Most Amusing.

Now where did I leave the popcorn, its the only proper way to enjoy watching massive destrucion with a good snack.

Sorry double post.

Not much going on as far as I can see. There's a robot and a bit of oil behind it. Still, terrible.

There are a lot of live cams out there, not sure how they end up on the internet though. Watched a security cam in a pizza shop once, and it was quite entertaining at times, like when I saw a guy facing away from everyone else in the shop, but not the camera and pick his nose.

Anyone know where I'd go to make the video work? As I said I'm on Firefox with AdBlock plus.

Did you try using chrome,Safari,or opera?

Ah, good, it works in IE

Edit: I find it weird that I'm watching exactly what's happening at the bottom of the ocean on the other side of the world...

Many years ago in a meeting....

Jim: "Hey Tom, what if one of our rigs gets blown out of the water due to safety oversights and poor management and we end up spewing zillions of gallons of oil into the ocean, effectively screwing up the ecosystem for the next 20+years?"

Tom: "Yeah right!!! When monkeys fly out my butt!!!" ...entire room erupts in laughter

Great for one of those days when you're just not feeling depressed enough...

Pass.

I expect that soon Kanye will be telling us on national television that the president doesn't care about black people.

Well, at least the spill looks less dramatically huge from this camera angle.

Well, apparently the idiots at BP are going to "attempt" to stop the leak today. Heavy Mud and Cement. They claim, "We are going to Force Feed the pipe to stop the leak. There is a 70% chance this will work."

Yeah...ok.....good luck with that......I'll be waiting for the news to state...."Hey, it didn't work. Aren't you surprised?"

I don't think BP has quite enough data or figures or numbers to correctly fix this. We need another month.

How did they calculate it to be 70% anyway?


Also... A new day, a new camera angle.

83% of statistics are pulled out of thin air.

Does it include that one, too?

Of course

http://paulrademacher.com/oilspill/#

I don't know if that's been posted yet, but if so, my bad. This is pretty interesting though.

So the dark substance is the oil, while the lighter substance is the cement..

wow.

None of these oil companies should be drilling this deep if they can't plug a leak like this. Somebody somewhere knew something like this could happen and if there was any doubt about fixing it then they should have had some nads and not drilled.

Now everyone's standing around pointing fingers at each other while they're throwing darts at a wall trying to come up with a plan to fix it.

Whizzzzz....*thunk

Jim: "Hey Slim, what'd it hit this time?"

Slim: "Hmmmm...it says to give the press a random percentage about us actually plugging that thing up."

funny though.. none of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dredging#Major_dredging_companies have to date been contacted to provide expertise or materials to help.
Appearently, using the best is just too expensive..

All three companies are still in negotiations with BP, Halliburton and/or who ever else needs to pull a wallet.

So they're pumping in the cement now or something like that?

Hey, if you compare it to London my house is like a mile out from the oil spill.

Actually, thats all oil coming out.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/us_and_canada/10160267.stm is the BBC page about the concrete plan, it's got a cool interactive diagram thing at the bottom.

Let me be devil's advocate.

First, Old Andy, dredging companies are unable to operate at that depths, we are talking about 1500 m. There are not much they can do. The physics itself is very strange, hydrates are forming, the pressure is huge, temperature are less than 2-3 deg celsius. Their boats cannot do anything at that depth ranges.

I can assure you that BP is using very competent people to kill this well. Halliburton, despite being my competitor, have very competent staff. My company is involved as well. This is far from being an obvious situation to handle. For example, you have to calculate that at 1500 m, the pressure is around 155 bars, more than 2200 psi, pounds per sq.inch. So pumping cement or heavy drilling mud involves using very high pressure equipement. The cement must be able to thicken inside salty water, with very low temperature. The big risk I see with their 'top kill procedure' is to fracture the formation, fracture will extend in cone around the well and put the sea bottom surface in communication with the well and then, it gets worst. I experienced that in 199on a well and it turned nasty when gas started to bubble 100 m around the rig. But practically, this is probably one of the best option.

I have been involved in risk and uncertainties evaluation in drilling, it's actually one of my area of competences. When drilling a well, a probabilistic risk evaluation has to be carried. If the risk is too high in some domain, one has to find a way to mitigate or prevent it. Problem, the way people are carrying these risk evaluation is based not on engineering input but on knowledge input from experts. I worked on a software (very modestly) which was using the engineering input and automatized this risk calculation thus avoiding human bias. It's very difficult to put in the mentality of average driller, especially in the US, to use this application.
In addition, don't forget what I said, people wants CHEAP OIL, they are not ready to pay 159 $/barrels, with an oil at 1$ per liter. They want to pay the oil the same price than spring water. They want to keep using their big SUVs. At the end, any human activity is a trade off between risk and cost. Increasing security on deep offshore wells is very possible. One well will cost 150 millions instead of 75 millions US$, that's all. It will impact on field development costs and finally on the consumer.

Studies have shown that fake numbers are as good as real numbers, you know.