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Posted by David Sherman [72.47.9.228] on Thursday, July 15, 2010 at 18:44:20 :
In Reply to: Oil spill stopped! posted by Fleabag [96.60.220.17] on Thursday, July 15, 2010 at 16:11:21 :
Hopefully this will put an end to all those wild ideas circulating on the Internet about a huge "methane volcano" being about to erupt, cracks spreading across the sea floor, the well casing being eroded away by sand, the gusher going on for 10 years, etc. A lot of scientific-sounding people have been gaining quite an audience for their wild ideas lately. In the early days of oil exploration, there were several gushers (on land) bigger than this one, and they all calmed down within a year without anybody doing anything to cap them. This one caused a mess, and will cost a lot of money, it never came close to being the environmental disaster that lots of commentators said it would soon become.
Thankfully while all the politicians were grandstanding and all the pundits were offering wild predictions about the disaster that would soon occur, the engineers kept doing what engineers do -- fix the problem. Yes, I suppose the whole well could could blow out any day now and a giant bubble of methane could erupt out of the floor of the ocean and destroy all life as we know it. Can't prove it couldn't happen. But pretty soon now we can prove that it didn't happen.
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