It’s Quiet Out There…
… Too quiet…
On July 15th at 2:25PM CDT BP announced that oil had stopped flowing from the Well from Hell. The video seems to show that, if the video feed is in fact the well.
Oil started flowing into the Gulf when the Deepwater Horizon exploded at 9:53PM CDT on April 20th.
That’s 85 days, 16 hours, and 32 minutes of oil flow. At the USGS’s minimum estimate of 35,000 barrels/day, that’s 125,962,667 gallons of crude oil. Some oil has been collected, the amount is only available to BP and their word has proven to be less than trustworthy throughout this ordeal.
No one thinks this is over. As has become the norm with this well, it is not acting as people assumed it would. The pressure readings are lower than were predicted, which might indicate a leak, but they aren’t dropping, which would confirm a leak.
The only real solution for the leak is to fill the well shaft with concrete, which is the purpose of the relief well.
There is still around 100 million gallons of crude oil, 100 thousand 1.8 million gallons of dispersant, unknown quantities of methane, unknown quantities of dead sea life, and an unknown time frame for all this to be over, if it ever is.
At the heart of the tort in English common law is the concept of making the injured party “whole”, the idea of status quo ante, a return to the way things were before the injury. That will never happen. There will never be any justice for the Gulf or those who live around it.
