Thursday, July 15, 2010

Can't Contain Excitement over Contained Well

The news was all over the radio on the drive home from work. I kept on switching stations to get another take on the news that BP has finally contained the oil that was gushing out into the Gulf of Mexico. I really hadn't been following the story aside from the headlines over various failed attempts and the tragic delays in clean up efforts because of government inaction. Still today I can't contain my excitement over the contained well. There's finally hope that the clean up efforts will be a winning battle. I'm praying it works!

Just in case you missed it. Here's the Guardian's take on it:

for the first time in 87 days, it appeared last night that BP had control over the well.
The company said it would have to monitor the cap holding back the oil in a series of pressure tests every six hours for the next 48 hours, before it could be certain the well would hold.

It also cautioned that the final solution remained a relief well, still some weeks away.

"I am very excited that there's no oil in the Gulf of Mexico," Kent Wells, a senior vice-president for BP, said in a conference call. "But we just started the test and I don't want to create a false sense of excitement."

Doug Suttles, BP's chief operating officer, said engineers would be checking carefully to make sure no oil was escaping from the well from previously undiscovered leaks.