the day.

If Bill Nye (who's awesome btw) can't find a solution, I guess we'll have to call Captain Planet.

Has anyone seen the underwater footage of the spill? This is just sad.

Looking at that oil spill just makes me think of a rasher of Bacon...:3

Well... it seems the British media were overexaggerating the American reaction a bit. They made out the Americans were pretty much calling for BP to be hung but seeing this thread... you're all being pretty decent, and concentrating on the disaster it is rather than trying to get anyone on the chopping block. Seriously, good for you guys.

And in relation to the oil spill itself, it makes me feel a bit ill thinking about it. It's devistating such a huge area and killing so much wildlife, I just hope they come up with a solution and quick.

No, yeah, we want BP served on a platter only because it took them CLOSE TO TWO MONTHS to take this crap seriously. The CEO was spouting crap like "oh it's no big deal it's not going to be that big an impact" to "you have no idea how hard my life has been working on this problem. I just want my life back." It's not word for word but it's pretty damn close.

So yeah, screw BP. Not only is wildlife dead but now there are tens of thousands of jobs being lost; no hopes for fishermen, no hopes for any shops and such on the coast that relied on tourism to strive. Hell there's news that there was I guess an oyster place or something that's been open for the past 120 years or so that's in danger of closing down because he's practically lost his entire business to imports now.

It sucks. And it's BP's fault for not taking this crap seriously in the very beginning.

Yeah they messed up. They probably should have reacted faster when the American rig they were leasing out exploded.

But in the end of the day, BP's stocks are 40% British, 39% American. They account for a whopping one in 7 British pensions, and probably quite a lot of American pensions too. Simply put, they are so huge that if they went down it will affect the worldwide economy when some of us are only just getting out of the recession.

And in the BP CEO's defence, he is actually taking it, despite his moaning. Unlike say... Union Carbide (Now Dow Chemical Company)

"just as long as it's not in our neighbourhood" springs to mind...

and at the end of the day what will be the result? Obama claims massive damages against BP to cover the cost of the clear up and please the Fox viewers, BP claim against the American owned rig + staff (always who caused all this mess in the first place, petrol prices will go up, people will whine even more as they fill up their cars at the pumps but carry on regardless... etc

*creates a thread replacing pictures of dying animals in oils with pictures of thousands of dead iraqi kids,* but as it's not on "our" doorstep or in our neighbourhood

How do oil rigs just explode?

Just wait until the first hurricane moves through the Gulf, and I'm not talking about a 'oil hurricane' factor, I'm talking about a hurricane moving over abnormally warm water (warmed by the insulation caused by the slick) and shooting up a Category or two before it hits land.

Tony Hayward should be strung up by his balls for his conduct.  So should his predecessor John Browne.  In fact, I almost envy the Chinese method for dealing with gross corruption, because they tend to place their convicted corporate criminals on a hangman's noose or in front of a firing squad.

BP, over the course of the last 3 years, accrued 760 safety violations from OSHA inspections.  SEVEN HUNDRED AND SIXTY, and that's ONLY in US facilities.  God only knows what their track record looks like elsewhere (if they even allow those countries to KEEP a track record).  To contrast, the next biggest safety offender over those 3 years after
BP?  ConocoPhillips, with 8.  Single digit number 8.  Their neglect to put a killswitch to prevent blowouts and their doctoring of safety test documents to hide the fact that the blowout prevention system was experiencing problems on the rig is what caused this all to happen. 

Between this and the Texas City explosion of 2005 (hey, more negligence from BP), they need to either file criminal negligence charges against BP as a corporate entity or just nationalize the US arm of it.  This needs to HURT BP, or they'll do it again and again and again.

And before you go all "Boo hoo think about the pensioners", I'd ask you to visit this site and see how the spill looks over your neck of the woods.

That, and there's a pretty good possibility that there's damage beneath the sea floor.

As I noted Tuesday, there is growing
evidence that BP's oil well - technically called the "well casing" or
"well bore" - has suffered damage beneath the level of the sea floor.

The evidence is growing stronger and
stronger that there is substantial damage beneath the sea floor.
Indeed, it appears that BP officials themselves have admitted to such
damage. This has enormous impacts on both the amount of oil leaking
into the Gulf, and the prospects for quickly stopping the leak this
summer.

On May 31st, the Washington Post noted:

Sources at two companies involved with the well
said that BP also discovered new damage inside the well below the
seafloor and that, as a result, some of the drilling mud that was
successfully forced into the well was going off to the side into rock
formations.

"We discovered
things that were broken in the sub-surface," said a BP official
who spoke on the condition of anonymity. He said that mud was making it
"out to the side, into the formation."

On June
2nd, Bloomberg pointed
out:

Plugging the well is another challenge
even after BP successfully intersects it, Robert Bea, a University of
California Berkeley engineering professor, said. BP has said it believes the well bore to be
damaged, which could hamper efforts to fill it with mud and
set a concrete plug, Bea said.

Bea is an expert in offshore
drilling and a high-level governmental
adviser concerning disasters.

