Fixing an oil spill at the bottom of the ocean isn’t just a matter of taking a roll of moisture-proof duct tape and diving to the site, even in relatively shallow depths of a couple hundred feet.
But things get really complicated when the problem is on the ocean floor 5,000 feet below the surface of the water. It’s extremely dark and cold, currents are strong, and the outside pressure is incredible.
I don’t begin to understand the technology required to do what BP is trying to accomplish in order to plug the three oil leaks at the Deepwater Horizon site 53 miles southwest of the Louisiana coast, but Tony Pann at Examiner.com has video of some of the repair work in process.
Pann says the water temperature is 41 degrees at the site, which is somehow cold enough to cause ice in parts of the repair equipment. Pann has lots more info on the spill and the repair effort on his site, which I suspect is getting a tremendous amount of traffic this week.
