h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

the pipe was straingt up and down

connected at the bottom to the well and at the top to the rig

when it sank, it didnt sink straight down, but drifted off a bit and as it went down the pipe was still conected so it twisted and bent and burst, so when it came to rest it was still connected and oil was leaking out of ruptures along the pipe, so they had to cut it off at the base to get only one point of spill rather than trying to plug countless leaks along the length of the pipe

the best way to deal with it would have been to remove the rig from the pipe at the surface, but the coast gaurd tried to put out the fire instead of letting it burn

they poured water on it and flooded the rig causing it to sink

if it could have been disconnected at the surface, they could have contained the spill better

as it was oil was leaking from cracks all along the 1 mile pipe

Also, the well (in the ocean floor that the pipe was connected to) is meant to have fail safe mechanisms in it that shut off the oil coming from under the sea floor in the case of such an accident. In this case they didn't work.

Unconnected?

1. BP CEO Tony Hayward has faced fresh criticism for taking time off to go sailing in the Solent instead of dealing with the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/us_and_canada/10359120.stm

2. Oil is washing up on beaches in Hampshire after a pipeline leaked in Southampton Water on Sunday.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/hampshire/10366153.stm

When I was a wee lad, back in the day, my mum used to buy stuff from Amway. Don't ask me why, I was a wee lad and never asked her. Anyhoo, she used to have this stuff called Liquid Organic Cleaner, or LOC for short. It was great stuff (according to my mum), you could use it for washing up, cleaning clothes, getting the grease off my trousers when I'd been on my bike.... HOLD THE PHONE!!

Getting grease off my trousers- organic cleaner??? Hmm, could this be the product we've been dreaming of??

Get me Obama on the line, right away!

Sudden repressed memory...

We never used washing up liquid when I was young. My dad would (ahem) 'acquire' an industrial degreasing product from the factory he worked at.

ed wants to swarfega the gulf

*nods towards the OP*

>>
Call me a hard-hearted bastard, but I’m finding it difficult to summon up the sympathy demanded by the institutional investors now threatening to sue BP. They claim that the company inflated its share price by misrepresenting its safety record(1). I don’t know whether this is true, but I do know that the investors did all they could not to find out. They have just been presented with the bill for the years they spent shouting down anyone who questioned the company.

They might not have been warned by BP, but they were warned repeatedly by environmental groups and ethical investment funds. Every year, at BP’s annual general meetings, they were invited to ask the firm to provide more information about the environmental and social risks it was taking. Every year they voted instead for BP to keep them in the dark. While relying on this company for a disproportionate share of their income (BP pays 12% of all UK firms’ dividends), they refused to hold it to account.

...

In 2002, after one of its analysts conducted his own research into the safety risks that BP was taking in Alaska, Henderson Global Investors dropped BP from its socially responsible investment funds (this begs the question of what it was doing there in the first place, but never mind)(11). Henderson published its decision and the result was a stampede out of BP stocks by … nobody. The other investment companies chose to ignore Henderson’s warning and rely instead on the oil firm’s assurances.
<<

and so on.

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2010/06/21/bps-dumb-investors/

I caught the Panorama special on the Gulf Oil spill last night. Doesn't Tony Hayward look a bit like a rabbit caught it a car's headlights? He looked totally out of his depth. Fall guy, perhaps?

Does Obama still refer to BP as British Petroleum? The company was bought by Amoco (American Oil Corporation) and renamed BP Amoco, later renamed as simply BP. The "B" doesn't stand for anything anymore.

Or maybe it's Baracks Pissed!

It was the other way round - BP bought Amoco (I was doing some IT work for them at the time)

I thought people should have a look at this article:

http://www.financialpost.com/Avertible+catastrophe/3203808/story.html

According to this, the Dutch have great expertise in dealing with oil spills and offered to help out the US with manpower and equipment for free, but were turned down.

I understand the Russians also offered a deep sea submersible but were turned down. Of course the US Navy have their own submersibles fitted with robot arms designed to work on sunken submarines ... but they weren't used either.

The Russian one was one of only three able to work at the depth of the leakage though.

Well seeing as this test drill seems to have been finally capped...

d'ya think they struck oil then?