BP Successful Connecting Tube to Siphoning Up Gulf Oil

You hear that groan?

That’s the sound of the environmental whackos that were hoping BP would fail in trying to plug up the oil leak at Deep Water Horizon. They were gearing up to parley this unfortunate accident to stop all offshore oil drilling forever.

These same creeps successfully scared the country into not developing more nuclear power plants after the 3 Mile Island accident and this oil rig explosion in the Gulf was another opportunity to kill the country’s pursuit of developing our own domestic oil supply.

From The New York Post:

In the first significant progress in nearly a month toward stopping a massive Gulf of Mexico oil leak, BP said a mile-long tube was siphoning most of the crude from a blown well to a tanker ship after three days of wrestling to get the stopgap measure into place on the seafloor.

BP spokesman Mark Proegler said the contraption was hooked up successfully and sucking most of the oil from the leak.

Engineers remotely guiding robot submersibles had worked since Friday to place the tube into a 21-inch pipe nearly a mile below the sea.

Previous attempts to use emergency valves and a 100-ton container had failed to stop the leak that has spilled millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf, threatening sea life, commercial fishing and the coastal tourism industry from Louisiana to Florida.

BP PLC has also been burning small amounts of floating oil and spraying chemical dispersants above and below the surface.

Researchers, meanwhile, warned today that miles-long underwater plumes of oil from the spill could poison and suffocate sea life across the food chain, with damage that could endure for a decade or more.

Researchers have found more underwater plumes of oil than they can count from the blown-out well, said Samantha Joye, a professor of marine sciences at the University of Georgia. She said careful measurements taken of one plume showed it stretching for 10 miles, with a 3-mile width.
The hazardous effects of the plume are twofold. Joye said the oil itself can prove toxic to fish swimming in the sea, while vast amounts of oxygen are also being sucked from the water by microbes that eat oil.
Full story

Via New York Post


The Last Tradition