30 April 2010
Drill Baby, Drill
(Deepwater Horizon burning prior to sinking. Photo Rueters/Coast Guard)
If nothing else, the month ends with all of us stuck between a rock and a hard spot. I will grant you that I am querulous at the end of this calendar box. The San Jose Sharks beat my Red Wings in game one in the quest for Lord Stanley’s cup, their lead commencing with a quick wrist shot from Joe Pavelski during a power play at 9:05 of the first period that beat Jimmy Howard stick-side. California doesn't even have ice, for Christ sake.
The shot deepened my mood, attention wavering between the computer and the television. There was nothing I could do. On the screen, my guys were dogged but down. On the computer, Vietnamese were parading around in commemoration of their victory; I was powerless about that, too.
Images of Saigon flickered through my brain. It was fifteen years ago that the Congressman conned me into making a speech of congratulation to the Communist mayor of the city. I clicked through the accounts of this anniversary and was alarmed to see that some avaricious capitalists are seeking again to place a casino on the Gettysburg battlefield.
I did write the Pennsylvania legislators about that, though I suspect as a resident of Virginia, they will take my supplications lightly. It was our visit there that made the place historic, though, and they should be grateful.
Another click and I saw that my pal T. Boone Pickens had written me to solicit my support for a sensible energy policy, and I took his suggestion seriously. I addressed a form letter to the two Senators and that asshole Congressman who purport to represent me. I fully expect to get form letters back from them presently.
With modern technology, I suspect we could take all the people out of the democratic process and simply have algorithms on our laptops to send electrons to one another without any human involvement at all.
In a few dozen minutes this morning we will all be hurtling somewhere in our cars, burning gasoline, even as the hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude oil are washing up in the Gulf.
The explosion and collapse of the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform and the resultant release of the petroleum from the deep is likely to surpass the mess left by the Exxon Valdez up in Alaska.
Louisiana is reeling from the impact of another blow that in its way is as extraordinary as Katrina, this one self-inflicted.
“Drill, Baby, Drill” was the mantra and it sounds stupid this morning. I have always had a healthy respect for technology, but it is shaken this morning.
The Deepwater Horizon was as sophisticated an enterprise as is possible to imagine. The floating platform cost $350 million to construct back in 2001, and with the helicopters and support ships and all the rest cost around a million bucks a day to operate.
Eleven men are presumed dead from the explosion and the subsequent fire that raged for two days, the incandescent flames melting right through the helo-platform, before the thing sank in 5,000 feet of water.
The rig represented the cutting edge of drilling technology. A triple-redundant computer system kept the free-floating rig in place, since the well is so far down that no physical tether could work. The system is the linear descendent of the technology used on the Glomar Explorer to raise the Soviet Golf-class submarine in the Pacific years ago.
The technology, like the one that allows me to bombard our legislators with electrons, is breathtaking. In addition to the marvel of the control system that kept the massive rig bobbing in precisely the right position in the water column, there were multiple redundant safety features to prevent any chance of leaks.
The pressure control mechanisms are termed “Blowout Preventers,” or “BOP’s” for short. In the event of calamity, the engineers could trip them as required in an escalating fashion that would end with the automatic activation of a Deadman system that would seal the hole.
It was foolproof. Unfortunately there were no fools involved, just the raw power of the pressure contained in the oil dome far below.
Eleven men are missing and presumed dead, and the Gulf shores are going to be black with crude.
There are all sorts of schemes to mitigate the damage, but the bottom line is that it will take weeks to position another rig to drill a new hole that will intersect the one spewing oil. It will be a marvel of technology, and it will take a couple months to accomplish.
In the meantime, we will all motor along to go about our normal lives.
I was wary of the grand plan to get at the oil contained on the coastal shelves, but supportive of the effort to lurch toward new energy reserves. I don’t know now.
As usual, we are too limited in our attention span. Drill Baby, Drill. On the big screen, I saw that the Sharks held on for a one-goal victory. Nothing I could do about that, either. Damn.
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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