It’s still happening. That’s the most tragic part of this entire weeklong oil spill fiasco. It is still coming out of the hole and leaking into the ocean. Did you know that? Doubtful. This is not a small problem that is going to go away. It is still happening and nobody seems to have any ideas about how to make it stop. In the past there have been horrible oil spills where a tanker tips over and there are millions of gallons that leak into the ocean. That is tragic and horrible. But it was a finite amount and people knew what they were dealing with.

Right now we have an un-checked hole deep under the ocean that is gushing thousands of gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico. I heard a BP executive talk about how they would be building some kind of sci-fi type contraption that would go down and stop the fuel from coming out by injecting concrete or something. Apparently that didn’t happen.

And now I read that there is a lot of evidence/ indication that it won’t be happening any time soon, and that this slip-up could become a disaster on par with what happened in Alaska when the Exxon Valdez crashed.

If the near-term fixes that BP is trying for don’t work, there is mounting concern that they will have to dig two other wells which would take more like 3 months. At the current 5,000 gallon/ day rate of leaking, that would mean eclipsing the Exxon Valdez in about two months. Not to mention destroying any political momentum that Obama’s plan for expanding offshore drilling had or wanted to cash in anytime soon. It may, however, shut Sarah Palin up. Spill, baby, Spill!

Right now the robots are trying to turn the valve to stop the spill. It’s not happening. The next plan is to build a few huge funnels to put on top of the well upside down like a cap or a thimble. Then pump the oil up to a ship, where BP will process and sell it. BP is spending $6 million per day and doing everything they can. Wah, wah.

This is the same kind of crap that has been happening all over the world but isn’t publicized. If this had happened off the coast of Brazil we would have read about it in the WORLD section of the New York Times and that would be it. Oh, wait- that did happen. Expect months of coverage as this unfolds- it’s basically a war-zone. It’s a war on the Earth zone.

This is the kind of thing that happens when you go underwater to dig up crude oil. It’s not a punishment or anything, it’s just a consequence. Things happen. And we can’t find an easy fix, now, for this one. What are we going to do?

"Now we're going to take what we know and expand it and push the edges of the technology for this never-tried-before deepwater application," said BP spokesman Daren Beaudo.

Stop trying to make yourselves sound like heroes and be honest and humble. Something like, “We’re sorry that our technologies didn’t work. We’re now going to invent new ones to try and fix this problem. We hope it works."

Photo Credit: U. S. Coast Guard