BP's efforts to control their gusher in the Gulf of Mexico has hit another little snag. Undersea robots with diamond saws are cutting through the pipe, in order to fit it with what even they concede would be a leaky cap. In the process of doing this, one of the saws is currently stuck. OK, I understand that the pressures five miles beneath the sea are pretty intense, but isn't the pipe they're cutting spewing oil? Oil that has well-known lubricating qualities? How could it be stuck? "If at first you don't succeed, try again. Fail better," is starting to look like BP's motto.The ongoing crisis would be a comedy of errors, if the consequences weren't so deadly serious. The way of life everyone knew in the Gulf of Mexico may very well be over for at least a generation, if not more, and irreplaceable wetlands and species could be wiped out. Given what's at stake here, one thing is becoming clearer and clearer -- at least to me -- we shouldn't have been doing this deepwater drilling in the first place. A lot of attention has been given to the concept of prevention, but humans being what humans are, we can't make disaster impossible. We can make it less likely, but that's what we thought we did. Turns out we didn't. Corners were cut, laws were likely broken, safety measures were ignored. And, even if every precaution had been taken, if all the laws had been obeyed -- in fact, if BP had gone beyond the requirements and put extra safeguards in place -- no one would honestly be able to say that a disaster like this had been made completely impossible. And we never will. Machines break down, people screw up, the earth itself does unpredictable things. Preventing petroleum contaminations like this are extremely important, but it's only 50% of what should be our concern and the focus of our research. The other 50% should be mitigation and we haven't done a damned thing in that area. The unthinkable has happened and we have no idea what to do. Turns out we got way ahead of ourselves on this one. We're just poking around in the dark.
But there are consequences other than the wetlands and the species and the livelihoods and the public health. There is the law. For their part, the Obama administration is moving to see to it that those consequences come through... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]
