Interesting article re the cause of the blowout. Apparently it was a methane bubble, the scourge of drillers, as they were changing over from drilling to production.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/worl...article1561343/

Money translates to freedom, power, and influence. BP, with billions on hand, is very free, powerful and influential. That it used that freedom, power and influence to increase profits by sidestepping both internal industry standards and government regulation, and used them repeatedly to avoid penalties when caught, seem to be a matter of record:

http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2010/05/bp_spent_millions_to_evade_saf.php

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/may/02/bp-deepwater-horizon-oil-spills

I'm not saying they intended to have an explosion, wreck a rig, get people killed, or pollute the gulf. Drunk drivers don't usually intend to get into wrecks even though they roll the dice every night they drive home inebriated. I suspect that BP fully expected to stay lucky and to get away with their lax attitude. Besides their mandate as a business is profit, and who known more about drilling for oil than they do? The writers of industry standards and regulations don't have that sort of expertise. Not in drilling safety, and certainly not in making a profit. Unfortunately mother nature didn't see it that way.

It isn't like BP is a mom-and-pop operation barely making enough money to keep the owners sleeping indoors and fed. Yes, safety is expensive, and every dollar spent compliance with standards and regulation is a dollar that can't be reinvested into the business, or used to make investors happy.

Anybody have any actual information about what's going on with oil land fall and fumes? Media coverage is, as usual, crap.

The MSM coverage isn't really bad. You have to understand that this situation is simply too large, too widespread, too complicated, to say much of anything that isn't so narrowly focused, parochial, that it contradicts the situation somewhere else. Or, going the other way, so generally applicable to this huge situation that it is little more than a string of banalities. That and the MSM is saddled with spoon feeding people with the attention span of a gnat.

It is a big situation that can't be meaningfully explained in two minutes.

A decent place to start:
http://www.deepwaterhorizonresponse.com/go/site/2931/

But everyone is going to have to accept that you are going to have to dig and get information about it one piece at a time. Then again, if you're willing to wait a few years, I'm sure someone will write a book that will put everything in one spot for easy study.

NPR is reporting the daily flow is more like 70,000 barrels a day, not 5000. Apparently thats an Exxon Valdez sized spill every 4 days. And they don't know where the oil is, as most of it is under the surface. Better buy some oysters and shrimp now and throw it in the freezer. I imagine prices will go up eventually.

A good place to find authoritative maps:
http://www.deepwaterhorizonresponse.com/go/doctype/2931/53979/

This is a page off of the crisis center site is cited before but it gets you there directly. Both status and forecast maps are presented in pdf format that you can zoom in on.

I was listening to an interview with an attorney for several of the deepwater horizon employees. There was a great deal of pressure on the drilling crew because they were behind schedule. At one one, they drilled through a rubber gasket and there were handfuls of rubber coming up at the platform. They asked a supervisor about it and he said not to worry.
There will be lots of blame to spread around.
I think the federal governments response to this has been despicable, but the oil companies have got to bear the real blame. Unfortunately, the consequences only are paid by the American people, especially the folks on the gulf coast. I truly hope this can get arrested before it gets too out of hand. If it isn't already.

The net rumor mill is abuzz that there are plans in the works to evacuate elderly and respiratory impaired people from areas around the Gulf. Anyone have any real information on it?

This thing may be getting really nasty here shortly.

Exactly what would you have done differently?

Failure to prepare is not an excuse. There is a direct analog to "preparedness" here - when going on a long hike in the woods your don't get excused after getting lost because you forgot to bring a compass or map, or didn't bother to check the weather forecast.

That's what happened here. A few days before the spill the government announced intent to expand offshore drilling - in effect, they announced a hike in the woods. What we've discovered is that this walk was without compass, map, radio, etc.

The fact that there is nothing that can be done now does not excuse failure to prepare when there was opporunity.