The Oil Gush

It’s hard to visualize exactly how much area the oil gush covers in the Gulf of Mexico until you compare it to the area in relation to where you live. IfItWasMyHome.com provides a tool that allows you to overlay the oil gush in Google Maps.

After comparing the size to different places in the world, it gave me a better sense of the scope of this disaster. It’s quite astonishing to say the least. As you can see in the map above, all of Vancouver is covered and stretches west over parts of Vancouver Island. It reaches as far east as Kamloops, about a four hour drive from Vancouver and about 1.5 hours drive south across the Canadian-US border. The oil gush easily covers all of the islands of Hawaii and most certainly the entire island of Taiwan.

It does baffle me that even after a little over a month, no one seems to know how to stop the oil from spewing out into the Gulf. Of all the engineers that work for BP, the government officials and the consultants brought in to help solve this problem, you’d think with all that collective brain power that hole would be plugged up by now. And of all those groups of people, you’d think that BP should have the most know how on handling this issue. After all they deal with oil day in and day out. They are the oil experts, but maybe that’s stretching it. BP’s ineptness at bringing the situation under control is near to being a farce. You can’t help but think they’d have as much trouble handling a coffee spill. Their unsuccessful attempts to stop the flow of oil and their inability to mitigate this risk in the first place shows that they’re incapable of doing their jobs and have no right to be in the oil business. By “they” I mean BP as a company and not specifically the employees that work there. It’s the management and leadership of this company that has failed tremendously.

This video from the Los Angeles Times provides an insightful look into Phan Plork’s life after the oil disaster who used to catch shrimp in the waters of the Gulf, but now works for BP cleaning up the mess. It’s sad to see how the oil disaster has disrupted the livelihoods of the many fishermen who depend on the Gulf of Mexico.