But that expansion coming out of the pipe is legitimate, the stuff isn't going to get smaller in volume again, so what they observe in the video is real volume. I think these guys are probably right.

What makes you think they know? BP is a big operation, but much of what they do is contracted out, and those contractors aren't going to tell BP any more than they have to. They're all covering there asses too.

I think the idea is that a lot of the volume is gas rather than oil. When you watch the video you can see the oil/gas mix change every few seconds as the plume changes from black to silvery bubbles. I guess a "natural gas slick" isn't as bad as an oil slick.

New Scientist has a discussion of the amount here; the answers generally fall in the 50 to 100 thousand barrel per day range.

Right now the thing to do is stop the flow, but let us not forget: eleven people died on that rig, and the blow-out preventer was supposed to prevent that, too.

Yeah, maybe more than anything what strikes me is the reluctance to admit what they don't know. I accept that this is pretty deeply entrenched in (corporate) culture. But they're throwing up a lot of weird delays that don't make sense in today's media world: after the first containment dome failed, they took a 48-hour breather to decide what to do next.

By way of comparison, the Times Square Car Bomb fiasco resulted in an arrest in 53 hours. It's not that a lot of important auxiliary work wasn't being done: they've cleared a bunch of wreckage, and at 5,000' it makes sense if things move a little slower.

But, in terms of the 'body language' of a PR campaign, these few weeks of BP trying to manage the fallout has felt very crude and blatant. The assessment which rings most true to me is that they are making a bunch of distracting noise while doing the only thing that has an established shot at working: digging relief wells to plug the whole thing.

I think overall, that's where my interest lies: the specifics of how much is spilling, when will it stop, how much will it affect things, etc-- all that is pretty much whatever it will be. I don't eat seafood, I don't live anywhere near the gulf coast. But how we perceive information intrigues me, and, particularly, the changing face of what it means to 'be transparent' or to share information. I think delaying things, releasing limited information (a few 60 second clips from their ROVs? why not a few hours, crowdsource that shit; etc) does BP a PR disservice. But they might have gotten away with it 5 years ago. That's an interesting change to me.

And, at the same time, there seems to me to be a (bipartisan) trend towards moral outrage coming to outweigh logical, direct interpretations of law: tea partiers and ecoterrorists have similar trajectories, in a way. So it's social and cultural consequences, maybe, that I'm after. After the Exxon Valdez adventure, the initial punitive damages were set at one years' profit. That didn't stick, but it raises the question: what sort of ecological disaster is significant enough to put a multinational corporation on the scale of BP or Exxon out of business? How do you begin to draw that line?

Political posturing in an effort to gain favor for the next election.

Not even close, apples and oranges.

You can't and will not be able to put a large multi-national out of business. If it is destruction of the company you are after it is not going to happen, the best you could hope for is that it would be swallowed up, in business terms, by another company, and business would go on as usual. But is that the goal? Is that the end we want? No. I don't think so.

I noticed a lot of the pictures on various websites, of every political stripe, are watermarked Greenpeace.

I was sent a great PDF with some fantastic pics, and a subsequent extensive commentary. If I could figure out a way to post a link to it I would. The pics were great. I forwarded it to my friend in the UK who was an engineer on Off-shore drilling rigs for 15 years. He had some interesting comments as well as to what happened.

Eyewitness testimony from CBS's 60 Minutes. Obviously, these failures are not accidents:
Deepwater Horizon's Blowout Part 1 of 2 and Deepwater Horizon's Blowout Part 2 of 2

BP: effort to plug Gulf oil spill going as planned
Link
Not sure what they could do, but the clocks been ticking for over a month.

I wonder what "heavy mud" is?

The humans are apparently in way over their heads on this one.

Sorry everyone, this is partly my fault. I've been using oil for years, so I feel somewhat responsible.

Link
Looks like they are, hopefully, having some success with getting this under control. The timing couldn't have been better either.

Well, they could have done it a month ago. I think that would have been better.

Smart ass. :rolleyes: I was referring to Obama's press conference.