A mini-drama was played out in the afterglow of the final World Cup match this weekend, another contest, but this time man vs nature. At stake was the short term fate of the Gulf of Mexico, and with it the economies of four or five Southern states with a combined 3 trillion GDP. A mile beneath the turbulent, oil stained waters of the Gulf, BP engineers began the complex procedure of removing and replacing the containment cap sitting atop the Blowout Preventer stack. The new cap, with 10 inch thick walls of super hardened steel, is believed capable of withstanding pressures of over 40,000psi. But the process, as viewed live from the ROV cameras working the site, proved painfully slow as the the ROVs were used to methodically loosen and unscrew bolts beneath the gushing flange. I watched, mesmerized, for several hours as the ROV used a tool to unscrew the bolts. The engineers nudged at the component they were trying to remove, but it remained stubbornly stuck, like a loose tooth that would not come out of its socket.
Somewhere, a mile overhead on a humid, floating metal platform, the ROV operator was laboring to complete the complex procedure, one bolt at a time. The ROV put down the bolt removing tool and relied on the mechanical claw to try and jiggle the component lose, pulling and nudging without success. They switched back to their bolt remover and repeated the process until finally the component came off. At a little after 3:00pm EST the ROV pulled back away from the BOP, and as it maneuvered high above it, one could see the dark brown stream of oil and gas gushing from the top. It scudded away, following a yellow cable to find a white metal cage or “basket” sitting on the sea floor, where it used its pincers to remove a pair of large steel hooks, one arm gently handing them to the other as they dangled from convenient grappling ropes. The ROV itself looked like some bizarre undersea creature dreamed up by H.R. Geiger, with two bulbous light-bulb eyes above an exo-skeleton of metal and hydraulic hoses, and two remarkably agile mechanical arms that could be fitted with any number of tools.
As I watched I had the same feeling I experience while watching the Mars rovers scooping up soil millions of miles away on a distant red planet. But here we were working at yet another frontier, for we know less about the deep oceans of our own world than we do about the surface of Mars! The lesson hit home as the machines fumbled in the murky sea, that this was about the limits of human technology and engineering, all of it, the dead sea turtles, dolphins, pelicans, and the lives of those so profoundly affected on the Gulf coast. We were a mile deep in the Gulf because the oil we need to run our machines was no longer cheap and plentiful, or easy to find on land. Oh, we still produce oil and gas in the US each day, but increasingly, we rely on sources that sit on edgy, often inaccessible ground, be it deep beneath the sea or deep behind the borders of foreign nations and cultures where we have sent our young soldiers off to fight. We have reached our limit, and the whole crud encrusted mechanical mess beneath the Gulf was the result. Welcome to the 21st century, where we will spend more and more time discovering our limitations, and struggling to repair the slowly eroding infrastructure of our lives, finding a way to manage the inevitable contraction that is most certainly underway now, in spite of all the nonsense talk of a "recovery."
Somewhere, a mile overhead on a humid, floating metal platform, the ROV operator was laboring to complete the complex procedure, one bolt at a time. The ROV put down the bolt removing tool and relied on the mechanical claw to try and jiggle the component lose, pulling and nudging without success. They switched back to their bolt remover and repeated the process until finally the component came off. At a little after 3:00pm EST the ROV pulled back away from the BOP, and as it maneuvered high above it, one could see the dark brown stream of oil and gas gushing from the top. It scudded away, following a yellow cable to find a white metal cage or “basket” sitting on the sea floor, where it used its pincers to remove a pair of large steel hooks, one arm gently handing them to the other as they dangled from convenient grappling ropes. The ROV itself looked like some bizarre undersea creature dreamed up by H.R. Geiger, with two bulbous light-bulb eyes above an exo-skeleton of metal and hydraulic hoses, and two remarkably agile mechanical arms that could be fitted with any number of tools.
As I watched I had the same feeling I experience while watching the Mars rovers scooping up soil millions of miles away on a distant red planet. But here we were working at yet another frontier, for we know less about the deep oceans of our own world than we do about the surface of Mars! The lesson hit home as the machines fumbled in the murky sea, that this was about the limits of human technology and engineering, all of it, the dead sea turtles, dolphins, pelicans, and the lives of those so profoundly affected on the Gulf coast. We were a mile deep in the Gulf because the oil we need to run our machines was no longer cheap and plentiful, or easy to find on land. Oh, we still produce oil and gas in the US each day, but increasingly, we rely on sources that sit on edgy, often inaccessible ground, be it deep beneath the sea or deep behind the borders of foreign nations and cultures where we have sent our young soldiers off to fight. We have reached our limit, and the whole crud encrusted mechanical mess beneath the Gulf was the result. Welcome to the 21st century, where we will spend more and more time discovering our limitations, and struggling to repair the slowly eroding infrastructure of our lives, finding a way to manage the inevitable contraction that is most certainly underway now, in spite of all the nonsense talk of a "recovery."
