Dam It!

Gusher, spill, leak, accident, failure, monumental technological cock-up. You take your appellation, assign it to BP and all will be well. Except, appellations aside, and while they might make you feel all warm and cozy that you've applied the correct term to the situation, there is one thing missing.

Missing from the news.

Missing from the websites.

Missing from everywhere.

That would be the constructive use of the term damn, err...dam.

As in, don't bring on damnation, though it would be perfectly well suited to the situation. But, the damning, or damming, needed is this. A proper dam.

Since the times of Rome, engineers have contained matters of construction inside coffer dams. You've seen them. Standpipes or huge containment structures out in rivers and lakes allow the area to be dried enough to sink pilings, build supports, construct walls, make secure that which will, in future, be under water.

Now, I understand the well that blew is 5000 plus feet down in Davy Jones Locker. Don't need one of those swell combination locks to keep things in that particular locker, but you do need to build some stuff around what it is that you are drilling with to keep things on the secure and level. Drills these days don't need the dry to work. But, they do need the proper environment. And when a proper environment is needed, engineers build them.

They have been building coffer dams for millenia, and building one in the Gulf would allow the engineers to put it down, then pump out what is filling it up, which would be a mix of oil and water.

Bring on the tankers.

Lots and lots of tankers. Keep filling them with that oil and watery mix.

Suck it up boys and girls, so you are able to suck it all up. And put it into the tankers.

Sure the well head is large, and the coffer dam would be larger. But it would be containment. Of sorts.

But, the one thing that has been missing in this disaster is containment. Except of course for constraining and containing the message into terminology which does nothing to reflect reality. And reality is this. One Exxon Valdez every 4 to 4.5 days.

Let it sink in.

They didn't have much in containment up there in Alaska, and doing everything on the cheap and the 'blame the other guy' system, BP and Halliburton and Deep Oceans, and Uncle Harry's Drill Skill Team, have done naught to contain. The Gulf is now awash in oil or in dispersants , or worse. The combo of the two. Unknown toxics from oil mixed with even more unknown dispersants, which don't make the oil go away, they just dispose by diluting it into the water where it is spread even further doing further damage. All of which is uncontained.

Containment we know. Containment is coffer dams. Not to keep the well head dry, but to keep it from the greater ocean. To contain and make separate the gusher from the well head that blew from the currents and waters of the Gulf.

You say a mile down of containment is too much?

I say gushing an Exxon Valdez every four days into the Gulf is way more too much. We have built underwater structures that support bridges in deep water, well head contraptions that rival the engineering required to go to the Moon, and we can contain this if we apply the simple, the direct, and the obvious.

For future drilling, it might be wise to build a structure around the well head that itself can be capped and thereby contain what might "spill", or "gush" or otherwise escape the structure used to tap the oil field under the oceans.

It would not require a full mile of coffer dam either. All that is needed is a progressively narrowing structure that can be capped and tapped as the oil fills it up.

Now, what qualifications do I have to recommend this audacious step? Well, precious few to be honest. But, I have done enough engineering in my day, both from college courses on through a thirty year career in IP law, to know one thing. The audacious can work.

My idea may be audacious.

But convincing me that one Exxon Valdez every four days, fouling the precious Gulf of Mexico on the cusp of Hurricane Season (remember Katrina), is the ultimate of audacious.

And cynical. And hurtful.

Finger pointing at 'the other guy' before Congress, without having had a good containment plan in place before a single grain of sand on the floor of the Gulf was first disturbed, was more audacious.

I am not saying my plan should be implemented as is. I am saying that there ought to be a lot of containing going on. Less dispersing, more containing, and more sucking it up.

That last would be responsibility, corrective action, and oil. We can do this, but we have done so little to date that all that is guaranteed at this point is destruction on a scale that none have or can imagine.

Damn it. Or, if you would, dam it. And fast.

Lives are in the balance, including the corporate personage of BP, and its ilk.