Once the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, from the well known as Deepwater Horizon, was established the owners of the well BP originally
estimated the leakage at 1,000 bbl/day. NOAA and other govt bodies
disagreed saying that it was more like 5,000 bbl/day, which BP accepted. BP
refused requests from scientists to use sophisticated instruments to gain a more accurate picture
“The answer is no to that,” a BP spokesman, Tom Mueller, said on Saturday. “We’re not going to take any extra efforts now to calculate flow there at this point. It’s not relevant to the response effort, and it might even detract from the response effort.”
Undeterred associate professor of mechanical engineering Steven Wereley
analysed videotape of the seafloor plume using a technique called particle image velocimetry and concluded that the leak was more like 70,000 bbl/day. As they said, it wasnt rocket science - all they needed to know was the diameter of the hole and the flow rate and apply basic geometry. So why all the ducking and weaving?
Questions remain why it's taken this long for evidence of a much bigger spill to come to light. The calculations above are elementary and could have been undertaken as soon as BP obtained pictures of the leak.
Perhaps the executives of BP, Halliburton and Transocean are innocent of all technical details and maybe even of elementary geometry. (It would have been interesting if at the Senate hearing where each of them blamed the other two they were asked the formula for a cylinder and its relevance to the size of the spill.)
But even if we excuse the executives' lack of technical knowledge, it's very hard to believe that the smart engineers who work for them didn't have a good feel for the extent of the leak early on. If they did, why didn't they speak up?
People are
becoming angry at the way this multinational miner has been allowed to run rough shod over national interests
“We’ ve got to stop relying on BP, we need transparency not cover-up . . . we need our best oceanographers on the site. BP has been blocking people, saying we’ve got it under control, and as we know they don’t. They’re running a misinformation campaign.
Said House of Rep
Edward J
Markey
"It's obvious they are trying to limit information to protect their economic liability,"
.."BP has mismanaged this entire incident from day one," he said. "They should not be trusted."
