My niece posted on Facebook: “Congrats BP it only took 104 days.”
I wrote the following, posted it as a comment on her post, and then thought, “What difference does it make? Her little friends will just call me an asshole.” Well, they’d be right, but they’d also be stupid. So anyway, I deleted it. But here is my deleted response to her snarky little remark:
It always amazes me how non-engineers think something like this can be stopped by essentially snapping one’s fingers. It takes time to design, build, and test such things. Plus the handicap of working by remote control a mile down in the dark water. Plus the handicap of the government sticking its fingers in where they did not belong and actually slowing things down when they should have left well enough alone (no suspension of the Jones Act, strict enforcement of maritime safety rules, EPA obstruction of state efforts to build sand berms to keep the oil out of the marshes, etc.). Frankly, I think it is amazing that BP were able to control the blowout in less than a year. That is the real story for any engineer worth his salt.
According to the New York Times the other day, the vast majority of the leaked oil has either dispersed or evaporated. So the water is already clean. The best estimate of the total amount of oil that escaped into the Gulf, by the way, from the start of the leak to the capping of the well, was that it was the equivalent of dropping 0.00012 milliliters of oil into your bathtub. What caused all the trouble was wind, tides, currents, and the fact that it was leaking so close to the coast. Well, that and the fact that the .gov wouldn’t let the state of Louisiana actually do anythnig proactive to keep the oil off the beaches.
If you stop listening to the government line for five minutes, you will suddenly realize that the “disaster” was fairly limited in its scope, and was probably made worse by government intervention that by anything BP itself did either before or after the rig sank.
But this would be wasted on the mush-filled brains of today’s young Øbama Youth.
Well, if she was in charge, they would’ve…
Yep. I love my niece but she has a head stuffed with four years of el-ed. It’ll take her awhile to unlearn some of that.
I loved two of my nieces, right up until they voted for that sonofabitch in Washington.
The really funny part is their granddad found out how they voted and banned their asses from family functions.
I love my dad. He makes me look politically correct.