‘Top Kill’ Fails to Plug Leak; BP Readies Next Approach

From the New York Times:

In another serious setback in the effort to stem the flow of oil gushing from a well a mile beneath the Gulf of Mexico, BP engineers said Saturday that the “top kill” technique had failed and, after consultation with government officials, they had decided to move on to another strategy.

Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer for exploration and production, said at a news conference that the engineers would try once again to solve the problem with a containment cap and that it could take four to seven days for the device to be in place.

“After three full days of attempting top kill, we now believe it is time to move on to the next of our options,” Mr. Suttles said.

The abandonment of the top kill technique, the most ambitious effort yet to plug the well, was the latest in a series of failures. First, BP failed in efforts to repair a blowout preventer with submarine robots. Then its initial efforts to cap the well with a containment dome failed when it became clogged with a frothy mix of frigid water and gas. Efforts to use a hose to gather escaping oil have managed to catch only a fraction of the spill.

More here.

They really have no idea what they're doing, do they?

Never mind, for the moment, anyway, that BP obviously had no pre-existing plan for dealing with such a disaster, or that the federal government, under both Bush and Obama, allowed them to proceed drilling this failed well without such a plan, which is required by law: the argument that BP ought to be in charge of the disaster response is based on the notion that BP, and not the government, is much more familiar with the science and technology of deep water drilling.

Well okay. But that doesn't in any way alter the fact that they really have no idea what they're doing. That is, the argument that puts BP in charge doesn't hold up. It's way past time for Obama to federalize this, and I'm really starting to think that the reason he doesn't has more to do with his pro-establishment deference to corporate power and authority than it does with who best understands the science.

Obama is well aware that his real bosses are not the American people.

But even from that perspective, this is totally fucked. Obama was allowed to rise to power by a corporate establishment that tapped him to clean up the mess made by the Bush administration. It was implicitly understood that part of the job was reining in some of the grosser examples of corporate power run amok, which is bad for business. But Obama isn't doing his job. This is way out of hand. And the same forces that got him into the Oval Office will just as surely kick him out if he doesn't get his shit together ASA fucking P. And then we'll have yet another psychotic demagogue Republican calling the shots.

I don't know if this country could survive another four years of that.

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