At times big events, like the Deepwater catastrophe, will hasten our demise, loosening the locked faults in a single disastrous slide slipping event. But mostly we will continue down the road we have been walking, like lost souls in a Cormac McCarthy novel by that same name.
While all this incredible engineering was working round the clock to try and stop the oil leak, the Internet continued to buzz with talk of ruptured and expanding sea floor near the well head, and the imminent release of a massive methane gas bubble similar to those that had cause extinction events in prehistorical eras. Some sites claimed the Navy was “evacuating” all its ships from the Gulf under a cover operation by sending them, (46 ships and 7,000 Marines), to Costa Rica on a drug interdiction mission. That's a lot of muscle for drug hunting. Another site claimed a brigade of Canadian Engineers, skilled in urban control operations from Bosnia, was now standing to in Edmonton on 72 hour notice to deploy to the Gulf Coast. (The implication was that they would somehow not be bound by US law when it came to operations involving US population there.) A third site exhorted people to get out of the gulf region altogether, before the catastrophe moved into its next evolution of doom. Another urged us all to withdraw ample cash from the bank and store food and water for a few weeks because massive solar flares were about to knock down the power grid. The “gubmint” was, of course, hiding all this from the people.
I found it odd, if such disaster was imminent and the Navy was on the run, that tens of thousands of people were gathering on Gulf beaches that weekend to watch an air show put on by the military and featuring the Blue Angels! The doomers would explain this away by saying “they” were intentionally luring people to the coast—to get rid of them.
While all this incredible engineering was working round the clock to try and stop the oil leak, the Internet continued to buzz with talk of ruptured and expanding sea floor near the well head, and the imminent release of a massive methane gas bubble similar to those that had cause extinction events in prehistorical eras. Some sites claimed the Navy was “evacuating” all its ships from the Gulf under a cover operation by sending them, (46 ships and 7,000 Marines), to Costa Rica on a drug interdiction mission. That's a lot of muscle for drug hunting. Another site claimed a brigade of Canadian Engineers, skilled in urban control operations from Bosnia, was now standing to in Edmonton on 72 hour notice to deploy to the Gulf Coast. (The implication was that they would somehow not be bound by US law when it came to operations involving US population there.) A third site exhorted people to get out of the gulf region altogether, before the catastrophe moved into its next evolution of doom. Another urged us all to withdraw ample cash from the bank and store food and water for a few weeks because massive solar flares were about to knock down the power grid. The “gubmint” was, of course, hiding all this from the people.
I found it odd, if such disaster was imminent and the Navy was on the run, that tens of thousands of people were gathering on Gulf beaches that weekend to watch an air show put on by the military and featuring the Blue Angels! The doomers would explain this away by saying “they” were intentionally luring people to the coast—to get rid of them.
These are the kind of outrageous and wild imaginings that cycle on the bitstream these days, as if the simple reality of the Deepwater Horizon event was not frightening enough. We have seen hundreds of miles of coastline fouled from Texas to Florida and millions of barrels of oil dumped into the Gulf to create a toxic methane-petro-stew of our great fertile fishing grounds there. Lives have been lost, businesses and livelihoods ended, a way of life altered forever for tens of thousands of locals. They have enough to worry about without lumping in mega-methane eruptions and tsunamis. The hope is that this collective national nightmare will be over soon, with a new containment cap that will stop or divert the leaking oil to producing ships above, and a successful deep kill operation from the relief well in the next 30 days.
Let us all hope the engineers at the other end of the wires controlling those ROVs get the job done, and then we can sort all this out and see what we, as a nation, may have learned. As for the Gulf of Mexico? Perhaps the blow it sustained may not be fatal, but how much more abuse can the Gulf take? And what new mantra will Fox news puppets and Sara Palin come up with now that we have seen the full measure of what we get with “Drill, Baby, Drill?”
Let us all hope the engineers at the other end of the wires controlling those ROVs get the job done, and then we can sort all this out and see what we, as a nation, may have learned. As for the Gulf of Mexico? Perhaps the blow it sustained may not be fatal, but how much more abuse can the Gulf take? And what new mantra will Fox news puppets and Sara Palin come up with now that we have seen the full measure of what we get with “Drill, Baby, Drill?”