On the same day, the Wall Street
Journal noted
that there might be a leak in BP's well casing 1,000 feet beneath the
sea floor:

BP PLC has concluded that its "top-kill"
attempt last week to seal its broken well in the Gulf of Mexico may
have failed due to a malfunctioning disk inside the well about 1,000 feet below the ocean floor.

***

The
broken disk may have prevented the heavy drilling mud injected into
the well last week from getting far enough down the well to overcome
the pressure from the escaping oil and gas, people familiar with BP's
findings said. They said much of the drilling mud may also have
escaped from the well into the rock formation outside the wellbore.

On
June 3rd, The Canadian Press quoted
the top government official in charge of the response to the oil spill -
Admiral Thad Allen, the commandant of the Coast Guard - as pointing to
the same possibility:

The failure of the
so-called top kill procedure - which entailed pumping mud into the well
at high velocity - suggested "there
actually could be something wrong with the well casing, and there could
be open communication in the strata or the rock formations below the sea
floor," Allen said.

On June 7th, Senator
Bill Nelson told MSNBC that he's investigating reports of oil seeping
up from additional leak points on the seafloor:

Senator
Bill Nelson (D-FL): Andrea we’re looking into something new right now,
that there’s reports of oil that’s seeping up from the seabed… which
would indicate, if that’s true, that the well casing itself is actually
pierced… underneath the seabed.
So, you know, the problems could be just enormous with what we’re
facing.

Andrea Mitchell, MSNBC: Now let me understand better
what you’re saying. If that is true that it is coming up form that
seabed, even the relief well won’t be the final solution to cap this
thing. That means that we’ve got oil gushing up at disparate places
along the ocean floor.

Sen. Nelson: That is possible, unless
you get the plug down low enough, below where the pipe would be
breached.

Indeed, loss of integrity in the
well itself may explain why BP is drilling its relief wells more than
ten
thousand feet beneath the leaking pipes on the seafloor (and see this).

Yesterday,
recently-retired Shell Oil President John Hofmeister said
that the well casing below the sea floor may have been compromised:

[Question] What are the chances that the well
casing below the sea floor has been compromised, and that gas and oil
are coming up the outside of the well casing, eroding the surrounding
soft rock. Could this lead to a catastrophic geological failure,
unstoppable even by the relief wells?

John Hofmeister: This is what some people fear has occurred.
It is also why the "top kill" process was halted. If the casing
is compromised the well is that much more difficult to shut down,
including the risk that the relief wells may not be enough. If the
relief wells do not result in stopping the flow, the next and drastic
step is to implode the well on top of itself, which carries other risks
as well.

As noted
yesterday in The Engineer magazine, an official from Cameron
International - the manufacturer of the blowout preventer for BP's
leaking oil drilling operation - noted that one cause of the failure of
the BOP could have been damage to the well bore:

Steel
casing or casing hanger could have been ejected from the well and blocked the operation of the
rams.

Oil industry expert Rob Cavner believes that the
casing might be damaged beneath the sea floor, noting:

The
real doomsday scenario here… is if that casing gives up, and it does
come through the other strings of pipe. Remember, it is concentric
pipe that holds this well together. If it comes into the formation,
basically, you‘ve got uncontrolled [oil] flow to the sea floor. And
that is the doomsday scenario.

Cavner also said BP must
"keep the well flowing to minimize oil and gas going out into the
formation on the side":

And prominent oil industry
insider Matt Simmons believes that the well casing may have been
destroyed when the oil rig exploded. Simmons was an energy adviser to
President George W. Bush, is an adviser to the Oil Depletion Analysis
Centre, and is a member of the National Petroleum Council and the
Council on Foreign Relations.

On May 26th, Simmons
referred to this issue on MSNBC:

On May 27th, Simmons again
addressed this issue on MSNBC:

And he referred to it again on
Bloomberg on May 28th:

And again on MSNBC on June 7th :

We
have a right to know what's really going on.

Given the impact on
America's people, natural resources and economy, BP and the government
must fully disclose the amount of damage underneath the sea floor, and
what that means for the efforts to cap the well.

The videos are on the main link, if you want to view them.

...

Well nukeallthewhales, if estimates of what's inside the well of the Deepwater Horizon (about 2 billion barrels of oil, IIRC), then that chart's gonna be outdated rather quickly. Because if we try to cap the well with too much damage underneath the floor, it'll just seep out through the floor, ignoring the cap entirely.

Of particular concern is not the oil, but the methane. The Gulf of Mexico has a loooooot of methane underneath its oil deposits.

So yeah, screw BP. Not only is wildlife dead but now there are tens of thousands of jobs being lost; no hopes for fishermen, no hopes for any shops and such on the coast that relied on tourism to strive.

Don't forget that eleven people also lost their lives in the explosion.

Old meme, yes, but I think this is fairly relevant.

Why am I getting a Toy Story vibe from that picture?

Probably because it's a Toy Story meme.

Plenty of blame to go around, none the least of which being EVERYONE being slow to act.  BP for covering up the real extent of the spill FURTHER delaying the reaction.  Obama for taking his sweet time in even condemning it.  BP again for poor maintenance.  Bush for making a certain safety measure voluntary because it was "too costly".    Yeah, there's plenty of blame to spread so I don't think America is JUST mad a BP.