IT'S NOT LIKE THE JOB EVEN REQUIRES AMERICAN INGENUITY...:

Floating Above the Chaos : Obama seized the crisis, all right. But he praised people we've lost confidence in—and proved anew that the president doesn’t know much about management. (Tina Brown, 6/16/10, Daily Beast)

The speech made me no less uneasy about the grotesque spaghetti of the org charts for BP and the government cleanup effort: both of which have terrifyingly unclear chains of command. Obama did a riff about all the challenges America has faced and overcome. “The one answer I will not settle for is the idea that this challenge is somehow too big and too difficult to meet,” he said. “You know, the same thing was said about our ability to produce enough planes and tanks in World War II. The same thing was said about our ability to harness the science and technology to land a man safely on the surface of the moon.”

But Obama’s speech begged the question of why, if America always pushes its bounds to what it can do, 57 days into it the Gulf clean-up is still in such head-scratching chaos.

...when we could just use a Soviet method to stop the leak.

MORE:
U.S. reconsiders Dutch offer to supply oil skimmers (John Ryden, 6/12/10, Examiner)

The U.S. Government has apparently reconsidered a Dutch offer to supply 4 oil skimmers. These are large arms that are attached to oil tankers that pump oil and water from the surface of the ocean into the tanker. Water pumped into the tanker will settle to the bottom of the tanker and is then pumped back into the ocean to make room for more oil. Each system will collect 5,000 tons of oil each day.

One ton of oil is about 7.3 barrels. 5,000 tons per day is 36,500 barrels per day. 4 skimmers have a capacity of 146,000 barrels per day. That is much greater than the high end estimate of the leak. The skimmers work best in calm water, which is the usual condition this time of year in the gulf.

These systems were developed by the Dutch as a safety system in case of oil spills from either wells or tankers. The Dutch have off shore oil development and also import oil in tankers. Their economy, just like ours, runs on oil. They understand that the production and use of oil has dangers and they wanted to be ready to cope with problems like spills. The Dutch system has been used successfully in Europe.

The Dutch offered to fly their skimmer arm systems to the Gulf 3 days after the oil spill started. The offer was apparently turned down because EPA regulations do not allow water with oil to be pumped back into the ocean. If all the oily water was retained in the tanker, the capacity of the system would be greatly diminished because most of what is pumped into the tanker is sea water.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 16, 2010 4:34 PM