BP pipeline hemorrhaging oil, similes
Plugging BP’s catastrophic oil well leak in the Gulf of Mexico, as you may have heard, is difficult. But how difficult, exactly? Nearly a month ago, BP America Chairman and President Lamar McKay compared it to performing "open heart surgery at 5,000 feet in the dark with robot-controlled submarines." In the weeks since, the executives, ...
Plugging BP's catastrophic oil well leak in the Gulf of Mexico, as you may have heard, is difficult. But how difficult, exactly? Nearly a month ago, BP America Chairman and President Lamar McKay compared it to performing "open heart surgery at 5,000 feet in the dark with robot-controlled submarines."
Plugging BP’s catastrophic oil well leak in the Gulf of Mexico, as you may have heard, is difficult. But how difficult, exactly? Nearly a month ago, BP America Chairman and President Lamar McKay compared it to performing "open heart surgery at 5,000 feet in the dark with robot-controlled submarines."
In the weeks since, the executives, engineers, government officials, and sundry experts who have descended on the Gulf may or may not be much closer to fixing this thing, but they have gotten pretty good at describing just how difficult fixing it is. Here’s BP Managing Director Bob Dudley:
"Like arm-wrestling between two equally strong people."
Energy analyst Byron King, riffing on McKay’s original:
"It’s like doing brain surgery using robots under a mile of water with equipment that’s got 30,000 horsepower of energy inside of it."
Bruce Bullock, director of the Maguire Energy Institute at Southern Methodist University:
"It’s kind of like pushing toothpaste through an obstacle course."
James J. O’Brien, professor emeritus of Meteorology and Oceanography at Florida State University:
"It’s like trying to unclog a toilet while you’re standing on a ten-foot ladder with a long stick attached to the plunger."
Thomas Bickel, deputy chief engineer at the Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories:
"It’s like trying to do an operation on the moon."
Andy Bowen, an oceanographer at Woods Hole, on the area of the seafloor where the leak occurred:
"It’s sort of like being in the Grand Canyon with the lights out and in a snowstorm."
Dudley again, on the gas that’s escaping with the oil:
"It’s like a soda can, shaking it up and popping it off … it’s difficult to measure."
Does BP have someone on staff coming up with these all day? Does the company have Thomas Friedman on retainer?
Help us out here — there must be more of these lurking among the talking points.
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