If It Was My Home is a mapping tool for visualizing the oil spill. Viewers can “relocate” the spill over their own location to see how big it is. For example, if centered in New York City, the spill would currently blanket the east coast from about Philadelphia to Boston. (HT: FP Passport)[%comments]
Visualizing the Oil Spill
and 
. You can also watch it on 
At last, a solution to the oil spill that puts money in people’s pockets!
Great idea guys! http://www.mypixplace.info/oil.htm
On the other hand an article in the last day claimed that the entire “spill” would not fill the sports dome in New Orleans. Which to me is clearly some kind of propaganda being spit forth by hidden powers. #1 is correct, the continued usage of the word “spill” is itself a kind of spin, and one which falsifies as spin is supposed to do. This is a deluge in the Biblical sense, it is a hemorrhage of the earth’s guts into the sea, it is a catastrophe, a scourge.. It is not “a spill.”
Frank #1: What is going on may legitimately be called a spill. We drilled into the ocean bed to reach the reservoir and then the expectation was that the oil coming out will be contained within the pipes and brought to the shore in a tanker. Since that expectation has not been met, the oil is now spilling into the ocean. A geyser or gusher does not describe it precisely because we do not expect containment in these cases. However, your expression,
“out of control blowout” is probably the most decsriptive term I have heard.
This just fuels what’s already a big problem with our oil policy. If this were on land the well would have been much safer. The odds of a catastrophe of this magnitude in a land-based rig are minuscule. But since we think “Oh no, this can’t happen by MY home.” We push the drilling farther and farther out to locations where it is least understood and the most dangerous.
“Out of control blowout” is repetitive. All blowouts are out of control by definition. It is a blowout, no more no less.
Of course when you describe it as a blowout you ought to mention that it is a massive one, and worse, the blowout is happening a mile under the surface of the sea. Those two qualifiers actually impart information about why this is such a major problem.
I think it is important to be able to visualize how much oil we are talking about. It is roughly a square mile ankle deep.
A friend of mine spells out the problem: UPS or Fedex are well run businesses with great expertise. But if you ask them to build an interstate highway…the job would never get done. Same with BP.
I stand by my earlier pronunciamento that preserving the viability of the well is what BP want to do…and the right way to approach the problem is :
1) Get LeTourneau to build a big mechanical device to crimp the well pipe flat. This would have taken them a week.
2) Drop a bunker buster desigbned for hundreds of feet penetration to crimp the pipe. Now the standard complaint is “But we don’t know what would happen…!” My standard reply is…Find out what would be likely by first testing on any number of abandoned well. Several could be used in succession.
3) Nuke it. The Russians have done this. Testing on a well, as above, can be done. No, neither the oil nor the shrimp would become radioactive.
It is BP’s attempts at trying something they only vaguely understand, trying to preserve the viability of the well, that continues the disaster.
Nice interactive map. If you haven’t heard of GIS software and its applications, it’s time to get on the bus.
http://www.esri.com/services/disaster-response/gulf-oil-spill-2010/index.html
Someone wrote about a similar tool by Paul Rademacher on the Environmental Defense Fund’s Coastal Louisiana blog, Restoration and Resilience:
http://blogs.edf.org/restorationandresilience/2010/06/04/what-would-the-oil-spill-look-like-in-your-neighborhood-interactive-tool-superimposes-the-slick-on-americas-great-waters/